JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This Why/Who/How pamphlet on the Sino-Japanese War fully and incredibly lays the blame for the war in the hands of China, reminding me a lot of an earlier propaganda pamphlet that I wrote about here on the threat of Poland to Nazi Germany (1939). Even the title of the war "the Sino-Japanese Conflict" is misleading--placing the Chinese first in the description of the fighting invests the idea with the primacy of the Chinese role simply because it is before the hyphen. Japanese-Chinese Conflict certainly sounds different, yes? (Click on image for a readable size; also see below for the rest of the pamphlet..)
The Chinese tried to tell their story, but I think not nearly as successfully as the Japanese--also this was complicated by the fact that Europeans had been mucking around in China for almost a hundred years by the time the Japanese got to it in 1932, so their voice raised against a foreign intruder was definitely not as loud as it might have been had the foreigners not been devastating China for such a long period of time beforehand. 
When this pamphlet was published, the war-in-earnest had been waged already for a year, mostly through engagements over a cresting wave of "incidents" in which Japan found it more and more necessary to "protect" itself from China while at the same time trying to harness/steal as much of China's natural resources as possible. It would take another six years for total war to set in, the end result of which (in the 1937-1945 timetable for the event) found 20-35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians dead and wounded, while the Japanese lost in the vicinity of 2 million. This war was basically folded-in to WWII after 7 December, though it is by far the bloodiest war fought in Asia in the 20th century.
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