China in the Shadows

[Chris Coles]

Re: Warning: Hyperbolic Chamber Dead Ahead

Enough already - the Escobar Antidote lies straight ahead, where people disappear by the minute everywhere:


As Shanghai Stock Market Tanks, China Makes Mass Arrests: ‘You Could Disappear at any Time’

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 3, 2015

The Shanghai stock exchange, which has been creating global stock market convulsions while trimming 39 percent off its value since June, will be closed for the next two days. The Chinese holiday started on Thursday in Beijing with a big parade and show of military might to commemorate the 70thanniversary of V-Day and the defeat of Japan in World War II.

The massive military pageantry and display of weaponry was widely seen as a move by President Xi Jinping to reassert his authoritarian rule in the wake of a sputtering domestic economy, $5 trillion in value shaved off the stock market in a matter of months, and the need to devalue the country’s currency on August 11 in a bid to boost exports.

Tragically, what has received far less attention than melting China stocks is the mass arrests of dissidents, human rights activists, attorneys and religious leaders. More recently, the government has begun to “detain” journalists and finance executives in an apparent attempt to scapegoat them for the stock market’s selloff.

The mass arrests began in July, the same time the China stock market started to crater in earnest. Last evening, the Financial Times had this to say about the disappearance of Li Yifei, a prominent hedge fund chief at Man Group China.

“The whereabouts of Ms Li remained unclear on Wednesday. Her husband, Wang Chaoyong, told the Financial Times that her meetings with financial market authorities in Beijing had concluded, and ‘she will take a break for a while.’ ”

Bloomberg Business had previously reported that Li Yifei was being held by the police as part of a larger roundup of persons they wanted to interview regarding the stock market rout.

The reaction to these authoritarian sweeps has worsened the stock market situation in China. Volume on the Shanghai market, according to the Financial Times, has skidded from $200 billion on the heaviest days in June to just $66 billion this past Tuesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, a Wall Street Journal reporter was interviewed by phone from Beijing on the business channel, CNBC. He said “waves” of arrests were taking place. That interview followed an article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, which appeared with no byline (perhaps for the safety of the Beijing-based reporter) that shed more light on the arrests:

“Chinese police on the weekend began rounding up the usual suspects, which in this case are journalists, brokers and analysts who have been reporting stock-market news. Naturally, the culprits soon confessed their noncrimes on national television. A reporter for the financial publication Caijing was shown on China Central Television on Monday admitting that he had written an article with ‘great negative impact on the market.’ His offense was reporting that authorities might scale back official share-buying, which is what they soon did. On Sunday China’s Ministry of Public Security announced the arrest of nearly 200 people for spreading rumors about stocks and other incidents.”

Also on Tuesday, David Saperstein, the U.S. Ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, publicly demanded that China release attorney Zhang Kai and religious leaders who had been swept up by the government the very day before Saperstein had been scheduled to meet with them. In an interview with the Associated Press, Saperstein called the state actions “outrageous,” particularly since he had been invited to China to observe religious freedom in the country.

Christianity is growing rapidly in some regions of China and strong religious leaders or movements are seen as a threat to communist party rule. Religious leaders had been protesting the state’s removal of crosses from the tops of churches.

On July 22, the New York Times reported that over 200 human rights lawyers and their associates had been detained. Using the same humiliating tactic as used recently against the financial journalist, The Times reports that some of the “lawyers have been paraded on television making humiliating confessions or portrayed as rabble-rousing thugs.” One of the lawyers who was later released, Zhang Lei, told The Times: “This feels like the biggest attack we’ve ever experienced. It looks like they’re acting by the law, but hardly any of the lawyers who disappeared have been allowed to see their own lawyers. Over 200 brought in for questioning and warnings — I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, is also demanding the release of female prisoners in China, including Wang Yu, who was arrested with her husband in July.

According to a detailed interview that Wang Yu gave the Guardian prior to her detention and disappearance on July 9, people are being arrested, grabbed off the street, sent to mental hospitals or detention centers. She said: ‘You could disappear at any time.’

