JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This Why/Who/How pamphlet on the Sino-Japanese War fully and incredibly lays the blame for the war in the hands of China, reminding me a lot of an earlier propaganda pamphlet that I wrote about here on the threat of Poland to Nazi Germany (1939).   Even the title of the war “the Sino-Japanese Conflict” is misleading–placing the Chinese first in the description of the fighting invests the idea with the primacy of the Chinese role simply because it is before the hyphen.  Japanese-Chinese Conflict certainly sounds different, yes?   (Click on image for a readable size; also see below for the rest of the pamphlet..)

The Chinese tried to tell their story, but I think not nearly as successfully as the Japanese–also this was complicated by the fact that Europeans had been mucking around in China for almost a hundred years by the time the Japanese got to it in 1932, so their voice raised against a foreign intruder was definitely not as loud as it might have been had the foreigners not been devastating China for such a long period of time beforehand. 

When this pamphlet was published, the war-in-earnest had been waged already for a year, mostly through engagements over a cresting wave of “incidents” in which Japan found it more and more necessary to “protect” itself from China while at the same time trying to harness/steal as much of China’s natural resources as possible.  It would take another six years for total war to set in, the end result of which (in the 1937-1945 timetable for the event) found 20-35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians dead and wounded, while the Japanese lost in the vicinity of 2 million.  This war was basically folded-in to WWII after 7 December, though it is by far the bloodiest war fought in Asia in the 20th century.