The great parade

And so ends the great parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Anti-Fascist Victory.

The whole of Beijing, the capital city of the world's second largest economy, a modern metropolis of 15 million souls, has been basically put on standby for the sake of this parade. The whole city center has been pretty much in a state of lock down for the last few days, with important avenues and subway stations closed to the public, and many establishments also forced to close. Beijing's usually busy streets were practically empty of cars this morning.

To a great extent, not only Beijing but the whole country has been gearing up for the occasion for days. The entire nation got a special holiday today so they could watch the parade. Chinese TV has been showing almost nothing but programs about the parade and documentaries and old films on the "War of Anti-Japanese Resistance" for the last few days, with most normal programming suspended.

I watched the parade on TV in my flat (although I actually saw some of the fighter jets from my window). It was certainly a huge and impressive display, spectacularly well choreographed, but you would expect nothing less from the Chinese state. If there's one thing they are good at, it's putting on a show. All the same, the whole event left a bad taste in my mouth.

It's not that I have a problem with celebrating the victory against fascism in the Second World War, and in fact I hope it is never forgotten. That many Chinese contributed to this struggle with their lives is also undeniable. What I do have a problem with, on the other hand, is the way that it is officially commemorated in China. In contemporary government discourse, there is very little focus on fascism as an ideology, and what it actually means. In fact, usually the word fascism is barely used, and the enemy is simply referred to as Japan or "the Japanese devils". And there is little attempt to present the Chinese fight against Japan as part of a wider global struggle against injustice and inhumanity.

Instead, the lesson which the Chinese people are supposed to draw from this chapter of their history is narrowly nationalistic: "we, the Chinese people, struggled against the Japanese, the last in a line of foreign invaders. Now we must make China strong, so nobody invades us again". In modern Chinese discourse, the Japanese are often demonized as a people who have an eternal instinct to invade other countries, and who still remain militaristic and aggressive towards China. And this in spite of Japan's army never firing a shot in anger since 1945.

Let's also not forget how the struggle against Japan is now officially presented as being led by the Maoists, when actually the Nationalist party bore the brunt of the fighting. And of course, the downplaying of the fact that it was mainly the United States who beat Japan in the Pacific, enabling China's liberation (this can be compared to all those European countries where the role of the local resistance in defeating the Nazis is exaggerated, while that of the US/Britain is downplayed).

The message today's parade was supposed to send to the ordinary Chinese is "look how powerful our military is; nowadays no country would dare to mess with us". Not really much of a celebration of world peace and the values of anti-fascism, then. It certainly had the desired effect on some people: my wechat feed is full of nationalistic posts from Chinese acquaintances, expressing their pride at seeing their country displaying all those tanks, jet fighters and ballistic missiles. Having said that, a Chinese journalist friend wrote the following post in her wechat: "they are using the fascists' methods to celebrate the anti-fascist victory".
 

military helicopters form the number "70" in the skies of Beijing

78th anniversary of Japan's invasion of China

Chinese soldiers fighting the Japanese in the battle of Taierzhuang, 1938

Yesterday was the 78th anniversary of the so-called Marco Polo Bridge Incident, known as the 七七事变 (Seventh of July Incident) in Chinese. This historical event, which occurred in 1937, is used to mark the official beginning of Japan's invasion of China (although Manchuria had already been occupied some years previously). It consisted of Japanese troops attacking Chinese ones near an ancient bridge on the outskirts of Beijing. The bridge in question was highly praised by Marco Polo, leading it to be called the "Marco Polo Bridge" in English (although it was rebuilt in 1698, long after the Venetian traveler lived).

As they do every year, the Chinese government held a ceremony near the bridge in question to commemorate the anniversary. This year however, it was only China's fifth ranking highest leader who took part, whereas last year president Xi Jinping himself participated and made a speech. Some have seen this as a sign that relations with Japan may be improving ever so slightly.

Meanwhile, these two news items from the last few days give a good idea of how hatred of Japan has become normalized in China to the point where people don't even notice it, and of how children are being indoctrinated into it.

In Shandong, a theme park for kids organized an activity in which dozens of children had to shoot with water guns at park attendants dressed as Japanese soldiers from World War II. The activity was called "the entire people attack the gui zi". "Gui zi" (devils or ghosts) is a derogatory term for the Japanese which was obviously used quite unthinkingly.

Meanwhile another theme park in Taiyuan organized a "defend the Diaoyu islands game", in which children navigated floating warship models adorned with Chinese flags via remote controls, while voices declaring China's sovereignty could be heard blaring from speakers. The Diaoyu islands are of course those little rocks in the sea which Japan currently controls, but which China claims were always part of its territory.

It's hardly surprising that amongst the Chinese hostility towards Japan actually seems to increase the further removed they are by age from Japan's actual invasion of their country. The truth is that in the vast majority of cases this attitude is not linked to actual family or personal memories of Japanese atrocities, but to an educational system which teaches children to be blindly patriotic and then turns hatred of Japan into a prime symbol of that patriotism, and a media which compounds this message.

Of course, it is true that Japan's occupation of China was pretty atrocious. Chin Ning Chu, the bestselling business-management author who was brought up in Taiwan and lived in America, recalls in one of her books how her mother, who came from North-East China, lived in a village which was occupied by the Japanese as a child. The village had a police station in it, and there was often a trail of blood leading to and from the station. Her mother had to walk over it when going to school. She also recounts how people were afraid of traveling, since Japanese soldiers would often check the papers of any Chinese waiting on the platforms at the local train station, and at the slightest sign of an irregularity they might well torture them on the spot.

It is a pity that the propagandistic use which is being made of this history in modern China, and the silly attitudes this propaganda engenders, make it very hard to focus on how terrible the Second World War actually was for the Chinese people.