As a documentary made by the Guardian shows, one of Wang Yu’s cases involved the alleged rape of six underage girls by the headmaster of their school. Wang Yu took the case and organized a protest, handing out literature on child protection laws to pedestrians and people passing by in automobiles.

Parents of the young girls who had originally consented to their legal representation soon withdrew the consent, saying they were being monitored by the government and had been told not to speak to journalists or lawyers. Wang Yu said that cases like this are happening every minute and everywhere in China.

Yesterday, the Mail & Guardian reported that Wang Yu’s whereabouts remain a mystery.

On August 18, Reuters reported that Chinese government officials “had arrested about 15,000 people for crimes that ‘jeopardized Internet security,’ as the government moves to tighten controls on the Internet.”

Against this horrific backdrop, China’s authoritarian President Xi Jinping is slated to visit the United States late this month for a meeting with President Obama and state dinner at the White House. According to the Washington Post’s David Nakamura, a bipartisan group of 10 senators sent President Obama a letter in August calling on him to raise the issue of human rights abuses when Xi visits. The Post published the following excerpt from the letter:

“We expect that China’s recent actions in the East and South China Seas, economic and trade issues, climate change, as well as the recent cyber-attacks, will figure prominently in your discussions. While these issues deserve a full and robust exchange of views, so too do human rights. Under President Xi, there has been an extraordinary assault on rule of law and civil society in China.”

Given the delicacy with which President Obama is likely to broach this subject with Xi, a mass demonstration outside of the White House by human rights activists and lawyers in this country during the White House visit might send a more powerful message. Last year, U.S. consumers and businesses purchased $466.8 billion in goods from China. Should these human rights abuses continue, China should be made aware that consumers in the U.S. know how to check labels for country of origin.

We have an Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom? Who knew . . . .

Thank you don; sets the debate into stone.

But that in turn opens another thought; is this a demonstration of open panic? If the nation was stable, there would be no need for any of this. To my mind, imprisoning dissent shows a lack of confidence in being able to control through force; where in their panic, they reinforce their own misunderstanding of the reasons for the dissent.

A peaceful nation must first and foremost; be at peace with itself; accepting dissent as honest debate about how to rule; in peace; peacefully. When a nation's leadership turns against its own; it is doomed.

History shows that you cannot rule a nation by applying force to achieve peace. Peace always stems from the rule of law; which law the people themselves have created; as their protection from government force. As things stand, I have now no option but to see China as a failed state; moreover, with no one able to point to an honest business with which to trade.

[GRG55]

Re: Warning: Hyperbolic Chamber Dead Ahead

Thank you don; sets the debate into stone.

But that in turn opens another thought; is this a demonstration of open panic? If the nation was stable, there would be no need for any of this. To my mind, imprisoning dissent shows a lack of confidence in being able to control through force; where in their panic, they reinforce their own misunderstanding of the reasons for the dissent.

A peaceful nation must first and foremost; be at peace with itself; accepting dissent as honest debate about how to rule; in peace; peacefully. When a nation's leadership turns against its own; it is doomed.

History shows that you cannot rule a nation by applying force to achieve peace. Peace always stems from the rule of law; which law the people themselves have created; as their protection from government force. As things stand, I have now no option but to see China as a failed state; moreover, with no one able to point to an honest business with which to trade.

I don't believe that China's leadership would agree. This is a government that will shoot hundreds of its own citizens if it feels the need to.

There are few governments that are not frightened by the sight of thousands of people on the street, protesting.




The bodies of dead civilians lie among mangled bicycles near Beijing's Tiananmen Square in this June 4, 1989 file photo.
Officially, 241 people died.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Warning: Hyperbolic Chamber Dead Ahead

...If the nation was stable, there would be no need for any of this. To my mind, imprisoning dissent shows a lack of confidence in being able to control through force...

Chris your mind works like that of a decent human being. Not like a tyrant.

There is a simple dark utility to showing the masses an occasional glimpse of ruthless brutality.
It maintains control and reduces outbreaks of disobedience that must be violently put down.

