Online Reporter
Jackey Sandton-Smith-Correspondent
In 1971, it was the crucial vote of African nations that blocked the bid to replace the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the representative of China at the United Nations.
This was a ploy that was designed to humiliate China, again. But Africa stood by her side. This friendship continues today, as China leads a new order, to protect itself, but also light Africa’s aspirations to avoid humiliation on the global stage.
Africa ought to learn a thing or two from China.
On September 3, China will hold a military parade that might just be their most important in modern history. They have military parades in October to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China and they hold them from time to time to celebrate other significant events. However, this 2025 China marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II with one of its greatest events and commemorates a period in time that is far more significant, and sombre, to China than it might appear to others.
For most Americans, WWII started in December 1941. For most Europeans it had already been going on even before Britain declared war in 1939 but in China, it was much earlier. The full-blown war commenced in 1937 with an incident which has become known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, that event started the full-scale conflict on July 7, 1937, a full two years before Great Britain and Germany declared hostilities in September 1939.
The Asian Reading Room of the US Government’s Library of Congress describes the Sino Japanese War as “one of the most destructive conflicts of World War II”.
There is no doubt that it was, but the history goes a lot further back than that.
Japan was already occupying parts of North Eastern China, they had done so since the first Sino Japanese War of 1894/5 where an ill-prepared and poorly equipped Qing Dynasty military were soundly defeated by a Western trained and equipped Japanese army.
As a result, China was forced to cede parts of what was then called Manchuria, now Dong Bei, as well as the city of Shandong, the island of Taiwan and the Pescadores islands to Japan.
These are things that still rankle today and still cause great pain to China’s national pride — they were all part of the Century of Humiliation commencing in the final years of the Qing Dynasty and continuing through the Republican era.
Japan’s troops occupied parts of China on and off for the next 40 years, but in 1931 they invaded and took over parts of vast swathes of China’s North East, creating a Puppet State they called Manchuko. China’s war of that era, was not the WWII but a much longer, festering occupation which blew into full scale war between the two countries in 1937.
This was when China, with both Kuomintang and Communist Party putting aside their differences, began national resistance to the Japanese. At the same time the Japanese, decided to impose a full invasion into China. So, while the Marco Polo Bridge Incident is an important milestone, it was, by no means the beginning of China and Japan’s hostilities.
However, from that incident, Japan’s occupation of China was heavily contested by Chinese military and would be for the next eight years until September 2, 1945. China’s World War was double the length of the US’ and it was two years longer than the Europeans.
Victory came, not because the US dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it came because the Japanese had fought and were losing a war of attrition throughout the Pacific against the US and throughout China’s Mainland against the combined forces of the Republican and Communist armies.
US forces in the Pacific Theatre fought a hard war, they lost 104 000 confirmed killed, over 200 000 wounded and 52 000 missing. A heavy toll indeed for 4 years of military conflict but those numbers pale into insignificance when compared to China’s losses.
The period known as ‘The Second World War’ was devastating to China. The losses were estimated by the National WW2 Museum as between three to four million military personnel but much worse was the fact that approximately 20 million civilians lost their lives.
Several cities were fire-bombed by Japan, civilians were taken to have medical and bioweapon experiments conducted on them in Harbin’s notorious Unit 731. In the city of Nanking (now Nanjing) in over a six-week period there were 300 000 civilian deaths.
Tens of thousands were raped, tortured and murdered, some just for entertainment some for bayonet practice, others in competitions between officers to see who could murder the most. Collective punishments were meted out. All of this in flagrant breach of any rules of war and which, to this day have gone unpunished. What China experienced was not war, it was living hell on earth.
So, when China says it will hold a massive military parade, this is not a postulating or showing of power, this is about showing strength and resolution.
China survived a horror during a terrible time, it lasted twice as long as others and it was invaded and occupied by a more brutal force than perhaps any other country in modern history.
September the 3rd will not just be a memorial for the four million military members and 20 million civilians who lost their lives in the conflict, it is also a sombre reminder of a terrible past and a declaration to the people of China that their government has made a commitment to ensure that this can never happen again.
While it’s likely that the parade will be remembered as one of the greatest military shows ever seen because it will display all that China has done in recent years to turn the People’s Liberation Army into the greatest defensive force in the world, it’s equally as likely that Western pundits and some so-called experts will look on with fear in their hearts.
Headlines depicting China as fearsome and aggressive will be written in media articles and think tank papers will discuss what China might, or what China could do but they will all disregard what has been done to China.
China’s military is not like the Japanese forces of 80 years ago, it’s not like the British of the Opium War period, it’s not like the US forces around the globe today, it’s not an aggressive, expansionist force, it’s a defensive and noble service created from the people of China to defend the people of China.
That is the message Beijing is sending; there will never be another century of humiliation, there will never be another foreign occupation, there will never be foreign concessions, treaty ports or colonies taken from the people of China.
The PLA is here to ensure those things never happen and this is why September 3rd’s Memorial Military Parade is so important.
