Up to 100 million Chinese became refugees in their own country

IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR A JAPANESE SOLDIER needing a toilet break in July 1937, things could have been so different.

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At this time imperial Japan had seized parts of north China, and tensions between the countries were rising. Japanese soldiers were involved in nighttime training exercises close to Beijing, near a stone bridge named after the Venetian merchant Marco Polo. One night, a Japanese private had failed to come back to base after an unplanned toilet break, and Chinese guards refused the Japanese entry to a nearby town to look for their lost comrade. The stand-off became violent, and was the spark that set off the Second Sino-Japanese war.

Within weeks, the Japanese seized Beijing, and then in November, Shanghai, but the Chinese mounted a strong defence. The Japanese army responded to Chinese resistance brutally, most notoriously after it entered Nanjing (or Nanking) in December 1937, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed and tens of thousands of women sexually assaulted. The war turned into a stalemate – with the Chinese nationalists and communists, who shared a fragile truce, holding the Japanese back.