The say the pirate captain Blackbeard, Edward Teach, would once in a while gather the crew on deck, pick out a new recruit, shoot him in the head, then dismiss the crew without another word spoken.
Point made, point taken.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: China in the Shadows

Then the question remains; are there ANY honest businesses in China? For example, I have a possible book that will need to be produced in that region for the enjoyment of the people of the region; are there any honest publishers in China, I must add; NOT owned by existing Western interests?

You have to do your initial homework in vetting out Chinese businesses to work with. After that, you do have to micromanage things a bit more to ensure that no funny stuff happens.

In your case, it's the publishing of a book. Depending on how many copies it's going to sell and the selling price, the only real problem I see is that of copyright violation from unauthorized publishers. If your book sells for a price typical Chinese books sell for and isn't something wildly popular, there's not going to be too great an incentive to pirate it so you should be OK.

Also, with book printing, you don't have to worry about quality as much as you do with manufactured goods or foodstuffs (or, eep, medicines.) So long as the print is legible, I'd be amazed if the general audience in China is going to care about or notice the quality of the printing and binding (acid free paper, paper opacity, Smythe binding, etc.)

[don]

Re: China in the Shadows

I'd be amazed if the general audience in China is going to care about or notice the quality of the printing and binding (acid free paper, paper opacity, Smythe binding, etc.)

Sounds as bad as music downloads in America that cutout the artists. Sound quality - digital vs vinyl - never enters the theft.

[GRG55]

Re: China in the Shadows

You have to do your initial homework in vetting out Chinese businesses to work with. After that, you do have to micromanage things a bit more to ensure that no funny stuff happens...

Now there's an understatement.

Just one small example - I know a Canadian oil drilling rig manufacturer that had the structures for 6 rigs built in China to their own engineering design and specifications. For Canadian winters low temp steel is necessary. They had their own supervision overseeing every aspect of the fabrication and documentation. When they got them back to Canada they discovered the Chinese steel supplier to their Chinese contractor had faked the mill certs. 6 rigs junked, no recourse (who is going to waste their time in the Chinese court system?).

[Milton Kuo]

Re: China in the Shadows

Now there's an understatement.

I was trying to be diplomatic and speak in a more British manner. If I personally had to oversee some sort of outsourced manufacturing effort in China, here's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of explaining what I would do:

[touchring]

Re: China in the Shadows

You have to do your initial homework in vetting out Chinese businesses to work with. After that, you do have to micromanage things a bit more to ensure that no funny stuff happens.

I do quite a bit of sourcing from China. Firstly, work only with reputable companies. Secondly, always select your suppliers based on merit and the quality of the components used, do not even look at pricing at the beginning. Thirdly, always do a pilot project to test the product or equipment to make sure it meets your requirement and be prepared to write off that project if it fails.

[Chris Coles]

Re: China in the Shadows

You have to do your initial homework in vetting out Chinese businesses to work with. After that, you do have to micromanage things a bit more to ensure that no funny stuff happens.

In your case, it's the publishing of a book. Depending on how many copies it's going to sell and the selling price, the only real problem I see is that of copyright violation from unauthorized publishers. If your book sells for a price typical Chinese books sell for and isn't something wildly popular, there's not going to be too great an incentive to pirate it so you should be OK.

Also, with book printing, you don't have to worry about quality as much as you do with manufactured goods or foodstuffs (or, eep, medicines.) So long as the print is legible, I'd be amazed if the general audience in China is going to care about or notice the quality of the printing and binding (acid free paper, paper opacity, Smythe binding, etc.)

It has always been my understanding that all supposedly private business in China is owned in part by the PLA; which to my mind, (so kindly emphasised by TBO above), is THE core reason for the ongoing blanket of corruption, seemingly throughout China. That the PLA is just another example of a "Mafia" using good old fashioned feudal principles to ensure their control over every aspect of their economy.

Again, that mafia law is the direct opposite of law, by and for the people; instead, entirely formed to protect the mafia.

