In the Chinese Museum of the War of Resistance Against the Japanese Aggression located near the Lugouqiao Bridge (Marco Polo Bridge) in southwestern suburb of Beijing, Li Mingqi silently puts a bunch of white flowers on the sculpture of several soldiers belonging to both Kuomintang (KMT) army and the guerrilla of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

"I dedicate this flower to my grandfather, who was killed somewhere during a battle against the Japanese invaders," said Li, with tears rolling down in his face.

"But we do not know where or when he died, or what kind of army he belonged to when he died."

In the summer of 1937, Li's grandfather, Li Shaokang had just been promoted to second lieutenant and platoon leader in the 29th Army of the KMT. It was defending Beiping, the name then for Beijing, and Tianjin when the Japanese aggression war formally broke out in July 7, 1937 in Lugouqiao.

At the end of July, Song Zheyuan (1885-1940), commander-in-chief of the 29th Army, decided to withdraw his main force from Beiping.

On August 1, the remaining few thousand Chinese soldiers withdrew from Beiping, losing the ancient Chinese capital to the Japanese invaders.

Under heavy attack from the Japanese troops, many soldiers of the 29th Army became dispersed after leaving their positions.

Li Shaokang escaped to his hometown in northern Shandong Province.

"My grandmother told me that my grandfather could have spent a peaceful life in the remote countryside if only he had pretended that he had not joined the army," Li told China Daily.

At that time, although Japanese forces had occupied most parts of north China, the average rural residents could still make a humble living so long as they obediently paid the exorbitant taxes and levies to the Japanese invaders and their puppet local administration.

But Li Shaokang did not do this. Staying at home for less than a month, he left with several of his fellow townsmen to join an anti-Japanese guerrilla group.

"The group was led by the KMT government in name but in reality it was independent of both the KMT and CPC," Li Mingqi said.

"That's why 60 years after the War of Resistance against the Japanese Aggression, my grandfather was still not listed as a hero of anti-Japanese invasion," he said.

Zeng Jingzhong, a historian with the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that it was very common for people to join the various resistance armed forces against the Japanese aggression, especially in the initial period of the war.

Different ideologies gave way to the major crisis that the country faced.

"It was an all-people war against the invader, in which people joined hands regardless their different political origins and beliefs," Zeng said.

Enemy's rear area

Li Zhongming, a historian and an editor of the Beijing-based academic Journal of the War of Resistance Against the Japanese Aggression Studies, said that the all-people war was rooted in the Chinese people's brave, bloody and firm resistance.

After the Lugouqiao Incident, Japanese troops occupied Beiping and Tianjin. In the following few months China lost 300,000 soldiers from the central armies led by the KMT in the battle for Shanghai and 100,000 soldiers in battle for Xinkou in Shanxi Province, while Japanese casualties were 80,000 in total.

In the face of defeat, many Chinese soldiers who survived these major battles regrouped behind the Japanese lines to fight for their livelihoods.

Others fled, but their weapons were taken up by other brave volunteers unwilling to become the slaves of the Japanese invaders, according to New Zealand journalist James Bertram (1910-93) in his famous book "North China Front" (1939).

According to Bertram, a large quantity of ammunition had been left in the neighbouring villages after the battle at Hsink'ou (Xinkou) in Shanxi Province, and the Japanese came to collect this. They loaded it all onto trucks; but the volunteers attacked at night and captured the trucks. The ammunition was later used to equip several guerrilla teams.

CPC as well as KMT leaders organized guerrilla groups to fight Japanese invaders in what the enemy considered their backyard.

Jia Shuwang, 78, recalled his experiences in Liusong, in Hebei Province's Xianghe County, close to Beiping and Tianjin.

In 1938 he was around 10 years old. "There was a small Japanese fort occupied by two Japanese officers and about 30 Chinese from the puppet army, at the eastern gate of the village," he recalled.

One night, the crash of guns and bombs suddenly shook the whole village. A furious battle lasted throughout the night and in the morning, Jia found the fort was nearly destroyed and he saw several corpses of the puppet army troops.

The attack seriously shook the confidence of the occupying Japanese army in the county site of Xianghe, as they had not expected guerrillas to suddenly appear in the plain area so near to Beiping.

