How China’s XXL military parade puts its military and territorial ambitions on show

For more than an hour, the tramp of boots and the roar of drones will thunder through the streets of Beijing this Wednesday. On September 3, China is putting on the largest military parade in its history to celebrate 80 years since the Chinese victory over Imperial Japan in 1945.

This XXL show of force will bring together upwards of 10,000 soldiers, more than 100 planes and hundreds of tanks on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, as well as new kinds of missiles and military robots, according to Wired.

Show of force

The V-Day parade marks the high point of days of diplomatic and geopolitical activity in China, starting with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin on Monday. 

This gathering, which brought together more than 20 heads of state and government, allowed Chinese President Xi Jinping to position himself as the pillar of “an alternative world order [China] wants to lead”, according to Marc Lanteigne, a China specialist at the Arctic University of Norway.

It’s a stance that Beijing is justifying in the face of the never-before-seen aggression of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs against friend and foe alike. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will be at Xi’s side at both the summit and at Wednesday’s military parade as one of the Chinese president’s guests of honour.

For all the talk of peace, the Chinese soldiers marching in Beijing on Wednesday beneath the watchful gaze of Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un won’t be empty-handed. 

“The parade shows ‘we are strong together’,” said Axel Berkofsky, the co-director of the Milan-based Institute for International Political Studies’ Asia Centre.

Soldiers and robot wolves

“China really wants to showcase its technological prowess, to be seen as an innovator,” Lanteigne said. “Until very recently, there was always the impression that China was using … pale copies of other countries’ tech. But we're well past that stage now.”

The parade’s official site stresses that all the weapons that will be shown during the event are 100 percent “Made in China”.

The parade is likely to go beyond a simple show of China’s military know-how, said Carlotta Rinaudo, a China specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security Verona. 

“There will definitely be elements of a science fiction show,” she said. “China wants to show the world that with future wars more and more relying on technology, the People’s Liberation Army is a technological leader.”

Rinaudo expects to see human soldiers side-by-side with military robots – such as the “pack of robot wolves” that has been widely covered in the Chinese media. Through this show of mechanical mastery, Beijing is hoping to convince countries thinking of drawing closer to China that it is “not just an economic superpower but also that it offers a credible military alternative to the international order dominated by the US”, Lanteigne said.

The right side of history

The parade also reflects Xi’s habit of bending history towards political ends. Frans-Paul van der Putten, a specialist in Chinese security at the Netherlands’ Clingendael research institute, said that celebrating the victory over Japan was a relatively recent development in China.

“Before 2015, military parades were occasionally held on National Day, which referred back to the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, but not to 1945,” he said. “The V-day parades allow the CCP to highlight its role as leading the country that was one of the four main Allied powers that won World War II, along with the US, USSR and UK – even though the CCP was not in control of the national government at that time.”

In emphasising the victory over the Japanese invader, Xi is also presenting himself as the leader of a China that “has overcome the status of humiliated country that everybody can invade”, Berkofsky said. A notable reference to the Eight-Nation Alliance – France, the UK, Russia, Germany, Japan, the US, Austria and Italy – that invaded China in 1901.

But the parade also comes as part of a wider effort to re-centre the role that China – at the time led by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists – played in World War II.

“We are starting to see, including in some Chinese history journals, a reworking, if you will, of the history of the Second World War, where Western contributions have been downplayed, including the idea that the West was not particularly kind or generous to China, whereas Russia was,” Lanteigne said.

The Chinese president has been eager to restore China’s role in the history of the brutal conflict. 

“China and Russia were the main theatres of the Second World War in Asia and in Europe,” Xi said in May during his visit to Russia for the military parade commemorating the end of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. 

Van der Putten said that Western accounts of the global fight against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany regularly downplayed the role that the Chinese people had played in breaking the Japanese war machine.

“In Western representations of World War II, the Chinese contribution to the Allied war effort has often been neglected,” he said. “The fact that Western media report about the parade may help somewhat to inform Western audiences about that aspect of the war.”

But for the CCP, it’s not just a question of setting the record straight.

“There's been a major historical debate about to what degree the Chinese Communist Party versus the Nationalists were most responsible for the defeat of Japan, Lanteigne said. “We are seeing a rewriting of that to play up the role of the Communist Party and downplay that of the Nationalists.”

Behind this battle over memory lies Beijing’s claims on Taiwan, as outlined by the Brookings Institute in an article on the hidden meaning of Russia and China's recent military parades. At the close of World War II, the 1943 Cairo Declaration – restated at the 1945 Potsdam conference – maintained that a defeated Japan would be stripped of all territories it had “stolen from the Chinese” – including Taiwan. 

But who would the Japanese-occupied lands be returned to? Despite claiming the self-governing island as an inalienable part of China’s territory, the CCP has never exercised control over Taiwan, where Chiang’s Nationalists sought refuge after losing the civil war that would give birth to the People’s Republic of China. If the CCP succeeds in imposing its own reading of the war, it would strengthen, in its view, the belief that Taiwan rightfully belongs to Communist China. 

The idea of a military parade to celebrate the victory over Japan once again shows that “Xi is very good at cherry-picking facts in China’s history and using them for a specific purpose”, Rinaudo said.

Wednesday’s parade will therefore have more than one aim – to put on a show of China’s military might before the eyes of the world, shift its political pawns behind the scenes and, in the wake of an unprecedented purge of generals in recent months, “making very sure that the military continues to act as a military arm of the party and nothing else”, Lanteigne said. 

This article has been adapted from the original in French.