Chinese President Xi Jinping used his 7–10 May state visit to Russia, which included Second World War commemorations in Red Square, to not only signal China’s ongoing alignment with Moscow but to burnish a historically based Chinese claim to leadership in international affairs.
China’s official discourse on the Second World War tells us much about how it conceives of its role and place in the international community.
Central to this endeavour has been an attempt to link China’s contemporary power to what political scientist Rana Mitter has called “a morally weighted narrative about China’s role in the global order” based on its experience of the Second World War. Chinese suffering and resistance during the “War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression”, as the Second World War is known in China, have been central components of a state-led promotion of historical memory, which presents China “not only as powerful, but as just and moral” due to its contributions to the Allies’ ultimate victory.
While for much of the country’s history, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exaggerated its role in leading Chinese resistance to Japan and diminishing that of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, since the dawn of the 21st century the Party has come to portray the war as a unifying experience in which China was both victorious and morally righteous. As such, China’s official discourse on the Second World War tells us much about how it conceives of its role and place in the international community.
This effort in state-led historical remembering was evident in the publication of an op-ed by Xi in Rossiyskaya Gazeta prior to his state visit. Xi emphasised the indomitable connection between China and Russia forged in resistance to “fascism” and China’s commitment to what it sees as the fundamental principles of international order arising from the vanquishing of Germany and Japan.
In the former instance, the “Soviet Volunteer Group”, a component of Soviet air force assistance to China between 1937 and 1941, is explicitly praised by Xi for coming to “Nanjing, Wuhan and Chongqing to fight alongside the Chinese people” against Japan. This was however in the service of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and not the CCP. The CCP’s role in assisting the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany is also noted by Xi with reference to the role of Yan Baohang, a one-time confidant of Chiang but also a clandestine agent of the CCP, in providing the Soviet Union with “primary-source intelligence” on Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.
Xi’s history lesson concerns the Party-state’s unfinished business in constructing a new nationalist narrative that appropriates the record of its once mortal enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, in the service of de-centring the role of the United States.
This purposeful blurring of the lines between the conflictual relationship between the Kuomintang and the CCP, and their roles in leading resistance to Japan and helping the Soviet Union, serves two purposes. First, it allows Xi to assert that there is an “eternal wellspring nourishing our everlasting friendship” forged in “blood and sacrifice”, which nourishes the current Sino-Russian alignment. Second, it enables the Party-state to portray the “War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression” as a shared struggle “across class lines” that defines the Chinese nation as “both strong and victorious, as well as morally righteous”.
With respect to the latter, Xi underlined that there should be a “correct historical perspective on World War II” that recognises that Russia and China were the “principal theatres of that war in Asia and Europe” and served as “the mainstay of resistance against Japanese militarism and German Nazism, making pivotal contributions to the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War”.
In Beijing’s narrative, the war did not begin with either the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 or the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 but with Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. China fought not with American but with Soviet assistance, while Western allies offered assurances about China's role in the post-war world that were not met.
As such, Russia and China’s post-war positions as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council must be recognised as legitimate based on their contributions to defeating Germany and Japan. In turn, this carries for both China’s conception of international order and its interests.
First, Xi maintains, the “UN-centred international system” provides the basis for the “basic norms of international relations” upon which to “steadily promote an equal and orderly multipolar world and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalisation”. This of course positions China in contradistinction to what it sees as the unilateralism and protectionism of the United States under the Trump administration.
Second, acceptance of the post-Second World War settlement means the acceptance of China’s claims to Taiwan. “Taiwan's restoration to China”, Xi asserts, “is a victorious outcome of World War II and an integral part of the post-war international order”, embodied in a “series of instruments with legal effect under international law, including the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation”.
The irony is that the China which made these contributions to the Second World War and had Taiwan “restored” to it was a China led by the Kuomintang and not the CCP.
Xi’s history lesson was thus not primarily about Sino-Russian relations. Rather, it concerns the Party-state’s unfinished business in constructing a new nationalist narrative that appropriates the record of its once mortal enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, in the service of de-centring the role of the United States in both the waging of the Second World War and the settlement that followed.
