Recasting History for Modern Politics
As Beijing prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, Xi Jinping’s government is waging what can only be called a campaign to rewrite the past. The capital will stage an enormous military parade, estimated to cost more than five billion dollars, meant to showcase Chinese power. Alongside the display, however, is a quieter but no less important project. China’s leaders are attempting to reshape the history of the war itself by downplaying America’s decisive role and presenting the Communist Party as the main victor.
The propaganda effort even manipulates the calendar. Japan surrendered to America on August 15, 1945, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet as the Washington Post notes, “September 3 is hailed as the day of Red China’s ‘victory’ over ‘Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.’” By shifting the date, Beijing suggests that the end of the war belongs to China rather than to the Allied victory led by the United States. This, as one observer put it, is “typical of Mr. Xi’s distortions.”
What the United States Did in the War
The truth is that without America, China could not have survived, let alone prevailed. U.S. aid came in multiple forms. The Lend-Lease program provided China with roughly seven hundred million dollars in military supplies, part of the more than forty-nine billion dollars Washington disbursed worldwide to help its allies. American generals, including Joseph Stilwell, were sent to advise Chinese forces, and U.S. volunteer pilots, known as the Flying Tigers, defended Chinese skies against Japan’s superior air force.
Harvard historian Rana Mitter explained it clearly: “Without China’s continued resistance, the U.S. would have had a much bigger problem in the Asia-Pacific region, and without American financial assistance and military advice, China would have had it much harder to last till the end of the war.” His words make clear that the alliance was a partnership. Both nations depended on one another, but the final blow that forced Japan to its knees was delivered by the United States.
It was America’s campaigns across the Pacific islands, combined with the devastating atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that ended the conflict. Japan’s formal surrender on September 9, 1945, in Nanjing, returned Chinese territory. To deny this chain of events is to ignore the very reality of how the war ended.
What China Leaves Out
China’s official story avoids the inconvenient truth that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, not Mao Zedong’s Red Army, carried the burden of resisting Japan. As the New York Times reported, “it was the Chinese Nationalists who did most of the fighting.” During the war, Mao’s communists were less concerned with defeating Japan than with conserving their strength for the civil war they intended to fight against Chiang once the Japanese were defeated.
The propaganda also erases the role of Chiang on the world stage. During World War II, Chiang stood alongside Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin as one of the “Big Four” leaders directing the Allied struggle against the Axis. Yet in today’s Chinese narrative, he is either dismissed or forgotten. Instead, films, AI-generated videos, and viral social media clips portray heroic Chinese soldiers passing the torch to a modern People’s Liberation Army. In one such video, a World War II soldier asks a present-day PLA soldier, “Have we won the war?” The PLA soldier nods, pulls out a smartphone, and the old soldier dissolves into a flock of pigeons. The clip drew nearly nineteen million likes on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. But the story it tells makes no mention of the Americans who actually helped win that war.
Nationalist Voices and Their Critics
Chinese nationalists argue that American aid was not really about helping China. A piece in the Historical Review, affiliated with the state-run Chinese Academy of History, claimed, “The fundamental purpose of U.S. ‘aid’ to China was to protect its own interests in China; it was by no means assistance based on an equal relationship.” Another commentary from the nationalist Red Culture Institute insisted, “Even without U.S. aid … China would have a chance of winning [against Japan].”
These claims are contradicted by historians, both inside and outside China. Su Zhiliang, a professor of history at Shanghai Normal University, acknowledged that U.S. support was critical, though he also argued that Soviet contributions have not received enough attention. Yet the contrast between nationalist propaganda and scholarly evidence is striking. As William Yang of the International Crisis Group explained, “China sees an opportunity to present itself as a great rising military power and inject and assert its own version of the narrative about World War II.”
Taiwan, the last remnant of the Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-shek, has reason to be frustrated. Taiwanese officials point out that the Communist Party “is taking credit for leading the fighting when most of it was done by forces of what was then the Republic of China.” They also note the staggering cost of Beijing’s anniversary parade as an unnecessary waste. The bitterness reflects what Reuters described as “the battle of narratives between Beijing and Taipei.” For Taiwan, honoring the truth of history is part of defending its own legitimacy against the regime that forced it into exile in 1949.
The reality is that China was brutalized by Japan. Millions of Chinese civilians were massacred, as seen in the horrors of Nanjing in 1937. Entire regions were occupied. Chinese resistance was courageous, but without American intervention it would likely have been crushed. Yet Beijing now presents itself as the primary victor, while dismissing the United States as selfish and unworthy of credit.
As the Washington Post summarized, regime-aligned commentators are “downplaying the significance of American assistance to China during World War II, casting the U.S. as a self-serving power then and now.” That is an insult to the American soldiers, pilots, and taxpayers who sacrificed to keep China alive. It is also a distortion of global history. The U.S. defeated Japan. China endured unimaginable suffering, but it did not deliver the final victory.
By erasing America’s role, Xi Jinping is not honoring the memory of China’s martyrs. He is using the past as propaganda in today’s power struggle with Washington. The lack of appreciation is galling because it dishonors not only the Americans who fought but also the truth of what actually happened. History matters. To twist it for political gain is to betray the very lessons that World War II should have taught.