Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) on Thursday last week urged democratic nations to boycott China’s military parade on Wednesday next week.
The parade, a grand display of Beijing’s military hardware, is meant to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. While China has invited world leaders to attend, many have declined. A Kyodo News report on Sunday said that Japan has asked European and Asian leaders who have yet to respond to the invitation to refrain from attending. Tokyo is seeking to prevent Beijing from spreading its distorted interpretation of wartime history, the report said, adding that former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe also criticized China’s 2015 parade marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the war.
China wants international participation at such events to lend credibility to its claim that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rather than the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), was chiefly responsible for defeating Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War. History tells a different story.
At the outbreak of war in 1937, the CCP commanded fewer than 100,000 troops, while Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces numbered more than 1 million, and enjoyed US and Allied support. While CCP units such as the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army engaged in guerrilla warfare — sabotaging railways and ambushing supply lines — the KMT bore the brunt of large-scale battles in Shanghai, Wuhan, Changsha and other major fronts.
The CCP did expand its forces to about 1 million by recruiting peasants, and the two sides cooperated intermittently against their common enemy. Yet it was US intervention in the Pacific — not CCP resistance — that ultimately forced Japan’s retreat from China. US bombing raids, the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union’s destruction of Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria were decisive in ending the war.
Despite these facts, Beijing continues to frame the war as a CCP-led triumph — an expected move by an authoritarian regime seeking to rewrite history and bolster its legitimacy. The reality is that the CCP could never have defeated Imperial Japan alone. Even a deeper CCP–KMT alliance would likely have failed to overcome Japan’s superior military might.
Japan entered the war as a modern industrial power with a well-equipped, centrally commanded army, navy and air force. By contrast, China was politically fragmented, agrarian and militarily underdeveloped. Although China had assembled a numerically larger army by 1938, Japanese troops were better trained, better armed and better led. Early Japanese victories reflected these advantages, although Japan’s control of China was ultimately hampered by the nation’s vast geography, poor infrastructure and internal divisions.
These strategic realities undercut Beijing’s narrative. China’s wartime experience was one of shared sacrifice — primarily borne by the KMT. The CCP’s claim to have “defeated Japan” dishonors the sacrifices of millions of soldiers and civilians who resisted Japan at enormous cost.
Today, Beijing’s historical revisionism serves a different purpose: to stir nationalism, fuel anti-Japanese sentiment and present the CCP as the rightful guardian of China’s sovereignty at a time when it is stoking regional tensions in the Asia-Pacific region.
Democracies should resist lending legitimacy to this distorted narrative. Attendance at Beijing’s commemoration is not a neutral act; it is an implicit endorsement of the CCP’s self-serving propaganda. By boycotting the parade, the international community can send a clear message: History is not a tool to be rewritten for political gain, and authoritarian regimes cannot whitewash their past to justify their aggressive policies.
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