Nor has the outside world ever fully understood the ghastly price that China paid to maintain its resistance against Japan for eight long years, from 1937 to 1945. Some 14 million deaths, massive refugee flight, and the destruction of the country’s embryonic modernization were the costs of the war.8 The road to victory for the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 lay within the devastated landscape of China created by the years of war with Japan.
