With war commemoration, China and Russia seek a historical narrative distinct from the West's
Paul Letters says China and Russia's decision to jointly commemorate the end of world war two must be understood against the background of their shared experiences - but only up to a point
Last week, China and Russia announced their intention to plan joint commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Such cuddling up on the world stage may appear merely a modern political convenience against Western antipathy. The two countries seek to refresh history and commemorate only the sweet taste of a sweet and sour relationship. But when you look at the course the war ran for each of them, theirs was in part a shared experience.
At the hands of fascistic enemies, by 1945, both nations had suffered to an extent many even in occupied Western Europe - let alone more remote America - could only struggle to comprehend.
The number of war deaths (military plus civilian) for the US or Britain were each around 400,000; France, 600,000. We need not six figures but eight for China and the Soviet Union, where most estimates vary between 10 and 20 million and 20 and 30 million respectively.
That experts cannot be sure, within a range of 10 million, how many citizens of China or the Soviet Union were slain says much about the nature of war in those theatres: the dead lay disrespected and unaccounted for on a scale unseen on the western front. It is understandable that at the end of the war, both nations expected to mitigate terrible losses through significant gains from the peace. Soviet forces set a precedent as to how to claim multiple victory prizes, from Prague to Pyongyang. For China, immediate rewards were less abundant; regaining Hong Kong was one dashed hope.
The West has long been blind to the roles China and the USSR played in the second world war. Americans can grow up thinking the Flying Tigers won the war in Asia, yet between 1937 and 1942, the USSR was the only country providing material assistance to the precarious Republic of China's cause. Before the Nationalist withdrawal to China's interior, the vehemently anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek relied upon Soviet air power to enable China to stand up against the Japanese. (Stalin feared losing China to the Japanese more than he feared the Nationalists.)
A few years earlier, the Republic of China had courted military aid not only from the US, but also from the Nazis - until Japan forced Germany to withdraw its military advisers.
The end of the cold war saw the archives open up in the former Soviet republics and, belatedly and tentatively, in the People's Republic. Russia's take on the "Great Patriotic War" crosses communist/non-communist dividing lines, but China is more internally angst-ridden. The Chinese Communist Party has yet to shed its reluctance to illuminate all aspects of the war effort, but, today, Chinese researchers are quietly rediscovering their nation's muddied history, including the enormous contribution the Nationalists made.
The USSR and Japan were not at war with each other for the vast majority of the war: Soviet Russia resolutely sought to avoid war. From the historically indefensible Nazi-Soviet Pact to its 1941 neutrality pact with Japan following border clashes, the Soviet Union was a reluctant combatant. China had to wait until August 1945 for the Soviets to declare war on Japan.
The Sino-Soviet friendship was far from close by the war's end. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin asked for Franklin Roosevelt's blessing on independence for Outer Mongolia in exchange for his assurance that the USSR would not support the Communist Party in the Chinese civil conflict. Moscow doubted the communists' ability to win the civil war.
That they won it and still maintain power has some bearing on the USSR's former communist KGB chief - Vladimir Putin - and his desire to stand alongside China today. Back then, the reward to the same communists who had fought alongside Americans and Britons in the Asia-Pacific theatre was Western-led international excommunication.
So began a relationship - admittedly at times a squabbling sisters' relationship - where China and Russia were bound together by something greater than ideology: a common enemy. The West, long Soviet Russia's enemy, had declared itself the enemy of the People's Republic of China before the new communist state could take its first breath.
This 70-year anniversary snuggle-up overlooks much dirt from the war era. Heaped on the Russian side of the garden fence was the Nazi-Soviet division of Poland, the Katyn massacre, and the acquisition of the three Baltic states. Poland - Nato's last stand in the east - clearly feels threatened by Russian military aggression again today, and, according to the British government, so should Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. British Defence Minister Michael Fallon avowed last week that they are in Putin's sights.
Look back nearer to the beginning of the second world war - to a 75th, rather than 70th, anniversary - and while China had suffered a decade of invasion by an axis power, the lengths Soviet Russia went to in order to avoid war included aiding Japan's key ally, Germany. Indeed, Germany's invasions of Western Europe in 1940 were fuelled by oil and grain, and fought with steel, supplied by the Soviets.
But history is something we judge by its endings. Today, Beijing and Moscow want to promote their own historical - and future - narrative distinct from any Western version. Seventy years ago, Asia's two largest countries ended up on the winning side, and the rest, as they say, is history.
