Key role in anti-fascist victory

Seventy-eight years ago near Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge, Chinese people, facing the threat of their nation and people being subjugated by Japanese militarists, fired the first shots of resistance against Japan's aggression on July 7.

In the following years of the war, the united front against Japan's invasion based on cooperation between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang opened a large-scale theater of war against fascism in the East.

The main battlefield for Japan was still on the Chinese mainland even after Japan declared war against the United States and Britain. When Japan announced its surrender to China in September 1945, Japanese forces in the China war zone totaled 1.28 million, exceeding its surrendered forces in the rest of Asia, and accounting for more than 50 percent of its forces in overseas regions. The number of captive Japanese soldiers and casualties in China was 1.56 million, over 60 percent of the Japanese total during World War II.