By Laurie Chen
BEIJING (Reuters) -Airport scanners at office entrances, road closures for large-scale midnight rehearsals, drones banned, guards stationed 24/7 on all overpasses: Beijing has effectively paralysed its urban core for a 70-minute military parade on September 3.
The “Victory Day” parade, marking the end of World War Two following Japan’s formal surrender, will be a projection of China’s growing military might amid deep-seated mistrust in the West, geopolitical uncertainty with the United States and territorial rows with neighbouring countries.
The highly choreographed parade, one of China’s largest in years, will unveil cutting-edge equipment like fighter jets, missile defence systems and hypersonic weapons – the results of a long-running modernisation drive of the People’s Liberation Army which has lately been beset by corruption scandals and personnel purges.
On the day, President Xi Jinping will survey tens of thousands of troops at Tiananmen Square alongside several foreign dignitaries including guest of honour Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Most Western leaders are expected to shun the parade, making it a major show of diplomatic solidarity between China, Russia and the Global South.
Ahead of the parade, Beijing has also mounted a campaign to emphasise the “correct view” of World War Two history, which emphasises that China and Soviet Russia played a pivotal role in fighting fascist forces in the Asian and European theatres.
“Putin and Xi take commemoration of the war so seriously because it shows that … Russia and China can take pride in their history and that Western attempts to tarnish their past… will fail,” said Joseph Torigian, associate professor at American University and an expert in Sino-Soviet history.
“World War Two is a foundational moment in the civilisational agendas that Putin and Xi are pursuing… Both men believe they are driving changes unseen in a century.”
A People’s Daily commentary this week claimed China’s contribution to fighting Japan was “selectively ignored and underestimated by some”, adding the Communist Party’s wartime efforts were “deliberately belittled and vilified”.
“Ignoring the ironclad facts of history, disregarding the tens of millions of innocent lives lost in the war, and … repeatedly denying or even glorifying the history of aggression constitutes a shameless betrayal,” it read.
Chinese academics have renewed efforts to rewrite what they believe are mainstream, Western-centric narratives of World War Two and advocate that the war actually started in 1931 with Japan’s invasion of China.
“China and Russia are the biggest victors and suffered the greatest losses during the war,” said Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.
“Chinese resistance played an indispensable role in draining Japanese military resources, which laid the groundwork for the defeat of the Axis powers.”
PROPAGANDA EFFORTS
Chinese casualties during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, as it is known domestically, are estimated at between 20 million and 35 million. China says over 35 million people died, including 300,000 killed by Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.
A post-war Allied tribunal put the death toll in Nanjing at about half that number. Some historians estimate the death toll was over 200,000.
Graphic scenes from the massacre are heavily featured in the recent Chinese blockbuster movie Dead to Rights, whose domestic box office takings have surpassed 2.6 billion yuan ($362 million) since late July. The film is loosely adapted from the real life story of a Chinese photography apprentice in Nanjing who secretly compiled photographic evidence of Japanese war crimes.
Another contentious point is the extent of the Communist Party’s contributions towards fighting the Japanese. Historians commonly agree that China’s republican government engaged in most direct combat with Japan, while Communist guerrilla forces carried out raids on Japanese supply lines.
At a museum in Beijing’s outskirts dedicated to the war in China, displays say Communist troops “annihilated substantial Japanese forces” while airbrushing all mentions of the republican forces for the “Chinese army”.
Some governments face a difficult decision between appropriately recognising China’s immense war sacrifices and legitimising the presence of Putin, diplomats say, whose invasion of Ukraine continues.
Most European Union ambassadors will not attend the parade and Western countries’ requests for working-level diplomatic representation have so far been rejected, two diplomats told Reuters. A state reception and an evening cultural performance are planned for the same day.
Many ordinary Beijing residents who have experienced weeks of widespread disruption to their daily lives are hoping for a brief respite. The last time the parade was held, in 2015, China implemented a nationwide three-day public holiday and Beijing schools delayed the start of term.
“I just want to meekly ask … can we have a public holiday so we can concentrate on watching the parade?” one user on the microblogging platform Weibo wrote on Wednesday.
($1 = 7.1730 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Laurie Chen; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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