When I used the term; "Failed State", I meant it in terms of the failure of that mafia system; NOT in terms of the nation as a whole. China is a good example of a successful nation; under the heel of a failed state.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: China in the Shadows

It has always been my understanding that all supposedly private business in China is owned in part by the PLA; which to my mind, (so kindly emphasised by TBO above), is THE core reason for the ongoing blanket of corruption, seemingly throughout China. That the PLA is just another example of a "Mafia" using good old fashioned feudal principles to ensure their control over every aspect of their economy.

Again, that mafia law is the direct opposite of law, by and for the people; instead, entirely formed to protect the mafia.

I've had street vendors try to hornswaggle me and I seriously doubt those street vendors's businesses are partially owned by the government. No, the problem in China is manyfold: a desire to get rich quick, made more urgent than usual by decades of grinding poverty thanks to an idiotic experiment in Communism and something screwy with character of Chinese people where they seem to have no problem doing the most outrageously dishonest things.

Not all Chinese are like that, of course, but those that are certainly make their presence obvious if that's something they don't intend.

When I used the term; "Failed State", I meant it in terms of the failure of that mafia system; NOT in terms of the nation as a whole. China is a good example of a successful nation; under the heel of a failed state.

I would say the recent decades since China has opened up its market a bit has moved China out of the failed state category. It took the scare of the Tiananmen incident for the government to be a little less idiotic and recognize what a joke the country was. A successful nation? I'm not sure I agree. However, over the years, I've arrived at the opinion that the Chinese are a very, very successful tribe.

I don't have too deep an understanding of other ancient countries and empires but to the best of my knowledge, China is the only large civilization that is quite similar (geographically, structurally, and ethnically) to how it was thousands of years ago. Hundreds of years of rule by the Mongols did not change the intrinsic nature and culture of the people, hundreds of years of rule by the Manchus did not change the nature and culture of the people (in fact, the Manchu culture is on official government life support ), and I remember a joke many years ago where it was said that the Japanese are glad for having lost World War II because had they won, they would have been absorbed by the Chinese. I guess you could say the Chinese are kind of like the Borg although not as fast-acting.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: China in the Shadows

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Evan Osnos
It won the Booker prize, finalist for Pulitizer, a page turner.

[touchring]

Re: China in the Shadows

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/07/black...-property.html

BlackRock's Saunders sees new opportunity in China real estate

I don't share the optimism over commercial Chinese real estate, but I'm exploring Chinese ecommerce stocks.

[don]

China's 70th Anniversary Parade

The China Challenge: The weapons the PLA didn’t show

BY BILL GERTZ on SEPTEMBER 8, 2015 i

The Chinese military parade last week that was part of the anti-Japan propaganda campaign coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, showed off a number of Beijing’s strategic and conventional weapons, including several never seen or officially acknowledged before.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency closely monitored the parade looking for clues to the secretive Chinese military buildup and the new high-technology arms it is producing.

A Pentagon official said the carefully choreographed military parade through Beijing’s Tiananmen was notable for the weapons that were not shown. They include China’s growing cadre of cyber warfare forces; its ground launched anti-satellite missiles and its new ultra-high-speed maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle, known as the DF-ZF.

All three programs remain tightly guarded secrets for the Chinese government and details about them are unlikely to be made public any time soon.

Cyber warfare

For its cyber warfare capability, the vast majority of China’s cyber espionage and cyber reconnaissance activities are secret and unacknowledged activities carried out by the PLA’s Technical Department 3PLA, formally the 3rd Department of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department, a kind of Chinese version of the US National Security Agency.

A recent NSA briefing slide disclosed by NBC News in July identified Chinese cyber exploitation and attack units as under the Central Military Commission, and the military’s General Staff Department. They include 28 separate 3PLA hacking units, the military intelligence service known as 2PLA and another military group called 4PLA that responsible for electronic countermeasures and radar. The civilian Ministry of State Security also carries out cyber attacks with an estimate 28 units.

The 3PLA is in charge of the Shanghai-based Unit 61398 that was targeted by the Justice Department’s 2014 indictment of five PLA hackers charged with cyber attacks on US companies.

“Groups operating from PRC territory are believed to be waging a coordinated cyber espionage campaign targeting US government, industrial, and think tank computer networks,” Mark Stokes, a former Pentagon official, stated in a report on PLA hacking.

