The 1938 KMT decision to breach the dykes and flood the Huang He region was truly a disastrous and terrible decision! That decision contributed to their defeat against the CCP years later, when the memory of this disaster was still fresh in Chinese minds.

But your article totally whitewashes the Imperial Japan campaign and colonization of China! Certainly the KMT leaders had seen a taste of Japan’s butchery in the Nanjing massacre at the end of 1937. They likely also knew something of the insane germ warfare experiments being undertaken in Manchuria by Japan’s biological warfare unit. Japan had earlier colonized Manchuria and annexed it, much as they earlier had done in Korea. Rule over Chinese and Korean nationals was brutal and oppressive. The Chinese and Japanese were hardly on “good terms” in the 1930s, as you put it.