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How an overseas Chinese views the military parade
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I have just returned home to Australia after sitting among those who watched the parade in Tian’anmen Square September 3.
Before that in Melbourne I had an unexpected conversation on WeChat with a business contact of mine — an expat lady who has been living in Beijing much longer than I did. She writes Chinese, runs a startup in Beijing, but didn’t know what the parade was about. I said it commemorated the 70th Anniversary of victory over Japanese aggression in World War II.
What she replied surprised me. “Don’t you think it is an irony to have a military parade for such a purpose?”
I knew what she meant. But does she understand China’s sacrifice and contribution in WWII, and what ordinary Chinese want from the parade?
Her question is an example of the sort of skepticism the West still hold toward China.
She might not understand that the parade is held important as much by all Chinese people — including the 60 million overseas Chinese — as by the Chinese Government. Let me share a little personal account because I believe understanding comes from listening.
China’s War of Resistance against Japanese aggression (1937-1945) was an unprecedented story, pure and simple, of great resistance against massive odds.
France capitulated in 1940, but China fought on, with an almost primitive war machine compared to the much superior Japanese army. For more than four years, the Chinese resisted the Japanese almost alone, until the Pearl harbor.
China’s Nationalist government retreated successively, ultimately to Chongqing, after suffering heavy casualties to its armies and civilians alike.
Yet the drama of humiliation during the eight-year-resistance, the slaughter of tens of millions of Chinese, the resilience of Chinese soldiers, citizens and millions of overseas Chinese remains little known in the West, making China the forgotten ally of World War II.
Who in the West has heard of the Battle of Shanghai, dubbed the “Battle of Stalingrad in the Pacific War,” where the Japanese ambition of “Occupying China in Three Months” was shattered? How many Westerners have heard of the Tai’erzhuang Campaign, where Chinese soldiers defeated superior Japanese troops in hand-to-hand combat, after their bullets had run out? In the Burma Campaign, Chinese General Sun Li Jen led his 113th regiment in a daring rescue mission for an entire British division, rescuing 7,000 British troops.
In australia, senior Cabinet Minister Malcolm Turnbull is amongst the first government officials to publicly acknowledge the Chinese struggle and a history that still shapes not only Chinese thinking today but also Asia’s geopolitical landscape.
At a recent business forum in Sydney, Minister Turnbull stated that “there is a tendency to see the sweep of Chinese australian history solely through the prism of the Cold War and then the opening up of China and the economic development that followed.”
If it is not for China to hold off the majority of the Japanese troops, Japan would have been able to deploy more resources to australia, even to Siberia and join forces with Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union could have been overwhelmed at the Western front by such combined military might.
Modern Chinese history is marked by an endless stretch of darkness and humiliation. The Sino-Japan war was between a China at its weakest in history and a Japan at its strongest. Above all, at that tipping point in our history, Chinese all around the world mobilized themselves to save an ancient Middle Kingdom they call motherland.
Donations by overseas Chinese accounted for a significant portion of the whole Chinese military expenditure during the war. Tens of thousands of overseas Chinese volunteered to serve in the army, most notably in the China-Burma-India theater protecting China’s only lifeline, the Burma Road. Naturally, the parade is seen by millions of Chinese around the world as the right move to commemorate their fallen and to remember the peace hard fought by their forefathers.
At the parade, a Jamaican American who is one-eighth Chinese sat next to me. he was very excited as it was his first trip to China with his mother, who told me his grandfather three generations ago started the Red Cross in China’s Guizhou Province.
Another one next to me was a Chinese american lady in her 60s who has lived in New York all her life. as the parade started with a salute to the veterans, she started crying. asked why, she said, “I miss my dad.”
The author was former senior adviser to the Hon. Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria and is president of Chinese Community Council of Australia Victorian Chapter and President, Australian Hubei Chamber of Commerce.
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