Leaders from countries united in their opposition to the west will gather in Beijing this week in a show of support for China’s president, Xi Jinping, at a second world war commemoration parade designed to show off China’s military strength and geopolitical might.
Described by western analysts as “the axis of upheaval”, the military, economic and political collaboration between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea has been on display on the battlefield in Ukraine and in the Middle East this year.
But on Wednesday it will be Beijing that takes centre stage as the world’s second-largest economy and rising superpower presents itself as an alternative to a western-led global order.
The tightly choreographed military parade through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to commemorate 80 years since the defeat of Japan in the second world war – referred to in China as the war of resistance against Japanese aggression – will be attended by 26 heads of state. As well as Russia, North Korea and Iran, leaders from Myanmar, Mongolia, Indonesia, Zimbabwe and central Asian countries will witness China’s unveiling of a range of combat-ready weaponry. The only western leaders on the guest list published by China’s ministry of foreign affairs are from Serbia and Slovakia.
“Xi Jinping is trying to lay out his ambition for the global order,” said Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House. In Xi’s view, “the world should be multipolar, led by China, and joined by many non-western countries,” Yu said.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is already in China, having attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin over the weekend. India’s president, Narendra Modi, also attended the annual gathering of Eurasian leaders, a sign of thawing China-India relations at a time when India has been hit by 50% tariffs by the US as a punishment for purchases of Russian oil.
As well as showing Beijing’s power to gather non-western leaders, the parade – two months after US’s own lacklustre military parade held on Donald Trump’s 79th birthday in mid-June – provides a direct comparison of US and Chinese military strength that Beijing will be comfortable with.
Wednesday’s bonanza comes “quite shortly after the awful US parade”, said Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It would “rub it in from the Chinese side”, he said, telling the US that “if you do parades, we can do it better than anyone else”.
In recent months China has been stressing the importance of its narrative about the defeat of Japan in the second world war, which minimises the role of the west. In May, when Xi visited Moscow for Russia’s Victory Day parade, he wrote an article calling for the “correct historical perspective” on the war.
Xi said China and the Soviet Union were the principle theatres of war in Asia and Europe, and that the two countries “served as the mainstay of resistance against Japanese militarism and German nazism, making pivotal contributions to the victory of the world anti-fascist war”.
Xi’s article made no mention of the US or European contributions against the axis forces in the war.
Several recent blockbuster films have also focused on China’s experience of the war. Dead to Rights, a film about the Nanjing massacre, in which more than 200,000 Chinese people in Nanjing were killed by Japanese troops in 1937, took more than 500m yuan (£52m) in the first four days of its release in Chinese cinemas in July.
Another film, Dongji Rescue, tells the story of British prisoners of war who were rescued by Chinese fishers from a bombed Japanese cargo liner, while the Chinese government has enthusiastically promoted a documentary on the same topic.
Yu said the legitimacy of the ruling Chinese Communist party was based in part on its defeat of Japan 80 years ago, making the historical narratives particularly important as Beijing grapples with challenging economic forces and a trade war with the US that threatens to undermine the prosperity of ordinary Chinese people.
Analysts will be closely watching Wednesday’s parade for signs of China’s military upgrade, especially anything that could be of particular relevance to an assault on Taiwan.
“Taiwan is the great unspoken piece of the parade,” said Charles Parton, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. By projecting military might, he said, Beijing is “sending a message to the Taiwanese that resistance is futile”.
In May, Chinese weaponry appeared to prove itself in a conflict between India and Pakistan, when Pakistan used Chinese J10-C jets to shoot down several Indian fighter jets. The role of Chinese kit in that conflict, while never officially acknowledged by Beijing, was nonetheless highlighted in Chinese media as a success story for China’s military capabilities.
Even more advanced jets could be on display at this week’s parade. Wezeman expects to see so-called “fifth-generation” fighter jets such as the J-20, a more advanced and stealthy version of the J-10C jets used by Pakistan in May.
Crucially, Chinese jets are increasingly made with Chinese rather than Russian engines, part of China’s military modernisation plan, which stresses the importance of self-reliance. “The whole point for China is to be totally independent of anybody else, including the Russians,” Wezeman said.
That desire for military self-sufficiency comes at a time when China’s key ally on the world stage, Russia, has been propped up by Chinese economic support and North Korean troops during its war in Ukraine. Many analysts believe Beijing is learning lessons from that conflict to inform its thinking about a potential conflict with Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as part of its own territory.
And while it is difficult to showcase China’s naval progress in a parade through the concrete streets of Beijing, there may be certain technology, such as supersonic drones and large underwater drones, that could show China’s ability to “deter anyone coming to the aid of Taiwan via the sea”, Wezeman said.
