Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the KMT party, also called the Nationalist Chinese, allied with the Chinese Communists to defeat the provincial warlords. The warlords had dominated large parts of China since the first Chinese Revolution of 1911. In a campaign lasting little more than a year, beginning in 1926, Chiang had crushed the warlords and set up his capital in Nanjing (also spelled Nanking). By 1928, Beijing was finally recaptured, but Chiang had split with the Communists under Chou and

Mao. In 1931, the Communists declared an independent republic in Jiangxi province, marking the start of the first civil war. Chiang's more experienced and better equipped forces had defeated the Communists by 1934. More than 1 million people had been killed in the fighting, but the Communist Party was not eliminated. Survivorsretreated from Jiangxi to the more mountainous northwest, a trek of 9600 km, in what is called the Long March.

Meanwhile, the Japanese infiltration of China went on unopposed. In July 1937, open war finally broke out between China and Japan after numerous Japanese provocations. In the fall of that year, the Chinese capital Nanking (or Nanjing) was captured. The Japanese army went on a killing spree, murdering hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. This incident became known as the Nanjing Massacre.

Japan joins Nazi Germany as an ally in the Second World War with the attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, in December 1941. The Japanese advance is finally stopped in May 1942 at the battle of Midway. The Japanese do not finally surrender until after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Both the Nationalist forces or KMT under Chiang and the Communists under Mao avoid heavy combat with the Japanese army in China. Both factions realized Japan would eventually be defeated by the British and the Americans, and they were saving their military forces to fight each other. With the Japanese defeat in 1945, peace between the Nationalists and Communists did not last long. A second civil war broke out by 1947, but this time Chiang's forces were quickly routed, in spite of huge amounts of American aid. Manchuria was lost in October 1948 after 300,000 KMT forces surrendered to the Communists, also called the Red Chinese. By the end of

1948 the KMT had lost over half a million men, more than two thirds of whom had defected. In April 1949 the Communists moved south of the Yangtze, and on October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was declared. Chiang and his remaining supporters, meanwhile, fled to the island of Taiwan. The Turkish Uighurs, who had revolted in 1944, were reconquered by the Red Chinese in 1949, while Tibet managed to remain independent until 1956.

One of the first "hot wars" of the Cold War era is the Korean War, 1950-53. The war saw communist Korean forces supported by Red Chinese and Soviet forces, opposed by a United Nations army which was mostly made up of American troops. There was no decisive result, but Korea ended up split into a communist North and an American- allied South.

In the years after 1867, when Emperor Meiji took the throne, more than 200 years after first contact with Europeans, Japan was once again invaded by new and alien forms of culture. An initial period of copying European styles was later matched by a swing back to more traditional Japanese forms. This school was led by Okakura Kakuzo. Out of these two movements developed Yoga (Western-style painting) and Nihonga (Japanese painting), categories that remain used to the present day.