Xi’s Victory Day optics: what Beijing wants the world to see this week

Monday, 1st September 2025

By inAfrika Reporter.

Beijing will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat on September 3 with a full-dress Victory Day military parade through Tiananmen Square—two days after hosting an expansive Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin. The guest list is the message: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Iran’s president and Myanmar’s junta chief are among those expected to stand with Xi Jinping, a tableau Western analysts have branded the “axis of upheaval.”

Three layers of signaling are in play. First, wartime memory politics. The commemoration recasts China as indispensable to the defeat of fascism, aligning today’s sovereignty rhetoric with an anti-imperialist narrative. It’s a move designed to resonate across parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where Beijing’s pitch as a protector of “order without hegemony” finds purchase. Sparse Western attendance—with only a couple of European leaders expected—sharpens the contrast.

Second, coalition choreography. The SCO summit convenes 20+ leaders, from India and Turkey to Central Asia, framing Beijing as a convenor of the “non-West” at a moment Washington faces its own political turbulence. Many will stay on for the parade, blurring the line between multilateral forum and martial spectacle. For Putin and Kim, the stage projects diplomatic stamina despite sanctions and isolation. For Xi, it shows personal ties to power centers that reject U.S. primacy.

Third, hardware theatre. Expect a procession of carrier-killer missiles (DF-26), air-defense systems, underwater drones and even a teased “mystery laser”—capabilities meant to reinforce deterrence messaging in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. The optics may complicate Beijing’s “peaceful rise” frame, but domestically they cement the image of a modernized PLA under Xi’s direct stewardship.

The risks are real. Tokyo and Seoul will read the joint appearance of Xi-Putin-Kim against their own security timelines; Washington will lump the visuals with export-control debates and evolving tariff policy. But the intended audiences also include Jakarta, Belgrade, Tehran and Harare—capitals receptive to sovereignty talk and skeptical of sanctions’ legitimacy. In those places, Wednesday’s images may scan as proof that the world’s center of gravity is tilting, however slowly, away from the Atlantic.

Bottom line: the parade is not an add-on to the SCO; it’s the closing argument. Xi’s message is that China can convene, command spectacle, and claim moral-historic ground in one breath. Whether that impresses fence-sitters or hardens opposition, the next 72 hours will produce the pictures that define Beijing’s pitch for the rest of 2025.