Xi Jinping World War 2 speech: China marked 80 years of the end of World War II (1939-45) with a military parade at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on September 3. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un — the first North Korean leader to attend a Chinese military parade in 66 years — were present. China officially describes World War II as the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War”, and the wordy slogan was emblazoned on banners at the event, which Beijing has been commemorating with increasing pageantry of late. Xi’s speech, a peek into Chinese weaponry “Eighty years ago, after 14 years of bloody struggle, the Chinese people completely defeated the Japanese militarist aggressors and declared the final victory,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his speech. It was a “historic turning point for the Chinese nation”, taking it “from a period of deep national crisis toward great national rejuvenation”, he said. Today, as the world faces a “choice between peace and war”, China would not be “intimidated by any bullies”, and “justice, light, and progress will always triumph over evil, darkness, and reaction”, the BBC quoted Xi as saying. The reference to the United States seemed obvious — indeed, President Donald Trump responded on social media, asking Xi to “please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America”. But China’s messaging is intended to go beyond the current events of US tariffs and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East — it is linked more broadly to the way in which China has attempted to project itself in global geopolitics. The showcasing of advanced Chinese weaponry at the parade was intended to drive home the message of the strength of the Chinese nation. The Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times said the DF-5C liquid-fuelled intercontinental strategic nuclear missile, with its range of 20,000 km, was “capable of covering the entire globe”. Western observers dubbed the ceremony, attended by leaders of 26 countries, as a gathering of authoritarians. How China sees World War 2 Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria in northeastern China in 1931. Full-scale war broke out in 1937, and Japanese soldiers carried out the infamous mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing over several weeks beginning in December of that year. When the war in Europe began in 1939, Japan was on the side of the Axis Powers along with fascist Germany and Italy. This was a time of internal upheaval in China, as Mao Zedong’s communists competed for power with the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek. After the war ended with Japan’s defeat, the communists prevailed in the domestic conflict, and the leaders of the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan. For many decades after, the Communists did not make notable mentions of the war. In an article for The Diplomat, researcher and academic Lewis Eves wrote, “By the late 1970s, however, the regime’s legitimacy of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was faltering. Chairman Mao, whose cult of personality had been a cornerstone of the CCP’s regime, died in 1976.” The economic reforms introduced two years later also threatened the core ideology of communism, and by extension, the party’s survival. In this context, the party embraced a nationalistic view of the war, invoking history as a unifying factor. It encouraged school education, films and TV shows on the subject. This has been emboldened by a revisionist view in Japan as well, particularly among the younger population, occasionally justifying its past military aggression. Notably, Taiwan has resisted agreeing with the Chinese view and, amid its own tensions with the country, restricted its officials from attending commemorations and parades. Further, framing the war as a fight against “fascism”, an ultranationalist far-right ideology, allows Beijing to criticise both its key strategic competitors — the West and Japan. Its official media commentary has said that in the Cold War era, “Washington chose to support Japan as a strategic counterweight in Asia. In doing so, the remnants of Japanese fascism were not fully eradicated.” The narrative also ties into the idea of the “Century of Humiliation”, covering the period from the mid-19th century to 1949, capped by the Communists establishing the modern-day People’s Republic of China. It includes the period of China’s unequal trade treaties with European powers to the Japanese invasions. Under Xi, it has often been used to build up nationalistic sentiments and frame criticisms of China (particularly by the West) as an attempt to subjugate it, once again. Finally, it relates to how China wants the world to perceive its rise. British historian Rana Mitter wrote in his book China’s Good War (2020) that the country is “keen for its growing presence in the world to be seen as one of normative and moral leadership, rather than leadership defined solely by economic and military weight.” This is what political scientist Joseph Nye called “soft power”, or winning goodwill through ideas and culture, not just coercion. “China has recently constructed such a story of its own modern genealogy, which presents the country not only as powerful, but as just and moral. Chinese thinkers now argue that the country was “present at the creation,” to use former US secretary of state Dean Acheson’s phrase referring to his leading role in the formation of the postwar world,” he wrote. A position as a direct stakeholder of sorts would, therefore, strengthen the country's claims to shape its future.
