Guns and guests
Re: "Beijing 'centre' of new world order", (World, Sept 5). The display of China's latest weapons and what its mammoth military parade means on the world stage could be misconstrued as a cruel celebration of the cast of invited autocrats and despots (sans the belligerent and offended Trump).
Let us be reminded that this is, first and foremost, a parade of remembrance on the 80th year of Japan's surrender in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
One wonders whether any attendance by world leaders at the United States Army's grand military parade on the occasion of its 250th birthday on June 14, in the guise of sharing the world stage with the big-noting Donald Trump's 79th birthday, would have incited the same public outrage as their visit to the 80th anniversary marches commemorating China's victory against Japan in World War II.
Xi is not celebrating a personal milestone or the day of his birth (like Trump in June), but the defeat of an aggressive Japan that killed many of China's citizens. Lest we forget, Xi's less-than-desirable heads of state guest list of Putin, Kim Jong-un, Modi and their ilk, representing Russia, (North) Korea and India, these countries too suffered greatly under fascism in World War II.
It required bristling military might and two atomic bomb deployments to defuse the conquest attempts by the Nazis and Hirohito's Japan in 1945. To put another interpretation on this, that Trump's threat to take over Canada and Greenland deserves a deterrent of the very visible presence of worthwhile opposition on show at Chang'an Avenue, Beijing. There are many ways to spin support or opposition to the machinations of those in power, and it's never as clear as daylight.
