Why should the world fear a powerful Xi Jinping?
Tom Plate says critics of Xi Jinping's apparent moves to strengthen his rule should also see the positives
As Hongkongers can certainly testify, political parades in the public square or citizen protests occupying a thoroughfare can hide as much as they reveal. Last week, Beijing put together for all the world to see a titanic military show, the first such lavish one in years, designed to knock people's eyes out - perhaps especially on the mainland. Yet just before that, in central Tokyo, worried citizens ginned up a vastly smaller but still potent peace appeal that caught the eye of a world more familiar with Japan's former militarism than widespread pacifism.
The Beijing celebration was an official government showing; the Tokyo protest was anything but. Both events raise pressing questions for East Asia and the West.
Japan, once Asia's leading military power, held the region in fear until the cataclysmic end of the second world war. Its abject surrender was what the Beijing display was cheering; but the Japanese need no help from anyone to recall that the end of their military era was punctuated with the atomic levelling of two cities.
Surely the collective conscience of the Japanese people (though not of insensitive, posturing politicians) can honestly say to the world: what is war for? The Abe government's aim to remilitarise by eviscerating its anti-war constitution strikes many Japanese as brutish arrogance, if not pathetic psychological denial.
if the main point of the hardware show in Tiananmen Square was to spotlight Xi as a man not to mess with, don't assume the worst
Chinese who claim or brag they loathe all Japanese may not fully appreciate that their closest archipelago neighbour in fact looks, in an anti-war respect, to be further along the evolutionary tunnel than China is. "War is the sword of Damocles that still hangs over the head of mankind," said President Xi Jinping at the parade. He hit the nail on the head. The question now is whether his government will steer a wise course that makes the militarism of the Abe government look primitive and retro, or goad Japan into tragic but seemingly justifiable action.
Indisputably, China was well within its rights to organise a showboat parade on the 70th anniversary of the war's end. After all, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon himself, no noted warmonger, took his spot on the reviewing stand; and that was a good decision. But no high-ranking US official from Washington was to be found; and that was a bad decision.