China’s military parades aim to instill pride and ease Communist control

China, China (AP) – Yang Hua Fen, a 92-year-old Chinese military veteran, remembers the horse-riding army and a handful of planes that marked the establishment of a communist China in 1949.

It was far from the troops that the country will be shown in the parade on Wednesday, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Japanese invasions devastated China before and during the conflict, killing millions of people.

“Now you’re going to see planes in our country… no one dares to ruin them,” the veteran told a journalist at the War Museum in Shenyan City. His chest was covered with ribbons and medals, Yang expressed his pride in the rise of his country.

The ruling Communist Party is trying to amplify that feeling by performing War Memorial Day in spring-flowing museums, new war films and military parades. The leader was present Includes Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Beijing plays with domestic and external audiences

For the outside world, parade missiles, tanks and fighter jets become a show of strength as China seeks to portray it as an alternative to the postwar era when the US controls.

At home, the memorial is an effort to show how far the country has come, and in doing so will build support for the party and its leader, President Xi Jinping. China is a major front of World War II, a fact that is often overlooked in accounts focusing on European and US naval battles in the Pacific Ocean.

“This is a truly important part of the Communist Party’s justification story, and a legitimate story as a Chinese leader,” said Emily Matson, a scholar of modern Chinese history who teaches at Georgetown and George Washington University.

The rise of China formed how it viewed war

The party has always been not that big of a deal about the end of the war. The Communists came to power four years later, and the majority of the battle was carried out by their rivals, the nationalist government they overthrew in 1949.

Wartime struggles were not very appropriate in the first decades of communist rule, where the focus was on building socialist states.

It began to change in 1978, when the party began reforms that promoted China’s economic rise. That message gradually shifted from working class victory to national building.

“This is a new nationalism in that it starts to include not only the Chinese proletariat but the entire Chinese nation,” Mattson said.

Over time, Japan’s defeat became part of the nation-building story. This is the starting point to mark the end of a long period in which foreign powers imposed will on weaker China.

Wartime history is becoming more important under XI

Xi, who came to power in 2012, stepped up his drive to build a powerful country that is no longer bullied. His government fought back New US tariffs This year, we forced President Donald Trump to reduce them.

In 2014, the government was designated September 3rd – the day after Japan officially surrendered – as the day of victory. The following year, the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, it was staged Military Parade That first day.

Party historians define Japan’s defeat as a turning point. Wang Jun Wei, chairman of the academic editorial council of the party’s Institute of Historical Literature, said it laid an important foundation for the reconstruction of the nation.

“The victory in the anti-Japan War has transformed the Chinese nation from a deep crisis into a major rejuvenation,” he said.

War Museum visitors are thinking of Gaza

For China, the battle known as the war of resistance to Japan’s attacks began in 1941 long before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

A massive exhibition on the war was held in July at a museum on the outskirts of Beijing, near the Marcopolo Bridge, centuries before the 1937 skirmishes grew into Japan’s invasion of China.

The party said the war began even earlier since 2017 – when Japan occupied an area known as Manchuria in 1931. The northeastern region is home to the War Museum in Shenyan and reopened last month after an outside facelift.

Visitors to both museums peeked out at grainy black and white photos of military life crafts and suffering and atrocities.

“We paid a very painful price,” middle school teacher Yan Hongjia said at the Beijing Museum. She portrayed in parallel with the ongoing war in the Middle East.

“Let’s think about that. If the children of Gaza during the war were our children, would we be willing to relive this history, this humiliation, and this pain?” Yang said.

China claims that Trump will shake up postwar order

Harvard historian Lana Mitter, who wrote extensively about China’s war experiences, noticed some changes in the party’s war presentation when he visited the same exhibition.

One was to play the role of a Soviet pilot who helped China during the early days of the battle. Putin is holding talks with XI on Tuesday.

The other was the increase in excellence given to China’s role as a founding member of the United Nations. China has established itself as a defender of the global order as Trump tears or bends it to his preferences, either to the norms established in international relations.

“World War II is used as framing to claim that China is now the true heir to the 1945 global order,” Mitter said.

Timeshift Asian Alliance Sand

In the 1940s, the US, China and other allies confronted and repelled Japan’s military-led expansion into Asia. Eighty years later, the US and Japan are allies facing China that have made stronger and more positive statements about what is considered their rights.

In some of their neighbours, especially Taiwan and the Philippines, China has become bullies in the South China Sea.

Kawashima Island, a Chinese expert at the University of Tokyo, says Beijing is using parades to create images of standing with Russia and others to compete with America and other wealthy countries.

“We say China is a key member leading the establishment of a postwar global order,” he said.

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Wayne Chang, video producer for the Associated Press in Beijing, contributed to Tokyo writer Mariyama Maguchi.