According to government statistics, the total number of military and non-military casualties was around 35 million, about 20 million dead and 15 million wounded. In addition, the war created more than 90 million refugees. The Japanese Army implemented a "Three Alls Policy" in China from 1942 to 1945, which alone was responsible for the death of more than 2 million Chinese civilians. This strategy directed Japanese forces to kill all, burn all, and loot all.

"The full scale invasion of the Japanese military destroyed many Chinese industrial facilities, and that delayed China's modernization for decades. And at the same time, Japan's scorched earth policy caused huge damage to agriculture. On top of that, the large number of Chinese casualties weakened the labour force," Yang Bojiang, research fellow with Chinese Academy Of Social Sciences, said.

Although the two countries had fought intermittently since 1931, full-scale war erupted with the Lugou Bridge incident in 1937, and ended with the surrender of Japan in 1945. The property loss to China was valued then at more than $380 billion. That was roughly 50 times the gross domestic product of Japan.

"The time span and scope of the Japanese invasion is rare in the history of war. What's more, is that Japan always waged undeclared wars. So most of the time, it was civilians, not the military, who were confronting the Japanese army first. All that made China one of the warring parties that suffered most in the Second World War," Yang said.

China was the main theatre of war in the Far East during World War II, with a front line spanning 5,000 kilometers, and more than 1 million square kilometers of territory fallen under the enemy's control. This was the largest Asian war in the 20th century. It also made up more than 50% of the casualties in the Pacific theatre of WWII.

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