By the mid-1940s, the Second Sino-Japanese War, which had begun in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in northeast China, had reached southern China. In the summer of 1944, an imminent Japanese invasion of Guangxi forced National Guangxi University to evacuate its Guilin campus and move south to Rong County. The university began conducting classes out of eight conference halls. By November, the nearby city of Liuzhou had begun wartime preparations. The university was forced to leave Guangxi entirely, relocating a second time to neighboring Guizhou province.