Webinar: World War Against Fascism - Remembering China’s role in victory 80 years on

📆 Sunday 21 September 2025, 4pm Britain, 11am US Eastern, 8am US Pacific

The old adage that history is written by the victors does not seem to apply to the real victors of the Second World War, the Soviets and the Chinese on the Eastern and Pacific fronts respectively.

This webinar will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender – marked in China with spectacular celebrations attended by an array of heads of state and government – focussing in particular on the contributions of the Chinese and other Asian forces which are forgotten in the largely Eurocentric narrative of the Second World War.

We will uncover some crucial but little-known aspects of the war: for example, that China was the first country to wage war against fascist occupation; that in the course of 14 years of war (1931-45) China suffered over 35 million casualties; and that without the contribution of Chinese, Korean, Mongolian and largely Communist-led resistance forces across the region, the Japanese imperial armies would have had free rein to deploy their forces against the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.

This webinar is the companion to our commemoration of VE or Victory in Europe Day, ‘The Fight Against Fascism Then and Now: 80 Years after the defeat of Nazism’. Just as that webinar discussed the re-emergence of fascist forces in the West, so in this one, we assess the renewed threats to China and other Asian countries emanating from the US, Japan and the rest of the capitalist world.