Beijing parades tanks, and narratives

Aware soldiers marching through Tiananmen Square might throw bad optics, the Party explains there's nothing to worry about. Is there?

On Tuesday, 3 September, Beijing once again held a grand military parade. Over 10,000 military personnel marched, 100 aircraft whizzed overhead through (nearly) blue skies, and tanks rumbled once more into Tiananmen Square.

Watching on, inspecting movements, was President Xi Jinping, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. Behind them sat the leaders of Iran, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, Myanmar and more.

Plenty has been written about the geo-ramifications of it all. And the military OPSEC accounts will pick apart all the new hardware China had on show.

So, lets ignore all that and talk state media, and Party messaging.

Because, boy has China been trying hard to spin this one…

---

Given the hype and attention, it's worth remembering that this parade is a completely new event — actually, only the second-ever incarnation. Before 2015, China had never held a military parade to commemorate its war with Japan — mass military parades were reserved explicitly for China’s National Day, held October 1.

Yet Beijingers, who've experienced weeks of practice marches; circling jets; soldiers guarding bridges lest banners be unfurled; had disrupted post; and enhanced security checks to access the subway, would be forgiven for thinking these inconveniences are now a regular occurrence.

Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping each oversaw one grand military parade each during their decade-long tenures. This is already Xi’s third.

President Putin, President Xi, and Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un arrive together. CCTV.

In all, 26 heads of state have RSVPed ‘yes’ this year. In some ways, Kim’s visit is a sizeable coup — this is the reticent leader’s first-ever multilateral summit abroad.

However, compare this list to 2015’s event, and it soon becomes a marker of how far, and fast China has fallen in relations with the developed world. That 70th anniversary parade was watched by Presidents, Prime Ministers or Heads of State from over 30 countries — notably South Korea; plus foreign ministers from France, Italy and Holland; former leaders including UK’s Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder of Germany; plus UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, and Red Cross President Peter Maurer.

All were conspicuous by their absence this year. As were China’s WWII Allies and international NGOs. Nearly all leaders attended as an extension to the 2025 Tianjin SCO summit.

‘China is a force for good’

Even Beijing, not the most adept at overseas messaging, realised early on that the optics to this event looked particularly bad.

As such, it has put in extraordinary effort to label this military parade as a sign of positive, peaceful aims.

The day before the parade, journalist ‘Ren Zhongping’ (actually a pseudonym the Party uses for official commentaries, sometimes personally edited by the President) made a rare appearance in People’s Daily. The article was a segment on Xinwen Lianbo, China's nightly TV news. If there’s just one Chinese article you read about the parade, it should be this. Across 6,360 (!) words, “Ren” mentioned “peace” 46 times. The headline: “Justice will prevail, peace will prevail, and the people will prevail” was later carried over the parade on huge red and gold banners, slung under helicopters.

“Wednesday's grand ceremony is.. both a tribute to the past and a beacon of hope for the future,” stated China Daily in an editorial.

Reporting from Tiananmen Square just before the event, CGTN host Liu Xin gushed: “China will be showcasing some of its latest technology weapons, such as hypersonic missiles, camera drones, and China’s nuclear capabilities,” before remembering her foreign viewers, and pivoting hard. “When those humongous machines pass through Tiananmen square, we should all remember that China is a force for good.”

One Xinhua commentary, got so swept up in ebullience, it proudly declared: “China has never infringed upon an inch of land that belongs to another country”! Vietnamese President Lương Cường, who also watched the parade, and served in the army when China invaded his country at the cost of 10,000 civilian deaths, may disagree.

A week before the parade, China Daily ran a particularly salty article to try and head off some of the allegations.

Some commentators are seeing hidden "signals" in the event… trying to connect the parade's supposed messages to today's complex geopolitics.

Those misinterpreting common practices such as national commemorations as an excuse to flex a country's military muscle are committing a grave mistake.

It likened China’s military parade to those held in many other countries — though for some reason skipped the two biggest examples of Russia and North Korea, and instead referenced the “United Kingdom's Peace Day Parade“. That left me scratching my head, until I remembered Remembrance Sunday. Ah, yes. Of course. The similarities are immense.

Spot the difference. Remembrance Sunday, London, and Beijing 2025. CCTV.

‘Defeat Fascism’

Officially this parade is named “80th anniversary of the victory in the War against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War”. And history pervades.

In the Ren Zhongping essay, around 1,500 words are devoted to an official telling of how China — with the CPC as its “backbone” and “national vanguard” — defeated Japan to win the Eastern sphere of the world war.

Domestically, content has taken on a much harder edge, with the majority centering on two clear topics:

• The power of China’s modern military.

• And the evil of Imperial Japan.

Some of this has spilled into China’s external messaging — particularly the schlocky cohort of the state’s media studios, targeting social media.

Content has been graphic, almost to the point of voyeuristic. In recent weeks, I’ve seen uncensored decapitations, and bayonetted babies pushed into my feeds from state media influencers [obviously not linked]. If the aim was memorial and dignity for the Chinese victims, then that message has been getting lost.

