LONDON - China played a major role in the Allies' victory against Japan in World War II (WWII), but its wartime contributions were largely forgotten in the West due to the quick arrival of the Cold War, a leading British historian said.

"I find it really amazing that the very significant role of China in WWII really isn't very well understood in the West," Rana Mitter, director of Oxford University's China Center, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

FORGOTTEN ALLY

Mitter, professor of history and politics of modern China at Oxford University, is the author of "Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945," a critically acclaimed historical account of China's eight-year war of resistance against Japanese aggressors in WWII.

The book, first published in 2013, was complimented by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as one that "makes an important and moving contribution to the historical record by illuminating the largely forgotten war that took the lives of millions of Chinese, yet ultimately facilitated the rise of modern China."

Having spent more than 10 years researching the origins and effects of the war, the 45-year-old historian said the statistics of China's sacrifice in WWII was "staggering," but the facts were still little remembered by its wartime allies in the West.

"More than 14 million Chinese were killed during the war, and some figures put it even higher; some 80 million to 100 million Chinese became refugees in their own country during that time; at its height, some 750,000 Japanese troops were being held down by the Chinese troops, and yet these facts are not really well known in the West at all," he noted, citing figures he acquired from war archives.

"It's very important that a greater acknowledgement is made of China's role in WWII to remind the Western powers, including the United States and the Europeans, that China did make a very major contribution to shaping the world that we know today," he told Xinhua.

"After all, if China had surrendered in 1938, the shape of Asia might have been completely different for years or decades, even for today perhaps," he said, adding that Chinese resistance was vital in holding back Japan's militarist ambitions in Asia.

He suggested that the Western world look at China's contributions to the war and "remind themselves that the shaping of the modern world -- the world today, including Asia, comes in significant part from China's decision to continue resisting Japan."

"China ended up as one of the Allied powers alongside the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire at the end of WWII," he said.