Be wary of Chinese ambassador’s promises of friendship
China is embarking on the most rapid military buildup since World War II to underpin an expansionary territorial and geopolitical agenda. The question is whether or what it has learnt from history.
Yesterday, China’s Ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian penned an op-ed to coincide with China’s largest-ever military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
A grand show of China’s conventional and nuclear military power, the occasion is also being used to propagate the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred narrative that it was at the vanguard in the “War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression” and a leader in the “World Anti-Fascist War”. Never mind that it was the forces of the Chinese Nationalist government, led by Chiang Kai-shek – not the Chinese Communists pursuing a guerrilla warfare approach – that suffered the bulk of the casualties in major battles with the Japanese.
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Lavina Lee is director of the Foreign Policy and Defence Program at the United States Studies Centre.
