The massive military parade in Beijing today definitively marks the end of the post-World War Two era. Nominally, the 80th Anniversary of China’s victory in ‘The War against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’, it has been used by China’s president Xi to, in the words of Reuters, ‘…demonstrate Xi’s influence over nations intent on reshaping the Western-led global order’ – an order that began with the end of World War Two.
Sharing the podium with Xi – but not invited to review the parade – were presidents Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Their client status to China is also clear: without China’s financial and industrial support, Putin could not sustain his war in Ukraine; and, albeit sometimes with a nosepeg on, China has acted as the ultimate guarantor of North Korea’s prickly, and now nuclear-armed, independence. Western leaders were few on the ground and the rest of the attendees were mostly the most compromised members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Communist China has not always commemorated the end of World War Two in any significant manner. Partly, because it was seen as a predominantly Chinese Nationalist victory, but also because, while marking the end of the Japanese War, this was a much more conditional surrender, more akin to the ends of the ‘cabinet wars’ of eighteenth-century Europe, than the German’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945.
The Emperor remained on his throne; the Japanese perpetrators of the horrific Rape of Nanjing, in which thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were most brutally murdered, went largely unpunished; and, perhaps most peculiar of all, many thousands of Japanese soldiers remained under arms, albeit under Allied direction. In Indonesia, Japanese soldiers participated in the attempted suppression of anti-colonial insurgents who were unwilling to see the Dutch colonialists resume their control. At sea, the Japanese mine-laying and counter mine measures force was never disbanded and continued its operations until the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force was reconstituted in 1954. The last formal surrender of Japanese forces took place in February 1946 in Malaya. It is perhaps not surprising that the Chinese took a somewhat jaundiced view of their VJ Day, not least because it merely marked a pause in the civil war between Mao’s Communists and Chang Kai Shek’s Kuo Min Tang, a struggle that remains unresolved, as far as Xi is concerned, with Taiwan’s continued independence.
Following this parade, we should expect the threatened invasion of Taiwan is more likely than not
Comparisons with the 1930s are always fraught but there was definitely something of the Nuremberg Rallies about this parade. President Xi has defiantly stated that China’s hour has come and that China’s rise is unstoppable. Joseph Goebbels used to say that, the rallies changed a participant “from a little worm into part of a large dragon”, which seems a suitable metaphor for what we have witnessed.
Following this parade, we should also expect that the threatened invasion of Taiwan is more likely than not. Xi had directed the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for an invasion by 2027 and, through a series of increasingly sophisticated exercises and deployment of new weapons, that is becoming more than a potential staff college exercise. It is very unclear how the USA and the West will respond: arming the Taiwanese even to the extent that the Ukrainians have been armed will be a stretch; resupplying them, in the event of conflict, is considerably more complex. Leadership and consistent messaging is critical but this is missing.
We should not expect that any aspect of the ‘law-based international order’ will henceforward go unchallenged and prepare accordingly: this will prove uncomfortable to say the least, not least as our economies are so intertwined. For Donald Trump and the USA, the scales may also have finally dropped. On his ‘Truth Social’, Trump posted congratulations to Xi. He then directly accused Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-un of conspiring against the USA: budding bromances with Messrs’ Putin, Xi and Kim may have to wait.
We live, as the Chinese say, in interesting times, but should have no doubt what we have just witnessed: the post-war era is over.
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