China's role in the WWII victory against fascism

ON SEPTEMBER 3, China will hold its 80th World War II Victory Day commemoration. Twenty-six heads of state and government and international dignitaries will grace the occasion to commemorate the sacrifices of the Chinese people in fighting and ending one of the darkest and most devastating moments of world history.

- GIDEON CHITANGA

While the world has experienced relative stability since the end of WWII, new violent conflicts, undeclared economic wars, pandemics, and global crises have plunged the world into uncharted uncertainty characterised by global geopolitical polarisation.

As expressed by President Xi Jinping in the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, “War is like a mirror. Looking into it helps us better appreciate the value of peace.

“We must learn the lessons of history and dedicate ourselves to peace.”

More than any moment in world history, modern contemporary conflicts could trigger unprecedented nuclear conflagration, pandemics, and other socioeconomic chaos never experienced before, upending any gains of modern human progress.

With modern military technologies, any war on the scale of WWI and WWII could directly threaten human existence, hence world leaders must redouble their efforts to foster global peace and stability.

The West has traditionally commemorated the end of WWII to honour the immense sacrifice of those who fought for freedom and democracy, to remember the millions who died in the conflict, and to learn from the horrors of war to prevent future global conflicts.

However, in the context of contemporary lurch towards heightened global polarisation and unilateral behaviour by the US, it looks like the lessons of the devastation of WWII have faded into mere faraway memories. We live in a precarious era teetering on the brink of global conflict and nuclear Armageddon.

Indeed, the US, Great Britain and the Soviet Union have dominated narratives of WWII, generally excluding and or downplaying the historical contributions of other nations to the defeat of fascism and the emergence of post-WWII peaceful coexistence. Such narratives have also fuelled his-