There are two things authoritarian governments love more than power: parades and revisionist history. So it was no surprise that on September 1–3, 2025, Beijing gave us both in one dazzling, over-produced spectacle—an 80th-anniversary Victory Day parade so self-congratulatory it made the Oscars look humble.
Xi Jinping, standing tall on his reviewing platform, hosted none other than Vladimir Putin, his favorite wingman in the global “we swear we won everything” project. Together, they cast China and Russia as the “main victorious countries” of World War II. Not allies. Not contributors. The main victors. The U.S.? Britain? Australia? Minor characters in the grand narrative, background extras in someone else’s war movie.
It wasn’t just a parade. It was an experiment: how far can a superpower go in rewriting history in real time?
The Erasure of America
The campaign began with subtle brushstrokes. State-aligned outlets started downplaying U.S. involvement in the China theater of WWII. Out went any mention of the Flying Tigers, those American pilots who defended Chinese skies in 1941. Out went the fact that Washington provided around $700 million in Lend-Lease aid to China—small compared to the $49 billion spread globally, but enough to keep a beleaguered Nationalist government alive.
Instead, a new refrain: China could have beaten Japan without U.S. help. America’s support was, at best, irrelevant. At worst, it was self-serving meddling.
The irony is rich. America is being cast not as reluctant ally but as opportunistic grifter, crashing the war like a late guest at a dinner party and then demanding credit for the food. In this telling, China’s heroic resistance was enough to win; the U.S. was simply background noise.
The AI Soldiers of Douyin
This revisionist project went digital fast. Douyin (TikTok’s mainland twin) flooded with AI-forged patriotic clips. Imagine black-and-white WWII soldiers magically resurrected with modern deepfake technology, staring in awe at Beijing’s gleaming skyline. “So this is what we fought for,” says one doctored soldier, tears shimmering in his pixelated eyes.
These aren’t history lessons. They’re propaganda musicals, performed in thirty-second bursts, scored with swelling orchestras and overlaid captions like The Motherland Never Forgets. The absurdity is structural: dead soldiers who never saw antibiotics are now apparently marveling at high-speed rail. The message isn’t subtle: sacrifice leads here, to a triumphant China that owes nothing to the West.
Cinema as Patriotism
To reinforce the story, Beijing’s propaganda arm rolled out blockbuster war films with all the nuance of a marching band. The Volunteers (a Korean War epic) and Dead to Rights (a dramatization of the 1937 Nanjing massacre) aren’t just films—they’re patriotic events. They’re being promoted heavily, even screened in schools, the better to ensure young minds are marinated in cinematic nationalism before they ever encounter an inconvenient history book.
This is not about remembering history. It’s about curating it, packaging it, monetizing it, and inserting it directly into the bloodstream of the culture.
The Russian Cameo
And then there’s Putin, standing shoulder to shoulder with Xi, the graying sidekick in this buddy comedy of historical recuts. His presence reinforces the second half of the project: boosting Moscow’s role in WWII. The Soviet Union’s sacrifices were indeed immense and undeniable, but the retelling now casts Russia as the other “main victor.”
It’s a delicate pas de deux: Moscow gets elevated, Washington gets erased. The U.S. is not so much villainized as airbrushed out, like an ex-lover cropped from a group photo.
The Historians Protest
Of course, historians like Rana Mitter push back. They remind us that U.S. aid wasn’t just money—it was matériel, planes, training, and advice. It was the infrastructure that helped keep China from total collapse. Without it, Japan’s domination of Asia might have been far deeper and longer-lasting.
But historians do not command parades. They do not have AI-generated soldiers crying on Douyin. They do not have entire national film industries at their disposal. Their rebuttals circulate in academic journals, in op-eds, in quiet corners of the internet. Beijing’s narrative marches through Tiananmen Square in goose-step formation. Guess which one sticks in the public mind.
The Proxy War Over Memory
This is what makes the spectacle so chilling: the battle isn’t about the past. It’s about today. The U.S. and China are already locked in a cold conflict—trade, tech, Taiwan. Now the war extends backward into time itself. Who won WWII? Who bled? Who saved? These questions are no longer academic. They’re ammunition.
If China can convince its people that America was irrelevant in 1945, then America’s relevance in 2025 evaporates by association. Why listen to Washington now if they weren’t the heroes then? Why respect alliances if they weren’t the saviors before? Memory becomes policy. History becomes a battlefield.
The Satirical Layer
What’s happening here is absurd on its face. The idea that China could have defeated Imperial Japan on its own ignores the material conditions of the time. The notion that America contributed nothing is laughable. And yet, the revision isn’t designed to withstand scrutiny. It’s designed to overwhelm it.
This is the brilliance of structural irony: the parade isn’t about convincing skeptics. It’s about drowning them. When tanks roll, flags wave, and AI soldiers salute modern Beijing, who has time to fact-check?
The Parades as Performance
Authoritarian regimes love parades because they turn complexity into choreography. A messy war with messy alliances becomes a tidy story told through tanks and soldiers marching in perfect rhythm. Parades flatten ambiguity. No one asks about the messy compromises, the betrayals, the supply shortages, the civilian deaths. They just see strength.
Xi and Putin understand that. They understand that while historians quibble in footnotes, ordinary citizens remember the spectacle. A parade is history with a drumline.
The Haunting Observation
This is the danger of living in a world where memory itself is weaponized. The past no longer belongs to archives, libraries, or survivors. It belongs to whoever has the biggest platform, the best technology, the most disciplined choreography.
On September 3, the streets of Beijing weren’t commemorating history. They were manufacturing it. And the scariest part isn’t that it worked. It’s that it doesn’t need to.
Because once a nation accepts that history is a mirror you can tilt at will, there’s no going back. The reflection becomes the reality. And in that reflection, the Allies vanish, the Flying Tigers evaporate, the Lend-Lease dissolves, and America is nothing more than a rumor in someone else’s parade.
And that is how wars are refought—not with bullets, but with memory, and the silence of those who no longer recognize their own past.