The official histories of the Second World War, curated by Western powers, are built upon a foundation of deliberate omissions. They typically mark the war’s beginning with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 or the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This chronological sleight of hand is a profound political act, framing the conflict as a primarily European affair and erasing a full decade of war, fascism, and resistance that had already engulfed Asia.

One of the starting points of the World Anti-Fascist War can be traced back to September 18, 1931. On that day, Imperial Japan staged a false-flag explosion near Mukden (now Shenyang) in northeast China. This event, the “9.18 Incident”, was the pretext for the invasion of Manchuria, marking the start of a brutal 14-year war against the Chinese people. This historical reframing was the central purpose of a recent webinar hosted by Tricontinental Asia and the Global South Academic Forum, “18 September 1931: Remembering the Origins of War, Fascism, and Resistance in Asia”, which sought to revisit this often-overlooked origin point of World War II and center the experiences of Asian peoples and their resistance struggles.

The scale of the historical erasure is staggering. While Western narratives foreground their own sacrifices, they consistently downgrade the immense human cost borne by others. The 27 million Soviets who died resisting Nazism are often mentioned, but the nearly 24 million Chinese people killed resisting Japanese expansionism are relegated to a footnote. New research reveals that at least 8.7 million colonial subjects, overwhelmingly in Asia, died during the war – ten times the combined Anglo-American death toll. Insisting on 1931 as the war’s starting point is therefore a fundamental act of decolonizing history, shifting the center of the conflict from Europe to Asia and revealing how, for years, Western powers enabled the aggressors, fearing communism more than fascism.

Voices from the resistance

For the Chinese people, the war is a living memory. As Professor Lu Xinyu of East China Normal University powerfully stated in the webinar. “Every inch of China – the mountains and the rivers – holds a story from the war of resistance which comes to constitute our national memory”. Born just after the full-scale invasion began in 1937, her mother – whose given name, Yong Ping means “eternal peace” – was nearly killed in her cradle by a Japanese bomb. According to Lu, this collective experience informed Mao Zedong’s strategy of a “war of the whole nation,” uniting the army and the masses into an “invisible” force of popular resistance. Lasting peace, she argued, is a revolutionary process. She told the story of a Japanese war criminal, a university-educated man turned into a “demon” by Japanese imperial military training, who committed horrific atrocities. In a Chinese prisoner of war camp, he was not simply punished but educated with the works of Mao Zedong, which “shatter[ed] his understanding” of the war. He dedicated the rest of his long life to the anti-war movement, convinced that pursuing “eternal peace is the sole purpose for my rest of time”.

The Korean peninsula endured one of the most brutal experiences of Japanese colonial rule. Dae-Han Song of the International Strategy Center in South Korea argued that this context is essential. “Was Japan trying to be like Western imperialist [powers]?”, Song asks. The answer is yes. To avoid the fate of being colonized like its neighbors, Japan chose to become a colonizing force. Japan’s modernization was a reaction to Western gunboat diplomacy, and the West actively encouraged its colonial ambitions, with the US giving Japan a “green light to colonize South Korea in exchange for the US colonizing the Philippines” in a secret 1905 agreement. The colonization that followed was savage, involving forced cultural assimilation, economic exploitation, forced labor for over a million Koreans, and the abduction of hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” as sexual slaves. The war’s end brought no justice. The US, fearing communism, reinstated Korean elites who had collaborated with the Japanese, creating a “topsy-turvy world where the villain became the hero and the hero became the villain”. This injustice was formalized by the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which excluded the war’s primary victims and contributors – namely the Soviet Union and China – and allowed Japan to evade accountability, and consolidate the country as an militarily-occupied and anti-communist bulwark in the region.

In the Philippines, the war was also an ideological struggle between two opposing internationalisms. Ramon Guillermo of the University of the Philippines traced the birth of a genuine proletarian internationalism forged by Filipino and Chinese communists. The early Filipino labor movement was tainted by a racist, anti-Chinese chauvinism encouraged by US labor federations. The turning point came when communist-led radicals broke away to form a new federation that welcomed their Chinese comrades, creating a Filipino-Chinese united front that laid the groundwork for the Communist Party of the Philippines (PCP). This solidarity proved vital when the PCP organized the Hukbalahap, the most effective guerrilla peasant resistance against the Japanese, trained in part by veteran Chinese communists. This class-based internationalism stood in stark contrast to Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” a *“*pseudo internationalist, ultra nationalist and racist idea” that cynically sought to replace Western colonialism with Japanese imperialism under the guise of “Asia for the Asiatics”.

The moral clarity of the “good war” narrative collapses when viewed from the colonized world. Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental, presented a searing indictment of what he termed a “colonial holocaust” perpetrated by the Allies. He argued that the Bengal Famine of 1943-1944, which killed three to four million Indians, was a man-made atrocity, a direct consequence of British imperial policy. To sustain its war effort, the Churchill government systematically diverted food from India and implemented policies that led to foreseeable and preventable mass starvation. As Prashad insists, these millions of dead were “War casualties, all of them”. This was accompanied by economic plunder and the brutal repression of India’s own independence movement. The official casualty figures for Indian soldiers are a gross distortion, ignoring those killed by the British themselves. For the colonized, the “World Anti-Fascist War” was inseparable from the “World Anti-Colonial War”.

An unfinished struggle for memory, peace, and justice

The history of the World Anti-Fascist War is a contested terrain. The dominant Western narrative is a political weapon used to legitimize the post-war imperial order and obscure the ongoing struggles of the Global South. To recover the true history of the war – a war that began in Asia in 1931 – is an essential task for our time, especially in an era of a resurgence of far-right forces, growing militarisation, and a climate of a dangerous new Cold War against China and its allies.

“Is it that the West today is so little interested in an anti-fascist struggle because they sacrificed so little to defeat fascism?” posed Vijay Prashad provocatively. “And is it the reason why it’s the Chinese and others who are so interested in anti-fascism? Because we sacrificed so much to defeat it?”. The memory of that sacrifice fuels a deep commitment to peace.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping proclaimed in his speech at the 80th-anniversary commemoration of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, “Might may rule the moment, but right prevails forever… we must always commit to the path of peaceful development… and work together to build a community with a shared future for humanity.” This is the vision that animates the struggles of the peoples of the Global South. The final, enduring message is one of revolutionary hope, a conviction articulated by Professor Lu Xinyu: “justice will prevail, peace will prevail, and the people will prevail.” It is a promise captured in the solemn words of the Korean anti-colonial poet Yun Dong-ju, who died in a Japanese prison just before the war’s end:

With a heart that sings the stars,

I will love all dying things.

And I will walk the way

that has been given to me.

Tonight, again, the wind brushes the stars.

Tings Chak is the co-coordinator of Tricontinental Asia, editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought, and PhD candidate at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

The post The war that began in Asia: Revisiting the roots of the world anti-fascist war appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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