“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” – Mao Zedong

Though both Japan and China modernized at the start of the 20th century and China far outweighed Japan in terms of men and materiel potential, the Japanese handily won the first modern war between the two sides, decisively defeating the Chinese in the First Sino-Japanese War. The conflict resulted in Japan’s short-term gains in the wake of victory, and the long-term disaster for both sides’ new roles in Asia, for with the end of Chinese dominance in East Asia came a new era for the region as a whole, an era whose consequences and horrors would not be fully realized for several more decades.

In 1937, the fledgling Empire of Japan once more went to war with China, which by then had become a nation broken into petty warlord fiefdoms and wracked by civil war. The Japanese enacted a brutal campaign over the fragmented realms that made up China, committing atrocities just as horrendous as their Axis allies in Europe. Despite this, the sheer size of China, coupled with Japan’s overextension, allowed the larger, less developed nation to endure throughout World War II.

At the same time, China was experiencing an equally brutal civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces, which became inextricably intertwined with the fighting raging across the globe. In fact, the sheer scale of the horrors of the civil war remain hard to believe today, even as action in that theater is often overlooked because of events in Europe. What most people remember about the civil war is that it was ultimately won by Mao Zedong and the Communists, ushering in a new era of Communism in China.