Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek: The History of the Rivals Who Fought the Chinese Civil War

In 1937, the fledgling Empire of Japan once more went to war with China, which by then had become a nation broken into petty warlord fiefdoms and wracked by civil war. The Japanese enacted a brutal campaign over the fragmented realms that made up China, committing atrocities just as horrendous as their Axis allies in Europe. Despite this, the sheer size of China, coupled with Japan's overextension, allowed the larger, less developed nation to endure throughout World War II.

At the same time,...