Troops, tanks and missiles in Beijing
On parade in China: Putin, the PLA and purges
Military pomp follows the removal of top military commanders
Donald Trump’s military parade astounded Chinese viewers in June.
The sloppy marching, the corporate sponsorship, the paltry crowds: how could the world’s greatest military power put on such a tawdry display?
China’s parades are minutely choreographed extravaganzas designed to inspire awe and respect.
Expect no less when China holds its first in six years on September 3rd.
But China’s tattoo, like Mr Trump’s, will reflect the insecurities of its leadership.
Impressive though the display will be, it will mask turbulence in the high command.
Since the last parade in 2019, the world’s largest armed forces—about 2m strong—have grown much more muscle.
They have gained an array of new weapons from hypersonic missiles and stealth fighters to a much-expanded nuclear arsenal: its number of warheads has doubled.
At the same time, strategic rivalry with America has grown more intense.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will use this occasion to signal to America the perils it could face, should war break out between the two great powers, and to Taiwan that it would be wise to come to heel.
It comes 16 months before an important deadline that American officials believe Mr Xi has set: by 2027 the Chinese armed forces, known as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), must be ready to take Taiwan if ordered.
This will be the third military parade in Beijing since Mr Xi took power in 2012.
Officially, it will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war.
It marks the day in 1945 when Japan surrendered to Allied forces, ending a 14-year occupation of much of China that left some 20m Chinese people dead and laid the ground for the Communist Party’s victory over China’s Nationalist army four years later.
Mr Xi sees such victory parades as a way to legitimise Communist rule by playing up the party’s role in defeating Japan (despite the Nationalists having done most of the fighting).
At the same time Mr Xi wants to show that China is moving towards “national rejuvenation” with weaponry that is state-of-the-art and, crucially, home-made.
(In a brief conflict between India and Pakistan in May, modern Chinese fighters and missiles—deployed by Pakistan—were used in combat for the first time and performed well.)
The guest list is designed to flaunt China’s global diplomatic clout.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, will be there, displaying the strengthening of military ties between the two countries since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Western leaders and their closest allies will stay away, as most of them did in 2015 when China staged its first big parade marking the end of the world war.
But more than two dozen other leaders are supposed to attend, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Indonesia and Malaysia are expected to send heads of state or government for the first time, indicating how “swing states” in Asia are hedging their geopolitical bets even as America presses them to choose sides.
China’s goal is to show that such efforts will fail.
It hopes to sap Taiwan’s will to fight and embolden isolationists around Mr Trump.
Much of the weaponry on show is designed to target American naval forces in the western Pacific.
Rehearsals included what appeared to be four new supersonic or hypersonic anti-ship missiles.
“The advantages these weapons bring may be determinative” in a Taiwan conflict, says Brendan Mulvaney of the China Aerospace Studies Institute, an American air-force think-tank.
America, by contrast, has been underinvesting in comparable armaments, he says.
The rehearsals also featured tanks with uncrewed turrets and other systems to defend against anti-tank weapons, such as American-made Javelin missiles (of which Taiwan has bought many).
That shows how the PLA has learned from Ukraine’s mastery of asymmetric warfare, including the country’s highly effective use of Javelins against Russian forces.
But foreign analysts will also be looking at who is missing from the show.
While there is no immediate threat to Mr Xi’s leadership, recent purges suggest deep-rooted corruption or other indiscipline within the PLA.
More than 20 senior officers have disappeared or been dismissed since Mr Xi began a third term as party leader in 2022.
They include three of the seven members of the Central Military Commission, which controls the PLA and is chaired by Mr Xi.
The most recent example, He Weidong, last appeared in public in March.
If his downfall is confirmed, he would be the most senior uniformed officer to be deposed since 1967.
Creating confusion
Relatedly, there are signs that Mr Xi’s decade-old campaign to modernise the PLA is facing headwinds.
The purges started in the Rocket Force, which operates China’s conventional and nuclear missiles, but have since encompassed its equipment-development and political departments, as well as state-run defence manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the PLA is struggling to attract enough recruits with the technological skills to operate new equipment.
And its ground, air, sea and other forces still have difficulty working together in combined operations.
Adjusting to Mr Xi’s reforms has been a huge challenge for PLA personnel, says Eric Hundman, director of research at BluePath Labs, an American research company that studies the PLA.
“It leads to stalled career paths, the need for retraining, new procedures and tactics, and new bureaucracies to learn how to navigate,” he says.
The purges “make all of that uncertainty worse”.
In such a secretive political system, uncertainty is ever-present.
Mr Xi, who is 72, has lately been less visible.
He does not appear in public as much and the party commissions that he formed (and chairs) to bypass state bureaucracy meet less frequently.
That is probably a deliberate move to delegate responsibility to loyalists, rather than a reflection of diminishing power.
But Mr Xi may hope that flaunting his role as commander-in-chief will help to quash speculation.
He will follow the choreography of previous Chinese leaders on such occasions by delivering a speech from the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tiananmen Square and then reviewing the thousands of troops.
“Greetings, comrades!” he will say, assuming he follows usual protocol.
“Greetings, leader!” they will respond in resounding unison.
“Just having this exchange, although it’s very ceremonial and very symbolic, shows that the PLA owes allegiance to one person and one person only,” says James Char of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
The reminder is a timely one for Mr Xi’s military commanders after the purges.
It could be good for morale among the rank and file, too.
Ultimately, though, such theatrics say little about China’s readiness for war, given its lack of combat experience (the last war it fought was in 1979).
And in many ways, the spectacle will reflect some of China’s greatest weaknesses: the concentration of power in a single man and its stress on performance, sometimes to the neglect of substance.
That is food for thought, perhaps, for anyone in America who might be watching with envy.
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