Equally significant in terms of strategic military capabilities that were not showcased last week are China’s two anti-satellite missiles, known within the Pentagon as the low-earth orbit DN-1 and the high-orbit DN-2.

How significant a threat is the satellite killer? A few as a dozen anti-satellite missile attacks against critical space satellites would cripple the US military’s ability to conduct joint operations.

“We are quickly approaching the point where every satellite in every orbit can be threatened,” Air Force Lt. Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space told the US Congress in March.

Hypersonic nuke weapon

DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle

China’s new DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle is a nuclear strike weapon, according to the Pentagon. China has conducted five tests of the DF-ZF since last year, an indication it is a high-priority weapons system. China’s Defense Ministry has confirmed tests of the weapon, saying only it is an experimental system.

The glide vehicle, launched atop a missile, travels along the edge of space at Mach 10, or nearly 8,000 miles an hour. Yet the vehicle is agile enough to overcome the effects of high-speed travel to maneuver – both to avoid missile defenses and for zeroing in on targets.
The DF-ZF can also be armed with a conventional warhead, making it China’s third missile outfitted with precision guidance that is accurate enough to attack ships at sea.

Two other missiles with anti-ship capabilities were showcased at the Beijing parade, including the DF-26, a new intermediate-range ballistic missile only seen earlier in official pictures posted on Chinese military blogs. It was described by the xenophobic Communist Party newspaper Global Times as the “Guam killer” capable of hitting US forces on the strategic western Pacific island.

A Chinese television announcer during the parade described the DF-26 as a dual-capable nuclear and conventional missile that is a “new weapon” for strategic deterrence, as well as capable of long-range attacks on ground targets and large and medium-size ships.

Anti-ship ballistic missile

DT-21D missile diagram

The second significant weapon in the PLA program was the medium-range, aircraft-carrier killing DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile. The missile purportedly is capable of the difficult task of flying on a ballistic trajectory through space and returning into the atmosphere at very high speeds but with a sophisticated guidance system that allows it to maneuver precisely toward hitting a moving ship at sea.

Navy aircraft carrier and other warship defenses against DF-21 and DF-26 strikes are uncertain based on the high speeds of the missiles and their maneuvering warheads.

China Central Television described the DF-21D as “an important weapon in China’s asymmetric warfare.”

The military display did not reveal the other significant weapons that make up Chinese asymmetric warfare doctrine also known as “Assassin’s Mace” weaponry. The Chinese term invokes sudden, devastating weapons designed to allow a less capable military to defeat a stronger one.
Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping in a speech at the military parade said the PLA would never seek hegemony or expansion however powerful it becomes.

But until China fully reveals its most significant military capabilities and provides an honest explanation of its military goals and strategy, the China military threat will continue to grow.



Bill Gertz is a journalist and author who has spent decades covering defense and national security affairs. He is the author of six national security books. Contact him on Twitter at @BillGertz


‘China’ rising: The Parade

BY PETER LEE on SEPTEMBER 8, 2015 in ASIA TIMES NEWS & FEATURES, CHINA

Think of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Sept. 3 military parade, officially “Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War,” as a tabula rasa, a blank screen upon which observers can project their PRC-related hopes, fears, anxieties, and fantasies. And, for Xi Jinping, to illustrate his “China Dream.”

In my opinion, a central purpose of the parade was to elevate and celebrate Xi Jinping as a key figure in 21st century China. The parade recapitulated Deng Xiaoping’s parade on the 35thanniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1984. Xi, like Deng, rode down Chang An Avenue by himself with the gaze of the world upon him, so on and so forth. The CCP, by the way, had the same fear of snipers back then. I was there in ‘84, ventured out on a balcony for a better look, and was promptly and firmly instructed to get back inside.

As to what doctrine Xi was promoting, the parade was not an “anti-Japan” parade. Actually, it was an “anti-United States” parade.