The Japanese scoured the area for several days for the guerrillas but found nothing.

"It wasn't until eight years later, after the resistance war, that I learned the organizer of the attack was a village fellow called Zhang Wu," Jia said.

According to Jia, Zhang was a peasant who worked as a long-term hired hand of a local landlord. He joined the CPC later.

"But Zhang told me that during the first years of the resistance war he had not known what the CPC was. He only knew that Japanese troops had occupied his home and killed one of his relatives."

To avenge the death of his own kin, Zhang joined a local guerrilla group and became its chief in the village.

First Chinese victory

Li Zhongming said that the KMT government as well as the CPC army thought it important to cultivate guerrillas in the enemy's rear area, but the CPC had done a much better job.

As the Japanese imperialist army fought its way south from northern China, Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), the leader of the KMT government, finally followed the CPC's declarations for the establishment of bipartisan co-operation and recognized the legal status of the CPC.

The main forces of CPC's Red Army, then concentrated in the northwest and in parts of northern China, were redesignated as the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Army (also called the 18th Group Army in the anti-Japanese battle order), with general Zhu De (1886-1976) as its commander-in-chief.

The troops of the Red Army remaining in the Yangtze river valley and east China area were transferred into the New Fourth Army.

On September 25, 1938, led by general Lin Biao (1907-71), a division of the Eighth Route Army ambushed a transportation section of the Japanese army in Pingxingguan in southeastern Shanxi Province, killing more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers and capturing large amounts of ammunition.

This was the first major victory of Chinese troops over the Japanese invaders since the Lugouqiao Incident.

Meanwhile, as Mao Zedong told Bertram on October 25, 1937, the Eighth Route Army was "doing what the other Chinese troops have not done, that is, operating chiefly on the enemy's flanks and rear."

Mao believed that in the first few months of the Chinese resistance, the major battles were "mostly passive." "We can never win by fighting this way," Mao said.

To take the initiative to the Chinese advantage, the Eighth Route Army marched into the rear areas of territory occupied by the Japanese invaders to establish various rural resistance bases.

Winning support from the people in the rear area of the enemy, these Eighth Route Army troops divided themselves into hundreds of small guerrilla teams, and joined hands with grass-roots militias to fight the invaders by disrupting their supply lines and bases.

It was "necessary to wage guerrilla and mobile warfare independently and with the initiative in our hands and to avoid all passive and inflexible tactics," Mao told Bertram.

Even Chiang, during the Wuhan Defence War, said that China's hope lay in its vast areas and huge population, so that the Japanese troops, and particularly their transportation lines, could be periodically attacked by patriotic grass-roots militia. In 1939 the KMT government launched a guerrilla training school in Hunan Province's Hengshan, in which CPC guerrillas and political commissioners were invited to give lectures.

The school expanded rapidly, with the number of students rising from more than 100 initially to more than 1,500 within half a year. Along with the school, the KMT government also sent a large number of senior officers and tons of material to the rear area guerrillas.

But most guerrillas and mobile forces were CPC-led small groups, who received no formal training or material from the KMT government.

They planted crops in the daytime but picked up arms fighting the Japanese soldiers who left their forts at night.

According to a report made by Zhu De, commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, on April 25, 1945, the CPC armies and guerrillas launched 115,000 battles, mostly small-scale confrontations, against the Japanese invaders between September 1937 and March 1945.

More than 960,000 Japanese and their puppet army soldiers were killed or injured.

In August 1942, Peng Dehuai (1898-1974), the vice-commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, told a US military envoy that between 1937 and 1939, the Eighth Route Army and guerrillas supported by it destroying 2,660 kilometres of railway track, 8,200 kilometres of roads and 42,220 electricity poles. They acquired 109 tons of electricity wire.

"The Japanese invaders were thus constrained despite their positions in major cities and traffic lines. They were often unable to continue their major attacks due to the disruption of transportation lines," Li Zhongming said.

The Japanese imperialist army, though well-trained and well equipped, found themselves mired in a vast quagmire.

As Mao predicted in 1937, "If a vast number of troops wage mobile warfare with the Eighth Route Army assisting them by guerrilla warfare, our victory will be certain."

Editor: Salina