Has China’s massive navy parade soothed a century of wounded national pride?
Show of maritime power comes more than 120 years after a catastrophic military loss
The staging of China’s biggest display of naval power this week prompted comparisons with a catastrophic military defeat at the hands of Japan more than a century ago.
China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was the centrepiece of a massive parade off the waters of Sanya in the South China Sea on Thursday.
The display, watched by Chinese President Xi Jinping, involved about 50 warships and nearly 80 aircraft, including jets, bombers and early-warning planes.
The parade came 124 years after the navy’s collapse in the first Sino-Japanese war, known in China as the Jiawu war, despite efforts to modernise the fleet and the deployment of two German-built battleships.
The loss accelerated the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and is still considered in China to be one of the biggest humiliations in the country’s naval history and a source of wounded national pride.