A soldier stands guard in front of a sculpture highlighting peace at the Peace Park in Shanghai, China, on Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. China is marking the 80th anniversary of its entry into the Second Sino-Japanese War on Wednesday, following a years-long effort to rehabilitate the image of its military amid a toughening regional stance.

Agency Misconducts

Posted by AI on 2025-08-26 09:18:34 | Last Updated by AI on 2025-08-26 11:38:54

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Can time heal historical wounds? That's the question underpinning Wednesday's anniversary of the day in 1937 when China's communists and nationalists united to fight Japanese occupation. Or will a more recent, controversial embrace of difficult moments from the past simply reopen them?

The Second Sino-Japanese War lasted intermittently from 1931 to 1945, with China entering in 1937 following Japan's invasion of China's northeast region, Manchuria, the previous year.

It left tens of millions of Chinese dead and fostered intergenerational trauma so profound that Chinese leaders remain acutely sensitive to any perceived slights more than seven decades later.

Japanese leaders, meanwhile, have been far slower to acknowledge the violence. But since 2013, top officials have traveled to Nanjing, the then-capital killed by Japanese troops in 1937, to offer amends.

Chinese hawks and an influential patriotic grassroots movement have increasingly pressed for a more assertive stance on Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing claims as its own, and in the South China Sea.

They also have pushed for more sympathy for the sensitivities around Japan, with some advocating for a tougher stance on the East Asian ally of the United States.

Chinese leaders have embraced a narrative of military heroism and national victimhood as part of an effort to unite the nation behind President Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to secure a third term as leader at next year's 20th Communist Party Congress.

But at the same time, relations with Japan have been at their lowest point in decades over disputes over maritime rights and sovereignty of a string of tiny islands.

And popular opinion in both countries toward the other remains bitter, despite a softening of tones in recent years, particularly in Japan, where younger people are less inclined to reflect the hostility of their parents' and grandparents' generations toward China.

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