The Guardian view on China’s display of military muscle: to what end?
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Version 0 of 1. On 15 August 1945, the day after Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese that the time had come to “endure the unendurable” and accept that Japan had lost the war, a weary but elated Chiang Kai-shek also spoke to his people on the radio. “Our faith in justice through black and hopeless days and eight long years of struggle has today been rewarded,” he told them, looking back on a struggle in which at least 14 million Chinese died, 80 million became refugees, and most of the country’s industry, roads, railways and other infrastructure was destroyed. Even though it was the atomic bomb that precipitated the Japanese surrender and the American advance across the Pacific which had destroyed Japanese sea-power, it was the Chinese who had kept the bulk of Japan’s land armies tied down on the mainland. Chiang’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), could rightly claim most of the credit, the communists playing a distinctly secondary role. Chiang and the KMT lost many battles, but they never gave up: the Japanese were never able to turn their energies and resources away from this battered but still resolute enemy. If they had been able to do so, the conflict in the far east might have developed very differently. Chiang would not relish his triumph for long. Within months, relations with the communists deteriorated. Within a year there was civil war, and by the end of 1949 the remnants of the KMT government had fled to Taiwan. The Chinese Communist party inherited the KMT victory, and built a modern China on that foundation. That is the real achievement that the Chinese government celebrated on Thursday by putting on a huge military show in Beijing. The claim, on the 70th anniversary of its end, that the communists won the war in China is flawed. But they did go on, after many bloody deviations, to create the strong China of which Chiang had also dreamed, a China securely seated at the top table from which he was so often humiliatingly turned away during the war. Nobody would now dream of leaving China out of a major international gathering in the way that the Nationalist government was left out of the Yalta conference in 1945, for example. Given the debt of gratitude owed to China for its part in the defeat of Japan, it seems churlish that a number of countries either refused invitations or sent low-level representatives, including the United States and Britain, although Tony Blair was there in a private capacity. The reason, of course, is that China’s strength is an uncomfortable reality for neighbours alienated by its territorial claims, for the former enemy, Japan, and for western countries that want to signal disapproval of Chinese policies. Then there is the way in which the leading role of the nationalists has been written out. At Taiwan’s own end of the war parade, held in July inside a military base, Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou said the truth “must not be distorted”. To be fair, mainland historians have in recent years given more weight to the KMT war effort, and Chiang Kai-shek himself is acknowledged as a leader of stature. But, finally, military parades have an intimidatory aspect which President Xi Jinping’s peace rhetoric and his announcement about troop reductions on Thursday will not have done much to dissipate. The world needs a strong China but not a China whose strength is feared. |