TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taipei resident Mu Chuhua caught some glimpses of China’s mighty military parade on YouTube on Wednesday. As she watched hypersonic missiles roll down Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue and troops march in lockstep, she didn’t feel like they posed a threat to Taiwan, the self-ruled island China claims as its own.
Mu, a 69-year-old retiree, said she saw the parade as simply a way for Chinese President Xi Jinping to “say thank you to the troops.”
“I thought it was quite normal,” she said. “It was very cool.”
China’s military parade commemorating the end of World War II and its victory over Japan was being watched internationally for insights into Beijing’s military advances and its show of unity with traditional U.S. adversaries such as Russia and North Korea.
But for many in Taiwan, the island democracy China threatens to annex by force if necessary, the military show registered at most for its entertainment value.
“The lack of public reaction to China’s display of military might reflects both the limits of Beijing’s intimidation campaign against Taiwan and the longstanding concern of Taiwanese people becoming desensitized by the constant military threat posed by China,” said William Yang, a senior Northeast Asia analyst for the International Crisis Group.
“It’s essentially a double-edged sword,” Yang added. “On the one hand, China’s attempt to regularize military operations around Taiwan in recent years has forced Taiwanese people to view these activities as part of a ‘new normal’ in their everyday life. However, China’s increasing military presence also reduces the effect of these intimidation tactics on the Taiwanese public.”
Taiwan’s government used the event to renew alarm over Beijing’s military intimidation of the island. China sends military jets and ships near Taiwan almost daily and hasn’t renounced the use the force to take over the territory, which it considers a breakaway province.
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said in a speech Tuesday ahead of the island’s Armed Forces Day that the “security environment” in the Taiwan Strait, the body of water separating China from Taiwan, was “more severe than ever before.”
China’s military intimidation and alleged cognitive warfare tactics are “not only a threat to Taiwan’s democracy and freedom but also a challenge to the entire democratic world,” Lai said. On Wednesday, Lai laid a wreath at a memorial shrine commemorating fallen soldiers and war heroes.
Taiwan, a former Japanese colony, and China have had separate governments since the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, lost a civil war against the Communist Party in 1949, with the Nationalists retreating to Taiwan.
During World War II, it was the KMT, currently Taiwan’s main opposition party, that was leading China out of the wartime capital of Chongqing. The country was then known as the Republic of China, which is now Taiwan’s official name.
The Chinese Communist Party acknowledges the role of the Nationalist army in defeating Japan while playing up the exploits of its own guerrilla fighters.
The KMT in a statement Wednesday criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s “twist of history” while reiterating its own role in the war.
“Eighty years ago, it was the Republic of China (ROC) government and the National Revolutionary Army that led the nation in the War of Resistance against Japan, sacrificing countless lives and blood to protect the nation and its people and achieve final victory,” the KMT statement read. “This historical evidence is irrefutable and cannot be distorted or falsified!”
While the KMT, Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the Chinese Communist Party sparred over their own interpretations of the day, for 17-year-old Justin Hu, a high school student in Taipei, the military parade was just “a nice celebration and a nice display of military power,” he told AP.
“It’s just a ceremony,” he said.
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Associated Press video journalists Johnson Lai and Taijing Wu contributed to this report.