The ostensible reason for the display of the PRC’s military might was that the United States has turned its back on the Potsdam dispensation, abandoned the “honest broker” “Pacific peacekeeper” role it claimed after World War II, and has instead become an overtly destabilizing force in the region, encouraging Japan to expand its military role, egging on the Philippines & Vietnam, etc. The PRC, therefore, not only has to look out for itself; it’s got to look out for the whole East Asian region to keep US adventurism in check.

PRC perceptions of the US posture were confirmed by Washington’s disparagement of the commemoration. The US recapitulated its boycott of Putin’s V70 parade and sent no national leader to Beijing, and merely dispatched Ambassador Baucus. Japan and the Philippines sent nobody. Most other countries hedged their bets. India, for instance, only sent VK Sing, Minister of State for External Affairs. The US media framing that the parade was only attended by lickspittles, jerks, losers, Putin, and Vanuatu was perhaps not appreciated by the President of Vietnam, Truong Tan Sang, or the President of the Republic of Korea, Park Geun-hye, or for that matter UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon.

The United States flirted with the same overreach that tainted its opposition to the AIIB by leaning on South Korea’s President Park not to attend. Park attended, and so did Ban Ki-moon, despite criticism from Japan. Ban’s presence was a reminder that the stated purpose of the parade was to uphold the post-World War II order that created the UN and turned over the job of ordering the world UNSC superpower club, and also a hint that US geostrategic boffins infatuated with Abe and roping Japan into the US security regime in Asia are ignoring ROK resentment at Japan for its brutal decades-long colonial occupation (and current zero-sum economic competition) at their peril.

All in all, the US response probably strengthened the hardliners around Xi by reconfirming US hostility to “rising China.”

Undoubtedly, Xi is chagrined at his relative lack of success in moving the historiographical needle in favor of Chinese contributions during the Second World War, at least in the West.

Much unfavorable attention was paid to the tsunami, excuse me, haixiao of hyperbolic Japan-devil-bashing, Japan-murdering Chinese superhero-fluffing, ahistorical movie, TV, and print campaign to exalt the Chinese role and CCP leadership in the anti-Japanese struggle, perhaps reaching its nadir with a movie poster apparently placing Mao Zedong (instead of Chiang Kai-shek) at the 1944 Cairo Conference. Of course, whose nadir is perhaps open to question. The Guardian mocked the PRC for putting Mao in the poster for the movie; but from what I can see of the trailer, Chiang is accurately shown at the conference, while Mao is depicted uttering some noble anti-fascist verbiage from inside China.

The West is obviously extremely protective of its role in winning “World War II,” and laying claim to leadership/lawgiver status in the postwar order. Now that the PRC asserts that the West is abdicating that role in order to cozy up to Japan and contain the PRC as a peer competitor, the West is getting testy about PRC pretensions to stepping up to sustain and guarantee the post-war order in Asia in its stead.

History would not seem to be on Xi’s side. China, let alone the CCP, cannot claim a great deal of martial glory in the defeat of Imperial Japan, as this detailed rundown by Han Linchao of who did what in WWII illustrates. It was pretty much an American show, and a bloody one at that.

However, the CCP has adroitly “sliced the World War II salami,” to coin a phrase, by splitting the Asian conflict into two separate chunks. There’s the “Pacific” chunk, in which the United States overwhelmed Japanese military forces in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945; and there’s the ”China” chunk, in which Japan started to fight its way into China in 1931 via Manchuria and got caught in a quagmire that it departed only with the utter collapse of its military capabilities in 1945, and after inflicting gigantic human suffering on China.

So the CCP calls Sept. 3 “Commemoration of The 70th Anniversary of The Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (a.k.a. China chunk) andThe World Anti-Fascist War (Pacific chunk).”

And it may gravel Western sensibilities, especially with its implication that the US was the decisive force in only one of the four global theaters, but this conceptual split captures what happened in Asia better than “World War II,” which is largely a US/UK construct.

Indeed, Japan uses a similar formulation to the PRC: the “China War” and the “Pacific War.” Probably the reason why Abe feels its proper to apologize to the US and backhand South Korea and the PRC is that Japan was unambiguously defeated by the US in the Pacific War, while the collapse on the Asian mainland had little to do with superior Korean and Chinese arms and valor, and a lot do to with catastrophic, serial defeats in the Pacific, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the opportunistic Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the Kuriles in the last moments of the war.

