Eighty years later, China reflects lessons learned with progress shown

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OPINION

By Joshua Kingdom

When Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945, the moment marked China’s great triumph over the occupying power. Things had not been easy in the time leading up to the event, though. For one thing, this particular resistance was the longest-standing against fascism anywhere in the world (having started in 1931). To this day, therefore, Beijing’s political vision continues to be driven in part by the lessons drawn from those years.

This is where President Xi was coming from in his remarks to the world during the eighty-year commemoration of the victory. So while it might initially seem counterintuitive for the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China to make statements such as “Today humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero sum…” on the one hand while going on to display state of the art military weaponry on the other, it does not have to be if one appreciates the context as we will see.

In the forties, the Chinese people had to make do with the situation in which they found themselves. Doing so, however, came at such a high cost. An estimated 35 million nationals (combatants and civilians), for example, lost their lives. The deduction of this reality, hence, was that despite the fact that a prerequisite of freedom is enabling internal infrastructure that supports it, the same is not sufficient. Also key in this picture, as the recent parade showed, is the protection of sovereign interests.

In Tiananmen Square on Wednesday, ten thousand men and women in uniform from the four services of the army (navy, rocket, infantry and air force) proudly displayed their skills to the admiration of thousands in attendance and millions watching live on television. And then there is the equipment showcased.

Leading these were the nuclear warheads; DongFeng-31 land-based intercontinental missile (which is all new), JuLang-3 submarine-launched intercontinental missile, and the DongFeng-61 land-based intercontinental missile.

Another debuting stellar piece of hardware was the AJX002 underwater drone. This equipment is gigantic, and yet it operates unmanned. Large lasers to be deployed in air and land fights were present too.

Others were: stealth aircraft, fighter jets, tanks, hypersonic missiles, etc. Keeping to the day’s theme, several activities reminded onlookers of the nonaggression stance of China.

Helicopters flying in the sky thus carried messages such as: “Peace Prevails,” “Justice Prevails,” and “The People Prevail.”

Elsewhere, there is no doubt that the message that China intended to send was received loud and clear. In the United States, the President took to his Truth Social account, accusing Beijing of working with Moscow and Pyongyang to conspire against it.

Now, the worthiness of this statement is barely existent, but its implications tell a lot. What the Whitehouse was saying without saying is that it felt the strength that came across from China on Victory Day, and we can look to pundits in the West for further clarity.

Speaking to CNN’s Rosemary Church, Malcolm Davis of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute affirmed that “China is moving much more rapidly in this critical military technology area than the United States is” and that “they’re gaining an advantage that will give them the ability to make it much more difficult for the US and its allies to be able to project power into the Western Pacific in a crisis.”

The other part of this equation, of course, is that in building the capacities that it has, China has not only emancipated herself but also emerged as a counterbalancing power in a world that has long needed one. At the parade, this fact was evidenced by the twenty-plus heads of state in attendance.

The diversity of the countries represented (i.e. European, Asian, as well as South American) is also a testament to the fact that this phenomenon is truly global.

Moreover, these nations exhibited a high level of commitment to honouring their invitations. With the current tariff policy by the United States, for instance, they had to wonder whether the Trump administration would not act in further hostility to them if they came through. Secondly, some of these leaders waited for this occasion from the time that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit concluded.

It is a fitting run so far, then. With proper consolidation, nothing can come in the way of China in the next eighty years. The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable indeed.

The writer is a research fellow at the Development Watch Centre