In 1937, the Japanese invaded China. With a common enemy to face, the Nationalists and Communists stopped fighting one another for a limited time to defend against the Japanese. Though they were on the same side, the two parties rarely fought with one another. At the start of the war, the Japanese won victory after victory, eventually taking the capital Nanjing, where Japanese troops engaged in a brutal campaign called the Nanjing Massacre, sometimes referred to as the Rape of Nanjing or the Nanjing Atrocities. The Nationalist government, which was in control of Nanjing before the Japanese invasion, suffered. They lost the best of their modern armies, their air force, and access to the country’s major industries and railways. In areas of China controlled by the KMT, the people suffered as well. Manufactured goods were scarce, and prices when up. The government did not have the ability to produce the food it needed to feed the population. Morale amongst the military and civilians in Nationalist controlled areas of China was very low in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Corruption spread in the bureaucracy and the armed forces. As the war dragged on, government measures to suppress dissent grew oppressive. The Japanese invasion and WWII had the opposite effect on the CCP. The communist leaders had survived 10 years of civil war and had developed a unity, camaraderie, and powerful sense of mission. As a result their numbers and territory grew. Communist troop commanders and political officers in areas behind Japanese lines tried to mobilize the entire UNIT 10.7 | Decolonization and Nationalism | SQ 12. What led to the establishment of the People's Republic of China? population against the enemy. Party members led village communities into greater participation in local government. They also organized and controlled peasants' associations, labor unions, youth leagues, and women’s associations. The party experimented with various forms of economic cooperation to increase production. For example, farmers temporarily shared their tools and draft animals and worked the land collectively. This cooperation led to work-and-battle teams composed of younger peasants who, when threatened, went out to fight as guerrillas under direction of the local communist army and then returned to the fields when the crisis passed. As the Japanese military grip weakened at the end of World War II, the experienced communist armies and political organizers spread their system of government ever more widely.