In his brief remarks kicking off the parade, Xi Jinping presented the situation reasonably accurately, especially if one defines “winning” as the first time since the Opium War a Chinese representative got to sit down on the victor’s side of the table and stick it to an imperial freebooter:
In defiance of aggression, the unyielding Chinese people fought gallantly and finally won total victory against the Japanese militarist aggressors, thus preserving China’s 5,000-year-old civilization and upholding the cause of peace of mankind. This remarkable feat made by the Chinese nation was rare in the history of war.

The victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression is the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times. This great triumph crushed the plot of the Japanese militarists to colonize and enslave China and put an end to China’s national humiliation of suffering successive defeats at the hands of foreign aggressors in modern times. This great triumph re-established China as a major country in the world and won the Chinese people respect of all peace-loving people around the world. This great triumph opened up bright prospects for the great renewal of the Chinese nation and set our ancient country on a new journey after gaining rebirth.

During the war, with huge national sacrifice, the Chinese people held ground in the main theater in the East of the World Anti-Fascist War, thus making major contribution to its victory. In their war against Japanese aggression, the Chinese people received extensive support from the international community. The Chinese people will always remember what the people of other countries did for the victory of their War of Resistance.

The PRC posture is also something of a gift to the Kuomintang (albeit something of a poisoned chalice that the politically-vulnerable KMT on Taiwan cannot quite bring itself to accept at this time). The standard narrative of Chinese involvement in the continental war effort was that Chiang Kai-shek, by and large, was a maladroit and unenthusiastic ally, holding back from the anti-Japanese struggle and instead hoarding his forces and US weaponry in anticipation of a restart of the civil war, which he lost in a rather humiliating fashion.

Instead, the current CCP revisionism accommodates the KMT as flawed, indeed, doomed Chinese partners in the anti-Japanese effort. And, with the veterans, memories, and animosities of the Chinese civil war dying out, the CCP is determinedly and not entire inaccurately packaging the anti-Japanese struggle as a shared heritage of all the Chinese people.

So I think the “Xi Jinping is trying to pretend Commies won WWII” mockery is somewhat misplaced.

Instead, Xi was advancing a new formula for the PRC’s relationship with its people, its neighbors, and the Chinese diaspora: it was moving beyond the CCP as embodiment of the Chinese peasants and proletariat (Mao) and the Chinese nation (Deng) to claim a role for the party as the representative and shield of the Chinese people in the region and around the world, and a guarantor of East Asian stability.

The parade was meant to demonstrate that the PRC has a military heft commensurate with its ambitions … and that Xi Jinping is an effective steward of this mission.

And it did a pretty good job.
Peter Lee runs the China Matters blog. He writes on the intersection of US policy with Asian and world affairs.

[llanlad2]

Re: China's 70th Anniversary Parade

"The China Challenge: The weapons the PLA didn’t show"

Isn't that the confidence trick the Pentagon and Defence Ministry have been playing ever since 1945?

Defence Analysts suggest ............................(insert bad guy of the day here) are developing a deadly new secret weapon that we don't know about called....................(insert scary name here, previous ones include isomer nuke, EM weapon, plasma weapon, directed energy weapon, super laser). Invariably they are orders of magnitude more powerful than nuclear weapons.

Now hand over your protection money.

[don]

Re: China's 70th Anniversary Parade

"The China Challenge: The weapons the PLA didn’t show"

Isn't that the confidence trick the Pentagon and Defence Ministry have been playing ever since 1945?

Defence Analysts suggest ............................(insert bad guy of the day here) are developing a deadly new secret weapon that we don't know about called....................(insert scary name here, previous ones include isomer nuke, EM weapon, plasma weapon, directed energy weapon, super laser). Invariably they are orders of magnitude more powerful than nuclear weapons.

Now hand over your protection money.

Of course this is a valentine to the MIC, though it could have some validity as well.