The narratives of China’s military parade

Yesterday, the US Department of Defense reported that five Chinese naval vessels had been observed operating near the Aleutian Islands. Although their activities were described as lawful and nonthreatening, it was the first time China has extended its reach into the Bering Sea. It was another incident in an eventful week for China that included more economic volatility, a flurry of meetings between Chinese President Xi Jinping and other world leaders, and a large parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II that had been in the works for months. The parade included 12,000 troops, 500 ground vehicles and 200 aircraft.

The parade's core narrative was that since 1945, China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, has evolved from a poor and vulnerable country preyed on by the West and Japan. During World War II, though China was weak, it fought with everything it had to resist an invader that far outgunned it, and the tenacity of China's people enabled it to outlast the Japanese Empire. China today is everything that the weak Nationalist government of the 1940s was not. Despite its recent economic slowdown, China is united (at least on the surface) under a strong central government, reasonably rich and militarily powerful. The message the parade conveys is essentially the motto of Scotland's Stuart Dynasty: Nemo me impune lacessit (no one attacks me with impunity). Although the parade is about China’s victory over Japan, the primary audience of this message is the United States, which China perceives to be its most likely great power adversary in the 21st century.

The parade was a display of overall military might, but missiles were definitely the centerpiece of the show. Among them were short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of striking US bases in the Asia-Pacific theater (such as those in Okinawa and Guam), various surface-to-air systems and anti-ship cruise missile launchers. These were helpfully painted with their designations, conveying exactly what every piece of hardware was to foreign military observers — and intelligence officers.

The array of missiles reflects China's narrative on World War II. Despite military improvements, China still considers itself outgunned in a shooting war with the United States. Nonetheless, it is showing that even if it is not confident of securing victory, it now has various tools to make any incursion costly to any invader that even approaches its coastline. This wartime capability is intended to shape US actions in peacetime.

The parade of China's capabilities also demonstrated continuity in Chinese strategic thought with two concepts dating back to the Gulf War and Korean War. The lesson that China learned from observing the Gulf War was that whenever the United States is able to enter a theater of operations, its conventional might enables it to rapidly defeat its foes. Beijing decided that the solution was to make access risky. Since then, China has pursued a counter-intervention strategy based on raising the stakes of intervention and introducing uncertainty over the precise point at which China would pull the trigger.

Maj. Gen. Chen Zhou, the principal writer of many of China's recent defense white papers, and therefore one of the most authoritative voices on Chinese military strategy, has emphasized that the parade should be seen in the context of China's “active defense” posture, which dates back at least to the Korean War. In short, the Chinese say they will attack only in self-defense, but they will not passively await an invader on their shores before they consider themselves to be under attack. The point at which China engages in self-defense may come far before an adversary actually begins launching strikes on China. In the Korean War, this posture led the Chinese to send armies to fight the United States before US forces crossed the Yalu River. In the context of the modern Pacific, it could manifest as a strike on US forces moving into the region before the actual declaration of hostilities. The uncertainty provided by China’s active defense posture forces the United States to act cautiously, enhancing China's ability to deter US military intervention in the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China seas.

Chinese state media also boasted that 84 percent of the equipment shown at the parade was “never before shown to the public.” However, most, if not all, of this equipment was already known to US observers. The United States has been tracking the development of both the weapons on display and China's counter-intervention strategy for a long time and has spent a long time developing various operational concepts aimed at securing entry into contested environments. The Pentagon even has an office, formerly named the AirSea Battle Office, specifically devoted to studying this problem. US strategists will definitely get the message that China's counter-intervention capabilities are improving and determine the need to factor China's new hardware into existing operation plans and concepts. Still, the parade does not herald a major strategic shift for either China or the United States.

Despite the attention given to the military parade, the threats China's missiles are meant to guard against are secondary. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, whose Nationalist government nominally ruled China from 1927 to 1949, concentrated on eliminating the Communists while accommodating Japanese encroachment. He explained the strategy with the famous comment, “The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart.” Although Chiang was finally compelled to fight Japan by 1936 and ultimately lost the civil war with the Communists in 1949, he was correct in observing that the most dangerous threats to China as a unified entity come not from without, but within — from separatism, regionalism and corruption. It was the confluence of these forces, not the Japanese, which finally brought down his government. No matter how many missiles China's factories produce, no matter how far afield its warships travel, China's leaders will not be able to escape the internal woes that faced Chiang in 1945, which remain pervasive outside of Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road.