If Russia is the tornado, China is the climate: a slow shift in global power

Many of the world’s most powerful leaders flocked to China this week, forming long lines on red carpets to shake hands with Xi Jinping before being moved on to view military parades and pose for group photos.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin was there, for the summit meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in Tianjin, and then for the giant military parade on Thursday through Tiananmen Square, to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the war.

Kim Jong-un arrived in Beijing by special train from North Korea, a leader increasingly confident after nearly 15 years in power and enriched by selling his military’s services to Russia in Ukraine.

India’s Narendra Modi was on his first trip to China in seven years, relighting a relationship interrupted in 2020 by bitter borders clashes with the Chinese military. “Long time!” he said, greeting Madame Peng Liyuan, Xi’s wife.

Two of South-East Asia’s most important leaders, Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, and Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia, had prime spots on the viewing platform for the military extravaganza, the latter coming despite violent protests at home over politicians’ privileges.

There were many more – leaders from Iran, central Asian nations, Mongolia, Vietnam, Belarus, and Pakistan – plus the retired politicians from countries which declined to send senior official representatives.

They included Yukio Hatoyama, a one-time Japanese prime minister long marked out as a friend of Beijing, and Dan Andrews, the former Victorian premier who was included in the leaders’ photo at the parade.

Left on the sidelines was Donald Trump, who called the parade “beautiful” but complained about China airbrushing America’s pivotal role in defeating Japan from the commemoration.

Who's who at Xi Jinping's military parade

“Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un, as you conspire against The United States of America,” he said in a note directed to Xi on social media.

China’s raw display of military and diplomatic convening power this week was deliberate, a kind of shock-and-awe introduction for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to Beijing’s plans to build an alternative world order.

The pageantry is no flash in the pan. Alongside the political theatre, China has been methodically building out its military, diplomatic and soft policy power over more than a decade, to reinforce regime security at home and to draw countries away from the West.

As the saying goes about the disruptive powers of Moscow and Beijing, Russia is like a tornado, but China is climate change.

Take the military parade, which was the largest since the ruling communist party established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and which displayed modern weapons designed to deter enemies in Washington, Taipei and beyond.

The display of firepower was also important in instilling pride at home about China’s rise and as an advertisement for its armaments companies to sell their wares abroad to foreign governments.

“What a spectacular event!” gushed Victor Gao, a well-known commentator, on state TV. “China has really reached the highest level of military sophistication, and is now the strongest in the world, next to nobody.”

Aside from the military dimension, the parade held multiple levels of meaning that need to be unpacked to decipher their real import.

The parade’s date, of September 3, was calculated, as it was only the second time that Xi has held a military parade matching the day of Japan’s formal surrender, in 1945. In that respect, the parade had a particularly anti-Japanese flavour.

In Tianjin, earlier in the week, Xi also called for the “correct historical perspective” on the Second World War, naming China and the then Soviet Union as the “mainstays” of the battle against global fascism.

China has every right to commemorate the extraordinary sacrifice of the Chinese people in a conflict that started in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and cost upwards of 30 million lives.

‘Correct view of history’

Chinese resistance severely dented Japan’s ability to meet its other objectives in the war: to conquer and hold South-East Asia, keep the US at bay and attack anti-Axis allies such as Australia.

But far from being a “mainstay” of the war, the Chinese communists held back from the frontlines and left most of the fighting of the Japanese to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army.

Mao Zedong himself joked about this after the war when he met Japanese politicians. No need for apologies, he told them. “I would actually like to thank the Japanese warlords!” (Such comments make Chinese officials squirm these days.)

But Xi’s directive – about the “correct view of history”– makes the communist party’s version virtually the law in a country where citizens can be prosecuted for “historical nihilism.”

In 2015, the other time that Xi held the military parade on September 3, the then prime minister Tony Abbott sent his veterans affairs minister, Michael Ronaldson, to represent Australia.

This time, the Albanese government, with no dissent from the Coalition, stayed away. In part, that was because of the assortment of dictators attending, such as Putin and Kim.

But it was also in recognition of Australia’s close diplomatic and security partnership with Japan.

These days, Australia and Japan are more than just friends. They are de facto allies working together on strategies to handle an increasingly unpredictable America and a powerful, assertive China.

To be sure, Japan itself has always struggled to come to terms with the war. The excruciating word games long associated with anniversaries like the one this week once meant that whenever Tokyo has apologised for its wartime conduct, one scholar joked, they un-apologised at the same time.

But numerous genuine efforts by Tokyo over many years to settle the war issue with China, with apologies and de facto reparations, have always been rebuffed.

Tokyo has long come to believe that Beijing isn’t interested in accepting apologies and moving on. Instead, Japanese leaders believe Beijing sees the “memory wars” as a form of diplomatic leverage.

Japan was one piece being moved around the chessboard by this week’s events in China. The far more consequential one was India.

Modi arrived in China in the midst of a bitter fight with Trump, who has imposed 50 per cent tariffs on New Delhi’s imports to pressure it to stop buying Russian oil.

Trump’s anger was compounded by Modi’s refusal to give the US president the credit for ending India’s hostilities with Pakistan earlier this year, and, by extension, supporting his campaign for a Nobel Peace prize.

Trump’s demands have come as an infuriating shock to New Delhi, who saw the US President as the perfect partner, one who could provide them with technology and not complain about Modi’s human rights record.

“I know today a lot of countries are nervous about the US. Let’s be honest about it. We are not one of them,” Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said after November’s presidential elections.

In an instant, decades of the US and India building diplomatic trust and the habit of working together has ground to a halt, New Delhi’s slow-moving thaw with China has sped up, and its long-time partnership with Russia has been revived.

The pictures out of Tianjin – of a beaming Xi, Putin and Modi chatting and exchanging hugs – landed with a kind of new-world-order thud in Washington.

“They have common interests, but their conflicting interests are structural.”

— Bilahari Kausikan, a former head of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry

This was deliberate signalling on Modi’s part, and Trump noticed, but it is too early to call a sea change in New Delhi’s policy, which still has every reason to get closer to the US to hedge against China.

“Spoiler alert – India is not ‘moving into China’s camp’. Americans really need to learn to see the world beyond binaries,” said Evan Feigenbaum, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Especially with Trump, countries are looking for manoeuvrability and flexibility in a more multipolar world, which is not the same thing as joining or defecting from one or another ‘camp’.”

India and China still have an intractable border dispute and a trade imbalance heavily in Beijing’s favour. China remains Pakistan’s best friend. All of which means that Beijing and New Delhi will never be joined at the hip.

“They have common interests, but their conflicting interests are structural,” said Bilahari Kausikan, a former head of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry. “So, let’s not lose perspective.”

Trump was not wrong to say that China, Russia and North Korea, plus countries like Iran, are working together against the US, but it is hardly a conspiracy.

A conspiracy usually takes place in secret. China’s efforts to build anti-American partnerships have been taking place in plain sight for years.

Indeed, China’s ambitions have received a supercharged boost from Trump himself, and his indifference to alienating and undermining allies and friends.

Xi and Putin, who are at the core of the anti-western axis, are both aged 72.

On the way into the parade, a hot mic captured the pair talking about medical advances in anti-ageing techniques. “Human organs can be continuously transplanted,” their interpreter was heard saying. “The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.”

This may have just been two elderly men talking about the latest story they read in the newspaper. More likely is that it reflects the message they have been delivering internally to their own systems.

Xi and Putin, and their campaign against the US and their allies, intend to be around for a long time.