After the Communist Hundred Regiments Offensive of August-December 1940 exposed the weakness of Japanese control in north China, the North China Area Army under Tada Hayao and from 1941 Okamura Yasuji adopted a counter-insurgency strategy of destroying the rural base of the guerrillas: burning villages, seizing or destroying grain, killing or removing inhabitants, and constructing blockade ditches, walls and strongpoints to seal off districts. Chinese sources named the strategy sanguang, 'burn all, kill all, loot all', which entered Japanese usage as sanko sakusen. Whole districts were declared depopulation zones. Estimates of the death toll are highly uncertain: the Japanese historian Himeta Mitsuyoshi has put deaths caused by the policy at about 2.7 million Chinese civilians, a figure repeated in Chinese accounts and questioned by other Japanese scholars as an extrapolation. There is no dispute among historians that the campaigns involved the systematic destruction of villages and the killing of non-combatants, which the Tokyo tribunal treated as part of the pattern of Japanese conduct in China.
The Japanese North China Area Army destroyed villages, food stores and populations in the Communist base areas of north China
Chinese Communist wartime reporting, cited in Japanese and Western scholarship on the campaigns, records the population of the north China base areas falling from about 44 million to about 25 million between 1940 and 1945. The figure is a party administrative claim rather than a census, and the 19 million difference mixes deaths with flight to areas outside Communist control and with territory lost to Japanese occupation.
The upper figure is Himeta Mitsuyoshi's estimate of deaths caused by the Three Alls campaigns, widely cited in China; the lower figure reflects historians who count only documented massacres and village destructions in the north China plain. No systematic wartime registration existed in the affected districts, so all figures are extrapolations.
Village burning, the destruction of grain stores and wells, the killing of inhabitants of guerrilla districts and the construction of blockade lines are documented in Japanese army operational orders, in Chinese base-area reports and in the evidence on Japanese conduct in China heard by the Tokyo tribunal.
China