by WorldTribune Staff, June 11, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
As the saying goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT) remember the past, are obsessed with it, and have weaponized it, an analysis said.
“The Chinese Communist Party offers perhaps the most cynical example of weaponized history in modern geopolitics,” Miles Yu wrote for The Washington Times on June 8.
“For decades, Beijing has portrayed Japan as a perpetual threat, invoking memories of wartime atrocities to justify xenophobia, military expansion and hostility toward Tokyo. Conveniently omitted from this narrative is the CCP’s own heinous record of repression, political violence and manmade disasters that have inflicted suffering upon the Chinese people on a scale far exceeding that of any foreign intervention.”
The CCP’s obsession with ancient history bears little resemblance to contemporary reality, Yu noted:
“Japan today is not Imperial Japan. It is one of the world’s most successful democracies, a leading defender of free markets, human rights, international law and peaceful conflict resolution. For more than 70 years, Japan has maintained a fundamentally pacifist orientation and has become one of the principal pillars of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Few nations in modern history have undergone such a profound political and moral transformation.”
The Xi Jinping regime continues to speak of Japan as if the year were 1937.
The CCP will officially celebrate Japan’s surrender in World War II on Sept. 3 as the Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Established as a statutory holiday, it is commemorated with massive military parades, wreath-laying ceremonies at national monuments, and state addresses.
Communist China’s portrayal of Japan “remains remarkably similar to the shrill propaganda advanced by Beijing and Moscow during the early Cold War, when both viewed the American-led reconstruction of Japan as a capitalist conspiracy to contain communism in Asia,” Yu wrote.
“Decades later, the language and ideological fervor have changed little.
“History is preserved selectively because it serves a political purpose. By keeping old wounds permanently open, the CCP manufactures external enemies, mobilizes nationalist sentiment and distracts attention from its own revisionist ambitions. It sacrifices an honest assessment of present realities in favor of politically useful memories. It lives in history while claiming to lead the future.”
Taiwan’s KMT — the island’s Chinese Nationalist Party — “represents a different but equally dangerous form of historical captivity,” Yu wrote.
KMT is the major Chinese political party that governed mainland China from 1928 until 1949 and has since been a prominent political force in Taiwan.
Related: What is Taiwan’s opposition party up to? Questions for Chen Li-wun in Washington, May 26, 2026
“The KMT’s political identity was forged in an era when it governed China and fought the Chinese Communist Party for control of the mainland. That struggle ended nearly eight decades ago. The CCP won. The KMT retreated to Taiwan. History moved on,” Yu wrote.
“Unfortunately, parts of the KMT did not.
“Modern Taiwan has undergone one of the most remarkable political transformations in Asia. The authoritarian state of the 20th century gave way to a vibrant democracy. The democratic transition of the 1990s created what can be called only a new birth of freedom. More importantly, Taiwan has long moved beyond the obsolete question of who represents China. The overwhelming majority of its people simply seek the right to represent themselves, as Taiwanese, not Chinese.”
The Taiwan of today carries out democratic elections. It has an independent political system. Civil society is thriving. Only a tiny minority in Taiwan now identify primarily as Chinese.
“Yet elements within the KMT continue to interpret politics through the lens of an unfinished Chinese civil war. They behave as if they remain participants in a struggle for China rather than competitors in Taiwan’s democratic system. This is not realism but strategic nostalgia,” Yu noted.
“The truth is straightforward. The KMT’s future exists entirely within Taiwan. It contests elections in Taiwan, serves voters in Taiwan and derives its legitimacy from Taiwan’s democratic institutions. It has no meaningful political space in the People’s Republic of China. Any strategy rooted in the political geography of 1949 is disconnected from the political realities of the 21st century.
“Like the CCP, the KMT risks becoming a prisoner of history at precisely the moment when strategic clarity is most needed.”
History changes.
Yu concluded: “Moreover, history provides context, not destiny. It should illuminate reality, not obscure it.
“The future belongs to nations that understand history without becoming enslaved by it. Strategic wisdom requires remembering the past while acting in the present. Those who cling to history as a substitute for reality eventually lose both.
“The Indo-Pacific cannot afford that fate.”
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