WHEN did WWII begin? September 1939? No, it started with Japan’s attack on China in July 1937. Japan had just signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany and Italy and its move was part of a carefully planned unfolding of fascist world aggression.

September 3 is China’s VJ day, a time to recall that China was in fact the first and most consistent foe of WWII fascist aggression. Between 1937 and 1945 it fought a protracted war with some 35 million casualties, the majority civilians, while 100 million more were made refugees — perhaps one-fifth of the total population.

The Nationalist and Communist armies of China’s United Front held down around a million and a half Japanese troops — over 60 per cent of the Japanese forces. This prevented Japan from opening up a second front against the USSR, blocking the attempts to establish German-Japanese control across Eurasia. The USSR was then able to concentrate all its forces against Hitler.

The horrific bombing and destruction of Chinese cities caused worldwide outrage and awoke a widening public to the dangers of the spread of war. But at the same time, China’s United Front raised hopes as military leader Chiang Kai-shek’s heroic 10-month defence of the city of Wuhan — China’s Madrid — became a symbol for anti-fascist resistance. Even after the loss of the city in October 1938, China fought on virtually alone until 1941. The Soviet Union was effectively the only country to come to China’s aid in these years.

Neither the British nor the US governments were willing to stand up against Japan’s aggression — but the people were different. In Britain, communists and Quakers, trade unionists and anti-imperialists came together to form the China Campaign Committee (CCC). They rallied trade unions and co-operative societies, religious communities, Liberal and Labour parties, raising funds for both sides of the United Front. China’s cause was Britain’s cause. As George Hardy, CCC trade union organiser, put it: “Assist China now against the menace of fascism in the Far East, which is simultaneously the defence of the people of Europe against fascist aggression, directly involving the British.”

Even with the outbreak of war in Europe, the British government still lent towards appeasement, conceding to Japan’s demand to close the Burma Road in 1940. A CCC petition in protest gained signatures representing one and a half million people: if the government could still give way to aggression in the Far East, how firmly would it stand against Hitler?

After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour and Hong Kong, Britain and the US had to take Chinese war efforts more seriously. China joined the Allies, and British and Chinese troops fought side by side in Burma. Mao Zedong, too, fully grasped the need to work with the Allies, using the contradictions between the imperialist powers. Finally, in 1943 the Cairo Agreement brought to an end the unequal treaty system imposed on China following the Opium Wars from the 1840s — all bar Hong Kong.

The Nationalists played a role in resistance, but it was the Chinese red armies, using highly effective methods of guerilla warfare, that came out of the war stronger. Their forces grew from some 30,000 to about one million at the end of the war, with approximately one million Communist Party of China (CPC) members. The Yenan headquarters, in the desperately poor province of Shaanxi, served as a beacon of radical resistance, building support through the New Democratic socio-economic reforms in the Liberated Areas.

While Britain and the US accepted China into the United Nations in 1945 as a world power, their priority was to “maintain Anglo-Saxon superiority” over post-war Asia — the US controlling the Pacific and Britain recovering its economically valuable Asian colonies. But Churchill and Roosevelt allowed a racially prejudiced myopia to cloud their vision: failing to see the war in the Far East as of equal importance to that in Europe, they misjudged the post-war situation.

As Mao recognised, the war in Asia was a war of liberation, its momentum surging beyond 1945. The world was changing fundamentally as the defeat of fascism unleashed progressive and national liberation movements across Africa and Asia. It was the success of China’s national revolutionary war in ending the semi-colonial unequal treaties system that marked the beginning of the end of the colonial era.

After 1945, China’s anti-imperialist struggle continued under CPC leadership to prevent the country, with a compliant Nationalist regime, falling under the influence of the now dominant imperialist power of the US. China was the country most changed by WWII. Out of the terrible suffering — cities laid waste by bombing, the butchery at Nanjing, Japan’s “kill all, burn all, loot all” methods, the huge areas blighted by famine — came the revolutionary will to create a new independent China.

Today, historical revisionism in Japan goes deeper than denials of war crimes. Abe cannot admit to the deliberate Axis planning, instead framing a nationalist narrative of resistance to Western colonialism to obscure the nature of his country’s imperialist aggression.

Western powers ignore the dangers of a revival of Japanese militarism as they do the fascist resurgence in Europe. It was the US, of course, that let the emperor off the hook after 1945, along with numbers of Japan’s war criminals. Now, contrary to the Potsdam Agreement which required the absolute eradication of militarism in Japan for all time, Abe is encouraged to ditch the pacifist constitution and prepare for military action.

In aligning Japan with the US-Asian pivot for the first time since 1945, Japanese forces are returning to the South China Sea for military exercises. This provocation seriously risks escalating tensions there. In fact, the islands under dispute were included in the Potsdam Agreement which also required Japan return all its territorial conquests. Instead history is turned on its head and it is China that is identified as the “bully of the South China Sea” as it seeks to assert its historical rights.

Beijing’s VJ-day military parade will be criticised by some as a display of aggressiveness. For the Chinese, humiliated time and again by the imperialist intervention and wars, the need for a strong army to defend itself is paramount. WWII agreements are being weakened and Japan is not alone in disregarding the lessons of history. The US also fails to accept that the Pacific is not “its lake,” that it is only one Pacific power among many, and that China is its equal.

But China is breaking loose from the cold war vice and will not allow Britain and the US to forget that there were four Allies in WWII and that victory in the anti-fascist war was an international effort of collective resistance — not just that of Churchill and Roosevelt, but also of the people’s war in China. Historical revisionism must not be allowed to pave the way for a repeat of the appeasement of the 1930s which saw the world to slide into war.