The exhausted Qing administrators held out as long as they could, but in 1912 the disgraced dynasty collapsed, plunging the country into chaos. Warlords divided China and fought a civil war that lasted for almost forty more years. Japan exploited this weakness in 1937, invading and occupying much of the country in a brutal campaign that killed as many as twenty million Chinese. Every high school student in China today learns to feel the shame of this
