It has been fifty years since the United States and the Republic of China defeated Imperial Japan in World War II. As decisive as the experience of the four-year Pacific War was for three generations of Americans, the eight-year War of Resistance from the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 to VJ Day in 1945 was for the Chinese a major turning point in their history. No other event in the twentieth century has had such a profound impact on their country's subsequent course through civil war, socialist revolution, and capitalist renovation, down through the present.

Like wartime France under German domination, China experienced both resistance and collaboration—and the gray, equivocal zone many people inhabited in between—under the Japanese. Until recently, most Chinese have turned away from the troubling ambiguities of the Occupation period when individual and family survival frequently left no choice but to cooperate with the Japanese and their puppet allies. In this way, few survivors of the Occupation in China's major cities doubted that Japanese rule over China, especially in urban areas, was somewhat eased by the compliance of the civil population. At least one contemporary scholar has suggested that the Japanese were able to rule occupied Shanghai effectively because they could skillfully utilize their familiarity with “indirect structures of government” to weaken Chinese resistance and secure international cooperation.