When China marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the second World War with a military parade on Wednesday, leaders from 26 countries will join Xi Jinping on the reviewing stand. But one figure will attract more global attention than most of the others: the usually reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Kim, who arrived in Beijing on board an armoured train on Tuesday, has made four previous visits to China but his most recent was in 2019. And although Kim has held bilateral meetings with a number of leaders, including Donald Trump, this is the first time he will make a public appearance alongside so many others.
North Korea is the only state with which China has a mutual defence pact but relations between the neighbours have been under pressure as Kim has drawn closer to Vladimir Putin, sending soldiers to fight alongside Russian forces on the border with Ukraine. Putin will also be at the parade as part of a four-day visit to China that began in Tianjin on Monday at the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), where he made an ostentatious display of unity with Xi and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.
The commemoration will begin with a speech by Xi at Tiananmen Square, followed by a march past, a fly past and displays of China’s latest military equipment and technology. Official media reports suggest that fighter jets, missile defence systems and hypersonic weapons could be among the equipment on display.
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The 80th anniversary of the end of the war and of China’s struggle against Japanese occupation has dominated Chinese media this week. Three major films on general release deal with different aspects of the war, including one that tells the story of how Chinese fishermen rescued British prisoners of war when the Japanese vessel transporting them was sunk by a torpedo.
During the last major commemoration of the war in 2015, the official Chinese narrative stressed the commonality of the history of the war on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Communists and nationalists made common cause to fight the Japanese, although from 1945 they fought a bitter civil war in which the communists prevailed and two million nationalists fled to Taiwan.
The government in Taiwan now frames the war as part of an anti-authoritarian struggle, which is not an interpretation shared by Beijing. This time, Beijing is emphasising that China was brought into the United Nations as a result of its contribution to the outcome of the second World War, although its role is often downplayed in western accounts.
British historian Rana Mitter, author of Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II 1937-1945, said the European and Asian theatres were equivalent in terms of deaths and scale. But the war aims for actors in Asia were very different as many, on both the Allied side and fighting for the Japanese, were fighting against European colonialism.
“A lot of what the Chinese case in the present day has been about is that World War II was about order. In other words, that powers that wanted to overturn the existing order should not be permitted to do so,” he said.
“Ever since the period when China decided to work within the existing global framework, reshaping it, for instance, trying to downplay issues like human rights, but definitely working within it and reshaping from within, it becomes much more possible to argue that keeping the global order is the key issue, and that China’s contribution in World War II, blood and treasure and sacrifice, was a contribution to creating and maintaining that order.
“In the present day, where clearly the United States is actually probably the most important revisionist power in terms of global order, in a weird irony, China is using its status as a wartime ally to argue that it is now the status quo when it comes to global order.”
