-Analysis-
PARIS — The impressive military parade on Beijing’s “Eternal Peace” Avenue is a celebration of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia. But above all, it is a show of strength and power against the backdrop of the rising Sino-American rivalry.
The presence of the Russian and North Korean leaders alongside Xi Jinping, China’s president, contributes to the anti-Western tone of the event.
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The Chinese Communist Party’s historical claim on the victory over Japan during the War is ironic, because the country that helped China most in repelling the Japanese army was the United States. At the end of the war, the Americans even had good relations with Mao Zedong: an American mission visited the Communist leader at his headquarters in Yan’an and found him to be more reliable and less corrupt than his nationalist rival Chiang Kai-shek.
But according to American sinologist Richard Bernstein, “the year 1945 effectively marked the beginning of the rivalry between the United States and Communist China, a rivalry that, like a recurring disease, continues to reinvent itself.”
Allies to adversaries
Most serious historians agree that the Communists held back their forces against the Japanese during the war, leaving Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army to take the lead. This is what Donald Trump criticized Xi Jinping for in a tweet, accusing him of “plotting” against the United States.
During World War II, the Communists were in fact preparing for the battles that would ensue: the civil war that followed Japan’s surrender, which ended with Mao’s victory and the proclamation of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949. However, Mao had promised the Americans that he would not resume the war against the Nationalists.
In his book on the year 1945 (China 1945, published in 2015), Bernstein shows that the break was inevitable despite American hopes, and left plenty of bitterness. The Cold War and the Korean War would ultimately bring China and the United States into brutal opposition.
The Taiwan question
This historical episode is still significant today, because it was in 1945 that Taiwan, which had been a Japanese colony for 50 years, was integrated into the Republic of China, as it was then called. And it was to Taiwan that Chiang Kai-shek fled with his army in 1949.
Control over the interpretation of history has always been a fundamental issue for the Chinese government.
As researcher Victor Louzon writes in his book Comment la Chine écrit son histoire (“How China Writes its History”), “control over the interpretation of history has always been a fundamental issue for the Chinese government.” A few days before the parade, Beijing’s People’s Daily warned against “nihilists” within China and Westerners who seek to minimize the role of the Communists in the war against Japan.
An event as significant as this parade generates a specific narrative: victory over Japan provides historical legitimacy for China’s assertion of power against the new threats it faces today, namely the United States. To achieve this, the Chinese Communist Party must be guaranteed a central role in history.
This instrumentalization is strikingly similar to the way Vladimir Putin used the memory of the “Great Patriotic War” in his invasion of Ukraine. And as if echoing Putin’s rhetoric, China accused Taiwan just a few days ago of being ruled by… Nazis! Who would have thought?
