Shanghai was the base of most modern Chinese artists at the time, and he had the opportunities to meet famous people in the cultural circles such as Lu Xun.

These photos, as well as ones taken during Lu's funeral, were widely published in many magazines, including Liangyou (The Young Companion) and Shidai, establishing his reputation as a photojournalist.

[2][3] Soon after his Lu Xun's images earned him national fame, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 and Sha Fei joined the Communist resistance in northern China.

The following month he formally enlisted in the Eighth Route Army, which established a resistance base in the Jin-Cha-Ji (Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei) border region.

[2] He took thousands of photographs of battle scenes, Japanese brutality, common people caught in hard circumstances, high communist leaders, and foreign visitors.

[4] Scholar Shana Brown wrote that Sha Fei's "images of soldiers crouching on rooftops, peasant armies marching through plumes of dust, and laughing young enlistees, convey an intensity that was the result of close framing devices that plunge the viewer directly into the action".

[3] Brown also wrote that "although Sha Fei's images eschew the rigidity of much contemporary Communist imagery—a surprising feat given the preponderance of Soviet influence on Chinese visual art from the 1930s onwards—they are still almost always political in nature.

Children laugh and smile, young soldiers keep their backs straight under fire, and even Japanese POWs break into song, grateful for the mercy of their Communist captors.

The artistry required to make such tableaux appear spontaneous and natural marked Sha Fei as a photographer and propagandist of extraordinary talent.