The undoubted star of China’s giant military parade marking 70 years since Japan’s World War II defeat — and countless television shows on the conflict — will be the ruling Communist Party, celebrating a victory historians say was largely won by others.
The display will feature 12,000 Chinese troops marching through Tiananmen Square alongside gleaming tanks and missiles, as fighter jets scream overhead.
It will all be overseen by President Xi Jinping — head of the People’s Liberation Army, the ruling party and the government — in what commentators say is an effort to bend history to bolster the Party’s legitimacy.
The parade aims to dramatise “this idea that without the Communist Party, there would be no new China”, said Willy Lam, an expert on Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“Xi Jinping and the Communist Party wants to claim the credit for vanquishing the Japanese, even though there is a big question mark over this claim,” he added.
Tokyo launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937 and, according to Beijing, the eight bitter years of fighting left 35 million civilians and soldiers dead or injured.
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