Xi’s big parade was much more than a message to Trump. Should we be worried?

1 week ago 4

Should US President Donald Trump be rattled by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s extravagant military celebration attended by so many of America’s main adversaries?

Much of the analysis has tended to frame the gathering through a geopolitical lens, and the temptation to see everything as a message to Trump is a syndrome – one that afflicts the US president himself.

The military parade in Beijing was far more elaborate than the US Army’s 250th anniversary event in Washington.

“I thought it was a beautiful ceremony – I thought it was very, very impressive,” Trump enthused in the Oval Office. “But I understood the reason they were doing it. They were hoping I was watching, and I was watching.”

It would be silly and indulgent to think Xi’s parade, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Sino-Japanese war, was for Trump’s benefit. This was an important milestone in China’s history, and the display of military might is textbook stuff from an authoritarian regime.

Nonetheless, a gathering of many significant non-Western leaders – Russian President Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian – is difficult to ignore for the alternative it presents to Western power and American leadership.

Does it matter? Not really, says historian and Johns Hopkins professor Sergey Radchenko, who wrote on his blog that despite the striking optics, “I struggle to understand why seeing Xi, Putin and Modi chitchatting is something we are supposed to have a heart attack over.”

Still, the presence of Modi, on his first visit to China since 2018, does further complicate an already strained US-India relationship.

Trump has been vicious toward New Delhi, hitting India with 25 per cent tariffs (higher than Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia and most other countries), then hiking the rate to 50 per cent as punishment for purchasing Russian oil.

This is couched as a sanction on Moscow, but China, which also buys a lot of Russia’s oil, has been spared. In more recent comments, Trump has focused on what he sees as India’s unfair trade practices, calling the trade relationship between the two countries “a totally one-sided disaster”.

Modi was unimpressed when Trump claimed credit for soothing a flare-up in hostilities between India and Pakistan earlier this year. Trump includes that long-standing conflict among the six or seven wars he purports to have ended this year. Hosting Pakistani army chief Asim Munir at the White House in June was also problematic for US-India relations.

Donald Trump claimed credit for halting the flare-up between India and Pakistan in Kashmir earlier this year.

While it’s easy to read too much into Modi’s pivot to China, such relationships are part of Beijing’s long-term strategy for countering the US, says Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Centre at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

For five years, Hass says, China “has been methodically fortifying its capacity to withstand trade and strategic pressure from the US”. One prong of that strategy is to not be isolated internationally: to stand with others, figuratively and literally. “Beijing is projecting confidence it can manage Trump,” he said on X.

Friends or frenemies?

Trump insists he has a good relationship with all the leaders who gathered in Beijing, though he says “we’re going to find out how good it is over the next week or two”. That could apply to several issues on the boil, including settling the Ukraine war, improving trade relations with India and scheduling a summit with Xi.

He limited his criticism of the spectacle to one gripe: Xi should have acknowledged America’s contribution to Chinese freedom by defeating the Japanese in World War II. Even before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour brought the US directly into the war, American pilots known as the Flying Tigers were recruited to defend China from Japan’s invasion.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (centre) talks to Vladimir Putin and Xi jinping at last week’s Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit.

“President Xi is a friend of mine, but I thought that the United States should have been mentioned last night because we helped China very, very much,” Trump said.

Xi did make an oblique reference to the US, but not in a positive way. As this masthead’s China correspondent, Lisa Visentin, noted, Xi said his country was a “great nation that will never be intimidated by any bullies”.

The part of the ceremony likely to stick with Trump is the military display itself. He has a fondness for such things – indeed, he commissioned his own parade in Washington in June to mark the US Army’s 250th birthday (and his own 79th). The event reportedly left him underwhelmed.

As Radchenko opined in Foreign Policy magazine, Xi used the extravagant occasion “to remind his audiences worldwide – and the United States in particular – that Beijing’s bid to global pre-eminence rests on a solid foundation: the shiny armour and the goose-stepping soldiers of China’s nascent war machine”.

That is one message that can’t be lost in translation.

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