One evening, you decide to pull an all-nighter for no particular reason, and you have nothing to do. Video games don’t interest you, there’s nothing to read, you got all your homework done, and all of your friends are sleeping. What can you do? Why, you can watch the Chinese victory anniversary military parade, of course.
September 9th, 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan and ending the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. Of course, someone thought it a good idea to celebrate it a week earlier. On September 3rd, 2015, over 12,000 soldiers and 200 aircraft will be featured in a grand military parade. The sheer scale tops the last military parade, one nearly 6 years prior on China’s 60th anniversary, a grand spectacle that featured merely 10,000 soldiers.
So what exactly does this parade on the victory over Japan mean?
To many, it represents the end of a long era of Japanese aggression in China, a dark time punctuated by exploitation, enslavement, and atrocities. For some individuals, the memory still lingers: those of Nanjing, comfort women, and forced labor. Such memories leave a bitter taste in the mouths of Chinese, many of whom still refer to their neighbors as “日本鬼子”, or literally, “Japanese demons.”
To the government itself, it represents a show of power. In fact, this parade is a perfect opportunity to showcase the might of both the People’s Liberation Army as well as the Communist Party. While the war against Japan ended in 1945, conflict in China remained for more than 4 years up until the year 1949, when the Chinese Nationalists left to Taiwan and the Communists solidified their rule. Therefore, such a display reinforces the notion of the power of the Communists, and their astonishing victories over both the Japanese aggressors and their Nationalist cousins.
To many of us at home, however, we should see it as nothing more than a political spectacle, no different from a redneck showing his neighbor the size and quantity of his gun collection. By revealing hundreds of aircraft and vehicles, Chinese president Xi Jinping, a man known for his political aggressiveness, is clearly taking his gloves off and revealing his hand.
But what reason does he have to spend millions of dollars in order to pull a move like this? The answer is on the other side of the globe. Despite recent consensus, the United States has a pretty long list of reasons to dislike its Asian counterpart. This includes recent incursions into the South China Sea, aggressive manipulation of the RMB, increasing spheres of influence in Africa, and cyber spying on sensitive information, among many others. As a result, warmongering on conflict between the two countries is a common theme for media in both the US and China. A massive parade merely shows the US and other western nations who is toting the larger gun.
Interested (or really bored) individuals from the United States can watch the parade on the evening of September 8th.
