Special to WorldTribune.com

By John J. Metzler, September 14, 2025

The Chinese communists put on a massive military parade in Beijing to both commemorate the 1945 victory over Japan as well as to reinforce the rule and strategic vision of Supreme Leader Xi Jinping.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its assorted services excelled in the usual choreography of regiments of marching troops, columns of tanks, missiles and aircraft overflies.

The Beijing rulers predictably produced an intimidating spectacle of martial might and technology to both impress and cower their own population, to awe East Asia and the United States, and to reinforce Chairman Xi’s domestic rule.

Chairman Xi’s parade gathered the usual assembly of dictators international as well as supplicant camp-followers kowtowing to Beijing leadership.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, and Xi Jinping may have been the stars of the socialist extravaganza, but autocrats from Belorussia, Cuba, Islamic Iran, Myanmar/Burma, Serbia and Vietnam took their places in the Tiananmen Square skybox as the tanks rolled by.

But what was the spectacle, billed as Beijing’s biggest ever, really about beyond re-enforcing Chairman Xi Jinping’s decade plus iron-rule inside China itself?

Revisionism; Classic historic revisionism, namely that largely China alone, defeated Imperial Japan in 1945. Commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan, much like Russia’s spectacle in May celebrating Victory Day over Nazi Germany, while partially correct, deliberately and intentionally overlooked the other allied military participants and victims in the world war.

Without question China suffered massively from the Japanese invasion and methodical dismemberment of the Mainland. Starting with Manchuria in 1931, and later with wider assaults in July 1937, China was under attack a full decade before Pearl Harbor. China stood alone. Between 15 and 20 million Chinese died. The country was decimated.

But Beijing’s omission was not noting Nationalist China who was a valuable ally in fighting Japan, who along with the United States, Britain, British Commonwealth forces, was viewed as one of the key Allies.

In 1943 for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill and China’s Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo, Egypt to discuss the postwar order for Asia. The Chinese government secured the return of territories seized by Japan such as Manchuria and Taiwan.

But since later winning the brutal civil war against the Nationalists in 1949, who then subsequently fled to Taiwan, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has seen its entire history airbrushed and buffed with the lacquered shine of communist revisionism shamelessly burnishing the dubious image that the Chinese communist guerrillas alone defeated the Japanese invaders.

Though the Nationalist armies were routinely battered and didn’t fight as well as they could have, yet after more than a decade, the fact remains that China’s military tied down between 600,000 and one million Japanese troops on the Chinese Mainland who otherwise would have been free to fight Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s island hopping Marines in the Philippines and Pacific islands.

Rebalance. The People’s Republic of China is actively striving to tip the military balance of power from the USA in the Pacific towards Beijing. Xi Jinping’s parade showcased the best of sophisticated ground equipment, but more significantly a host of hypersonic missiles and underwater drones. Ominously, China has achieved capacity for the strategic Nuclear Triad through air, sea and missile delivery platforms.

The point was not only to impress but to warn countries such as Australia, Japan and the United States, that their capital ships such as American Aircraft carriers and blue water navy could be targeted by lethal anti-ship missiles which could render and nullify the U.S. Navy’s advantage.

Equally China has been boosting its own maritime power not only numerically in ships and greater tonnage, but through force projection.

Chinese naval expansion has a whole other dimension beyond its falsely asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea and the Spratley Islands; The weight and numbers of the PLA Navy would be geographically closer to defending the maritime borders of the PRC, not committed to a global mission as is the U.S. Navy. Thus, here the fulcrum would seem to favor China.

Re-unification. The long-stated goal of “reuniting Taiwan with the Mainland,” emerges starkly. Beijing’s communists have never renounced the use of force to bring the democratically-ruled and prosperous island back “into the embrace of the Chinese motherland.” e.g. Echoing Russian claims to Ukraine.

Reunification remains an uncompromisable red line for the Chinese Communist Party.

Chairman Xi has warned China’s power is “Unstoppable.” The looming threat of Taiwan reunification would dangerously destabilize the Indo-Pacific region. The world is entering a dangerous period.

John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]

  China invited world to revise history, surrender to its power aims, With military parade spectacle