Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen speaks with the Chinese army's General Staff Gen. Chen Bingde during a ceremony welcoming Mullen to Beijing, China, on July 11, 2011. (Chad J. McNeeley/U.S. Navy)
China is awash in nationalist fervor ahead of its celebration of the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, which Beijing will mark Wednesday with a grand parade showcasing its military prowess.
Alongside the spectacle, a quieter campaign is unfolding: one to recast wartime history in service of today’s geopolitical tensions with Washington.
In the run-up to the anniversary, several state-aligned scholars, media outlets and think tanks have downplayed the significance of American assistance to China during World War II, casting the U.S. as a self-serving power then and now. The effort has spilled into popular culture: from highly anticipated films dramatizing China’s role in the Korean War against American forces to AI-generated videos of World War II soldiers marveling at modern-day China, which have gone viral on social media.
“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,” a piece in the Historical Review, affiliated with the state-run Chinese Academy of History, said in its August issue. A commentary published by state-backed, nationalist Red Culture Institute read: “Even without U.S. aid … China would have a chance of winning [against Japan].”
But historians say American assistance was crucial for China to survive the war. Large parts of China were occupied by Imperial Japan and war broke out in 1937, in the lead-up to World War II. Japan’s defeat in 1945, following the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, led to China’s liberation. Japan officially surrendered its territory in China in a ceremony in Nanjing on Sept. 9, 1945.
“China and the United States needed each other,” said Rana Mitter, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and author of “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II.”
“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.”
Mitter’s book argues that China’s wartime contribution was not given proper credit in the West for decades. But now, China is picking and choosing the parts of history that best suit its current political needs.
“It’s not necessarily the details are wrong - sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not - but they are made to add up to a story that fits your present-day needs,” he said.
Tensions between the world’s superpowers, the U.S. and China, have intensified this year, coming close to a full economic rupture spurred by President Donald Trump’s trade war. Beijing, bristling at what it sees as U.S. efforts to contain its rise, has sought to position itself as a stabilizing counterweight to the disruption caused by Trump’s confrontational and unpredictable approach to geopolitics.
The rivalry has also drawn Beijing closer to Moscow while deepening an anti-American sentiment at home. When he visited Moscow in May for World War II commemorations, Chinese leader Xi Jinping wrote in a Russian outlet that “correct historical perspective” placed China and the Soviet Union at center stage in Asia and Europe, without mentioning the U.S. and Western allies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will be among the leaders of the 26 nations that will attend the Sept. 3 Victory Day parade.
U.S. assistance to China during the war came in different forms, most prominently under the Lend-Lease program. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the program to provide war supplies to countries without directly getting involved in the war. The aid was provided with the expectation of deferred repayment.
China was a major recipient under Lend-Lease: receiving roughly $700 million in military aid during World War II before Japan’s surrender, according to a government memorandum sent to the State Department in 1946, with assistance continuing for some months afterward. Overall, the U.S. disbursed more than $49 billion under the program to nearly 40 nations.
“It’s probably fair to say that the conditions placed on China may have been somewhat onerous, but the exact same thing has been said about the conditions imposed on the British,” Mitter said, adding that the U.S. pushed its allies quite hard on payment.
Then there were American volunteer pilots, popularly known as Flying Tigers, who successfully fought the superior Japanese air force on China’s behalf. And after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Roosevelt sent Gen. Joseph Stilwell to serve as a military adviser to the Chinese government.
Some symbols of cooperation - such as the Flying Tigers - have weathered geopolitical tensions. China has invited descendants of the volunteers for the commemoration events, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported. Nell Calloway, granddaughter of Flying Tigers founder Gen. Claire Chennault, urged the U.S. and China to draw on their “historical experience” of World War II to navigate the current tensions in an article published in China’s state-run People’s Daily on Thursday.
Nationalist writers are also increasingly emphasizing the role of the Soviet Union. Recent commentary in state mouthpieces including the PLA Daily and People’s Daily accuses the U.S. and its allies of deliberately downplaying the Soviet Union’s contribution.
Prominent Chinese historians have pushed back on the views espoused by nationalist commentators. Su Zhiliang, a professor of history at Shanghai Normal University, noted that U.S. wartime aid was critical and helped China. But he added that Soviet support had not been adequately acknowledged: “Soviet pilots came to Wuhan’s help in the 1930s when the U.S. was practicing isolationism. Still, they are far less well-known than U.S. Flying Tigers.”
China was not claiming to be the biggest hero in the victory, said Yang Biao, a professor of history at East China Normal University in Shanghai. “China is becoming a more powerful country and naturally would want an image and narrative that fits its true historical status,” he said. “It shows the Chinese voice is getting more recognition.”
This patriotic sentiment is also surging across phone screens. Slick AI-generated clips and dramatic montages have brought World War II to life on Chinese social media.
In one viral clip, a Chinese World War II soldier, his arm bloodied and face streaked with soot, turns to a modern-day soldier of the People’s Liberation Army to ask: “Have we won [the war]?”
The PLA soldier, bearing the likeness of a popular fitness influencer, nods, and as he pulls out a smartphone to offer proof, the World War II soldier dissolves into a flock of pigeons rising into the sky.
The AI-generated clip has drawn nearly 19 million likes on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, with hundreds of thousands of emotional comments paying respect to the martyrs.
Some explicitly take aim at the U.S.: a widely viewed Douyin video features footage of heavy shelling as the narrator decries the Western narrative of the war. Defending China’s nationalism, another video says China deserves recognition for its World War II contribution after being “belittled” by the West for so long.
On the big screen, government agencies in China are heavily promoting “The Volunteers,” the third part of a hit Chinese-made Korean War movie franchise to be released this year. The first two movies portrayed Americans in a bad light: heavily armed, ruthless and ineffectual.
One of this year’s blockbuster hits is “Dead to Rights,” which takes the audience through the horrors of the 1937 Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops.
Zhou Yuanqing, 38, a taxi driver in Changsha, said his 9-year-old son watched the movie with classmates as part of patriotism education organized by his school. “He came back all serious, telling me and his mom that he hates the Japanese.”
For Sing Chow, a 28-year-old Hong Konger working for a Shanghai-based tech company, the movie was gutting. “I was shaking,” she said, recalling scenes that left her in tears. “I felt [it] all: anger, desperation, sadness, empathy, fear, and grief.”
The anniversary has provided China a stage to allow such rhetoric to be amplified, said William Yang, a senior analyst for North East Asia for the International Crisis Group, a think tank.
“At this particular juncture, 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 to present itself as a defender of justice, victory and the world order,” he said.
