Transcript: What Did the September 3 Parade Mean?

A double-bill with PLA Senior Colonel Zhou Bo (ret.) and historian Rana Mitter

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Beijing. It’s great to be back in town.

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This week on Sinica, a double bill, I will be talking to both Zhou Bo, Senior Colonel Zhou Bo (retired) of the People’s Liberation Army, who is a frequent commentator on Chinese military affairs. Sinica listeners will quite probably know him from his many television appearances. He is now a Senior Fellow at CISS Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. I will also be talking to Rana Mitter, who has been on Sinica several times and will be familiar to our listeners — author of two excellent books on the Sino-Japanese war, both of which I have discussed with him. Every time there’s a parade, we have him on. He was formerly at Oxford and now at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

It will come as no surprise at all that these subjects of today’s discussion will be the military parade held in Beijing on Wednesday, September 3rd, commemorating, of course, the Japanese surrender that finally ended World War II, 80 years ago. We will touch on some of the events leading up to the parade as well, including, of course, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Tianjin. So, please enjoy this double header.

Senior Colonel Zhou Bo, now retired, has, for some time, been one of the most interesting commentators on Chinese military affairs, in part because of his extensive international experience, combined, of course, with his long career in the PLA. He served in the Guangzhou Air Force Regional Command in a number of posts, and held the post of Deputy Director General of the West Asia and Africa Bureau and then Deputy Director General of the General Planning Bureau of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Ministry of National Defense of China, as well as serving as Defense Attaché in Namibia. He is a prolific writer and has been published in many, many major English-language journals, newspapers, and magazines, as well as appearing frequently on television. In April, he published a collection of his essays written over the last dozen years, called Should the World Fear China? He is a regular at the Shangri-la Dialogue, something I’ve spoken about with guests on this program before, and at the Munich Security Conference, where he always offers fascinating perspectives from the Chinese side. He has an MPhil in international relations from St Edmund College at Cambridge University. He is, as I mentioned earlier, now a senior fellow at CISS, the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua. And let me take the opportunity to thank my friend, Da Wei, there at CISS, for making the introduction to Senior Colonel Zhou. Senior Colonel Zhou, a very warm welcome to Sinica. Very glad to have you here.

Senior Colonel Zhou Bo: Thanks, Kaiser, for having me here.

Kaiser: So, as you want to know, I want to focus on the parade today, but not just on the hardware on display, impressive as that was. I want to start with this, maybe, from a planner’s eye, what were the parade’s primary objectives? Were they about deterrence, about reassurance to a domestic audience, about maybe alliance management? And who are the intended audiences? I think there were multiple audiences for the parade. Maybe if you had to decide which were the more important and less important audiences, how would you assess that?

Senior Colonel Zhou: Well, this is a group of questions altogether. But, first of all, let me try to say that this, first of all, is a correction of history and, in part, a correction of the Chinese people’s own understanding of history, because in the past, we were talking about 80 years of resistance against Japanese invasion. But now we’re talking about 14 years. I believe now we have actually re-corrected our own understanding because that is certainly true. Otherwise, how can General Yang Jingyu fought actually in and also the part of China, yeah, before 1937? So that is correct that we started this well in 1937. This is the primary purpose of understanding our own history correctly, but, as you have mentioned, it also serves multiple purposes. Of course, for domestic audience, it’s actually a showcase of national pride. Yeah, it is a promotion of patriotism, so and so forth. But that is understood but what is more important is how it would be received by international audience. Because it is almost like a double-edged sword. It depends on how you read it. Because you could argue that this is flexing up muscles, right? Absolutely. But on the other hand, it could also be interpreted as an unprecedented effort in transparency. So, if you read the Western media, you actually would find the Western media accuses China on both elements, that is China is not transparent enough or China is showing up its muscles. So, all these weapons are here. Now, you could read the same thing in different lights. It’s up to you to interpret what kind of things China wants to portray. But I believe this actually is a very good opportunity for the West to have a closing observance of the military strength of the purely. Because, as a matter of fact, China hasn’t published many white papers regarding its military, and these white papers tend to be somewhat too short, very much abstract. But these stuff that are on parade are basically those that were already deployed with the PLA. So, it’s a demonstration of PLA is ready capabilities. It’s not about something that is still during research and development period.