OPINION
Xi and Putin: World War II History as Geopolitical Power
The leaders of China and Russia have come together in a political alliance of remembrance. History has become another method for the two powers to challenge Western states and legitimize aggressive ambitions today.
On September 3, China marked the 80th anniversary of its victory over Imperial Japan with a record-breaking military parade on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Holding a military parade on this date is a relatively new idea from the Xi Jinping government, as the first took place in 2015. Among the invited heads of state on the honorary stand this year were Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
Putin attended as a return visitor after Xi attended the Russian Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9 this year. For Putin, the two visits are a foreign policy highlight as these military parades demonstrate an evolving common memory policy between Russia and China, one which signals strength by pointing both backward and forward in time.
Under Putin, Russia has developed a state-run cult associated with the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany in World War II, one that is based on a conspiracy theory that Western states are rejecting the great contributions of the Soviet Red Army in World War II while unjustly highlighting their own efforts. Moreover, the West is allegedly covertly sponsoring neo-Nazi groups in the post-Soviet area as a strategy to undermine Russia. It is this narrative which has undergirded Putin’s claims about a ‘neo-Nazi Ukraine’ – and the same ideas lie behind the Kremlin’s anti-Western rhetoric and ideological militarism that have been promoted from the Putin regime, with a growing shrillness over the past few years, in parades, speeches and foreign policy declarations.
Now Xi Jinping is embracing similar ideology.
Statements in the run-up to the parades in Moscow and Beijing and subsequent press conferences show how Russia and China are increasingly building their so-called boundless partnership on common ground, including around the victory in World War II and an idea that the efforts of the Soviet Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, especially in the Pacific Theatre, have been rejected in Western states. In both Russia and China, history analyses have become heavily censored, with Xi now following Putin’s lead and crafting an argument that the state must ensure that the history of World War II is told “correctly” and not falsified by hostile states that wish China harm or to minimise its power.
This is not primarily about the past. Recent statements from Xi and Putin highlight how their countries now stand together in using the history of World War II in today’s geopolitical rivalry between the great powers; both Moscow and Beijing claim that the American effort in the Second World War was tangential, insignificant and, moreover, had colonialist goals. The two leaders emphasise that the Soviet support for China’s fight against Japan was crucial; and without the Red Army, China would not have been able to repel Japanese militarism and occupation. This unity of struggle was symbolically displayed on Red Square this past May by Chinese soldiers parading alongside Russians. At the press conference after the parade in Moscow, Putin spoke about how China and Russia are now standing together again, this time in a fight to preserve historical truth and counteract the so-called “Western rehabilitation of Nazism and militarism”. Xi also drew comparisons back to World War II, stating that China and Russia must learn from history and stand together against “all forms of hegemony” in world politics.
Although the Kremlin’s claim about neo-Nazism in Ukraine, and the link to the fight against Nazism during World War II may seem absurd, these are notions which have resonated on the local level in Russia, where many people have family stories of sacrifice and loss during the Great Patriotic War. In China, the memories of Japanese fascism and war crimes are still a trauma that arouses strong emotions.
The strength of the Sino-Russian partnership should not be overstated; the two states have far from converging interests in several policies, and China, as a rising power, dominates the relationship. At the same time, this newfound ideological alliance is disturbing. The history of war is a powerful tool for mobilising and creating enemy images in the present day. When Putin and Xi link American colonialism in Asia and unjust hegemony in world politics to unresolved war traumas and anti-Western currents, they create a potent mix.
The fact that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un also attended the military parade in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, along with more than twenty non-Western leaders, made the current geopolitical Sino-Russian rivalry with the West even more prominent. North Korea openly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine with weapons and soldiers, and has also subscribed to Putin’s cult around World War II and the “fight against Nazism.” Last week, a memorial to a Soviet intelligence agent was unveiled at the North Korean naval base in Wonsan. Similar monuments honouring Soviet war heroes have been established in the Chinese border region with Russia over the past few years, in cooperation between the Russian Foreign Service and the Chinese authorities.
Despite the official stance by Beijing that it is neutral in the Ukraine conflict, maintaining this facade while he poses with Putin and Kim during the military parade in Beijing is a contradiction at best. Xi’s visit to Moscow on Russia’s Victory Day in May further strengthened the bilateral relationship, with mutual assurances of partnership and a united front against Western dominance in the global arena. We have now seen the same thing play out in China again last week. For Putin, the strengthened alliance with Beijing and the memory policy community have a distinct strategic value: support from China in the form of oil and gas trade is crucial for Russia to be able to maintain the war in Ukraine. Xi’s embrace of Putin’s history narratives acts as further support that helps legitimize Russian aggression.
In following Chinese public opinion, one sees that the ‘memory alliance’ with Russia is also increasingly being translated into concrete political value for China. In the weeks before the Beijing parade, an alternative history, namely that Taiwan was, for all intents, handed over to the People’s Republic of China after Japan’s surrender in 1945 and therefore has no right to sovereignty today, began to appear in Chinese media with greater intensity. This despite the fact that the People’s Republic - which current historians in the country present as an unbroken continuation of previous Chinese governments - was not established until 1949. In the wake of the parade and the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that preceded it, the Xi government announced a new ‘Global Governance Initiative’ (GGI) as part of building a stronger alternative pole to the West. In parallel, history is becoming a new battlefield for Chinese influence.
Europe is now living with full-scale Russian warfare in Ukraine entering its fourth year. There is every reason for Europe and the international community to pay attention to the evolution of Putin and Xi’s ‘memory-political alliance’ in the future, and its real-world impact. In this instrumental use of history lies the threat of both mobilization around an anti-Western agenda and the legitimisation of military aggression against other states.
