This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. China, as the main eastern theatre, was involved in the war earlier and for longer than any other of the Allies. Throughout their 14-year struggle, the Chinese people engaged and pinned down a significant part of Japan's military forces, inflicting over 1.5 million casualties on them. China's contribution to victory in the war against fascism was immense, as were the sacrifices its people made.   

Hans van de Ven is a leading historian at the University of Cambridge in the UK. As one of the first Western scholars to conduct a systematic study of China's wartime experience, he has identified a bias in the scholarship. He says: "There is a real Eurocentrism to Western, I mean English-language, writing, mostly from the U.S. and the UK. The Second World War in China by the previous generation of Western historians was seen as sort of completely insignificant. Actually, it's done a lot. It's trapped Japan.”