Anger has also spilled into perceived slights by the West. Nanjing, is a “forgotten holocaust”. China sacrificed the most lives, but is a forgotten theatre of the war. People forget the callousness of Imperial Japan [really?]. Japan has never apologised for its crimes (seemingly research stopped before Wikipedia).

However, history isn’t treated equally.

A still from CGTN’s Li Jingjing, about the Nanjing Massacre.

“Selective outrage”

China says 300,000 died in the the Nanjing massacre. Yet even these numbers are dwarfed by other contemporaneous tragedies that go by, largely unmentioned. Like the Huayuankou Dam Burst Incident, where in 1938, retreating Chinese commanders burst levees along the Yellow river in a desperate attempt to slow Japanese forces. Between 30,000-89,000 Chinese, mostly peasants, immediately drowned. Disease and starvation led to around 500,000 dead in all. It’s the third deadliest flood in human history.

Today, it's a smaller part of Chinese history. A simple monument. A few articles — not a footnote, but certainly not afforded twice the level of attention as Nanjing. You’d imagine the CPC would be eager to reference it, too, seeing how it was perpetrated by the Chiang Kai-shek, and their Nationalist Government but references are surprisingly muted. In a 2019 speech, President Xi discussed the event, but even he baulked at mentioning the word “deaths”, instead noting “12.5 million people were affected”.

Tiananmen. Cultural Revolution. But perhaps no more is this deliberate historical amnesia seen more than with the Great Famine, possibly the Party’s greatest stumble. Around 55 million dead. Shortly after, the Party declared it “70 percent human error”.

Yet it's worth pinching ourselves, and remembering that even this, one the most taboo events in CPC history, was relatively well discussed until quite recently. In 2012, Global Times, China’s nationalist tabloid, openly considered how much the Party was responisible, and advocated scientists to research the number of deaths. If that’s surprising, brace yourself for this 2011 article, titled: “Mao's past mistakes show need for open government”.

Such self-reflection is today a thing of the past, coinciding with the rise of Xi, and his 2016 doctrine that the press should “love the party, protect the party”.

Like the military parade, China’s National Memorial Day for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre is also a thoroughly modern construct, that only appeared under Xi. Congress established it in 2014.

It even debuted to internal criticism, which Global Times was quick to push back on.

Some questioned why the memorial day had not been designated earlier. Some even claimed that total casualties in the Chinese civil war, the three years of the great Chinese famine (1959-61), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), all put together, are way more than those caused by Japanese aggression.

Rather than answer these critics, Global Times simply called for censorship.

Chinese society has the tenacity and tolerance to allow different voices, but silence won't always be kept if these voices cross the line of values and morality.

The range of free speech is waiting to be demarcated.

They didn’t have to wait long. In 2021, ‘Historical nihilism’, criticising Party policy, and insulting martyrs was declared a crime. Citizens can snitch via a hotline. Perpetrators face three years in jail. Global Times itself hasn’t printed the phrase “Great Famine” since 2019.

The effect today is that China has plenty of historical trauma — but only the politically useful is remembered. But why?

Beijing military parade 2025. CCTV.

‘Victimhood nationalism’

Last week, Global Times interviewed South Korean historian Lim Jie-hyun. The writer took his following words to mean Japan, but see if you recognise which other nation this sounds like:

"Victimhood nationalism" is a narrative template to grant moral superiority and political legitimacy to a present nation of "hereditary victimhood" … Nationalist discourse has been shifting from heroes to victimhood with the globalization of memory

Lim adds, this trend is on the rise, and that nations are in a “distasteful competition over whose nation suffered the most”.

“I cannot help but feel that we are returning to the fascist era of the 1930s,” he laments.

Many watching today’s parade, featuring unelected leaders, clapping goose-stepping soldiers, as oversized flags flap off concrete buildings, will feel the same.

Where are we heading? Frankly, I don’t know. The optimist in me wants to take China at its word. The rationalist in me can see the immense pressure the West puts on developing countries to align or die. And even then, many are still eaten. Is China’s militarisation an extension of its own expansionist ambitions; is it slowly warming citizens up with tales of sacrifice and glory? Or is it simply equipping the tools to defend itself, as is a nation’s right; and instilling pride so its citizens can lift their heads? I waver.

And yet, optics don’t lie.

Also, there’s a part in the official Ren Zhongping essay that I haven’t been able to shake since reading it. Buried among all those references to “peace” are two lines conspicuous by just how different they are in tone:

“The world needs justice, not hegemony. Taiwan's return to China is the fruit of victory in World War II and an important part of the post-war international order.”

This slip is fundamental to understanding China’s modern mentality. An admission that Leadership are unhappy with the world’s status quo, and crucially, believe they have divine right to pursue their territorial aims, against a peaceful nation, through unsettled scores. It’s a tactic as old as war itself.

Through this lens, the recent intense resurrection of near-100-year-old history makes complete narrative sense.

China doesn’t want to launch a new world war. In its head, it’s still fighting the last one.