Yang Huafeng, a 92-year-old Chinese army veteran, remembers the troops on horseback and the handful of planes that marked the founding of communist China in 1949.
It was a far cry from the military might the country will display Wednesday in a parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. A Japanese invasion before and during the conflict devastated China and left millions of people dead.
“Now you see our country’s planes … , no one dares to mess with them,” the veteran told journalists at a war museum in the city of Shenyang. His chest covered with ribbons and medals, Yang expressed pride in his country’s rise.
The ruling Communist Party is trying to amplify that feeling by playing up the war anniversary with spruced-up museums, new war movies and the military parade, attended by leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Beijing is playing to domestic and outside audiences
To the outside world, the missiles, tanks and fighter jets at the parade will be a show of strength as China seeks to portray itself as an alternative to the American-dominated postwar era.
Domestically, the commemoration is an effort to show how far the country has come — and in so doing, build support for the party and its leader, President Xi Jinping. China was a major front in World War II, a fact often overlooked in accounts that focus more on the fight for Europe and U.S. naval battles in the Pacific.
“It’s a really important part of the Communist Party’s legitimizing narrative as the leader of the Chinese people,” said Emily Matson, a scholar of modern Chinese history who teaches at Georgetown and George Washington universities.
China’s rise has reshaped how it views the war
The party didn’t always make such a big deal about the end of the war. The Communists only came to power four years later, and the bulk of the fighting was done by their rivals, the Nationalist government they overthrew in 1949.
The wartime struggle was less pertinent in the first decades of communist rule, when the focus was on building a socialist state.
That began to change in 1978, when the party launched the reforms that propelled China’s economic rise. Its message gradually shifted from the triumph of the working class to nation-building.
“This is a new nationalism in that it begins to include not just the Chinese proletariat but the whole Chinese nation,” Matson said.
Over time, the defeat of Japan became part of the nation-building story, a starting point marking the end of a long period when foreign powers imposed their will on a weaker China.
Wartime history has risen in importance under Xi
Xi, who came to power in 2012, has stepped up a drive to build a strong country that can no longer be bullied. His government pushed back against new U.S. tariffs this year, forcing President Donald Trump to scale them down.
In 2014, the government designated Sept. 3 — the day after Japan formally surrendered — as Victory Day. The following year, the 70th anniversary of the war’s end, it staged a military parade on the day for the first time.
Party historians define Japan’s defeat as a turning point. It laid an important foundation for the rebuilding of the nation, said Wang Junwei, the chair of the Academic and Editorial Council at the Institute of Party History and Literature.
“The victory in the anti-Japanese war transformed the Chinese nation from deep crisis toward great rejuvenation,” he said.
A war museum visitor thinks of Gaza
For China, the fighting in what it calls the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression began long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
An extensive exhibition on the war opened in July at a museum on the outskirts of Beijing near the centuries-old Marco Polo Bridge, where skirmishes in 1937 would grow into Japan’s invasion of China.
The party has, since 2017, said the war started even earlier — in 1931, when Japan occupied an area then known as Manchuria. The northeast region is home to the war museum in Shenyang, which reopened last month after an exterior face-lift.
Visitors to both museums peered at artifacts of military life and grainy black and white photos of the suffering and the atrocities.
“We paid a very painful price,” middle school teacher Yan Hongjia said at the museum. She drew a parallel to the ongoing war in the Mideast.
“Let’s think about it, if the children in Gaza during the war were our children, would we be willing to relive this history, this humiliation and this pain?” Yan said.
As Trump shakes up postwar order, China claims it
Harvard historian Rana Mitter, who has written extensively on China’s war experience, noticed some changes in the party’s presentation of the war when he visited the same exhibition.
One was the playing up of the role of Soviet military pilots who helped China in the early years of the fighting, a nod to China’s deepening relationship with Russia. Putin is holding talks with Xi on Tuesday.
Another was the increased prominence given to China’s role as a founding member of the United Nations. China is positioning itself as a defender of the global order as Trump rips up established norms on international relations or bends them to his liking.
“World War II is being used as the framing to argue that China is now the real inheritor of that 1945 global order,” Mitter said.
Sands of time shift Asian alliances
In the 1940s, the U.S., China and other allies confronted and drove back Japan’s military-led expansion into Asia. Eight decades later, the U.S. and Japan are allies confronting a China that has grown more powerful and assertive of what it sees as its rights.
For some neighbors, notably Taiwan and the Philippines, China has become the bully in the South China Sea.
Shin Kawashima, a China expert at the University of Tokyo, says that Beijing is using the parade to create an image of standing with Russia and others to counter America and other wealthy nations.
“China is trying to say that it was a key member leading the establishment of the postwar global order,” he said, “and that it has now reached a stage where it is catching up with and overtaking the United States.”
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Associated Press video producer Wayne Zhang in Beijing and writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.
