<P> Following this battle, Japanese advances continued to the south and west . A contentious aspect of these Japanese campaigns are the war crimes committed against Chinese people . The most infamous example was the Rape of Nanking, when Japanese forces subjected the population to looting, mass rape, massacres, and other crimes . Other, less publicised, atrocities were committed during Japanese advances and it's estimated that millions of Chinese civilians were killed . Various attempts to quantify the crimes committed have proved contentious, and at times divisive . </P> <P> The war from 1938 onwards was marked by Chinese use of guerilla tactics to stall advances, and retreat to the Chinese interior where necessary . This eventually limited Japanese advances because of supply - line limitations--the Japanese were unable to adequately control areas outside of cities, roads and railways . Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the US into the war, fighting in the Pacific, and South East and South West Asia, significantly weakened the Japanese . After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Japanese - occupied Manchuria, Japan surrendered . </P> <P> The Republic of China (ROC) administrated Taiwan after Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945, following a decision by the Allied Powers at the Cairo Conference in 1943 . The ROC moved its central government to Taiwan in December 1949, following the victory of the PRC in the Chinese Civil War . Later, no formal transfer of the territorial sovereignty of Taiwan to the PRC was made in the post-war San Francisco Peace Treaty, and these arrangements were confirmed in the Treaty of Taipei concluded by the ROC and Japan in 1952 . At the time, the Taiwanese authorities (the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT)) were recognized by Japan, not communist China (the People's Republic of China, or PRC). As such, the KMT did not accept Japanese reparations only in the name of the ROC government . Later, the PRC also refused reparations in the 1970s . See more details in the section about World War II reparations and the statement by Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama (August, 1995). </P>

Japan became independent of earlier chinese influences by