Waving beatifically over the crowd of 50,000 spectators assembled in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Wednesday, Xi Jinping exuded an aura of confidence that many leaders in the west could only envy. To his left stood North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of an increasingly strident hermit kingdom. To his right was the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Xi’s “old friend” and China’s biggest ally in opposing the US-led world order. The last time that the leaders of these three countries were together in public was at the height of the cold war.
“Humanity once again faces the choice between peace or war, dialogue or confrontation,” the Chinese president told the gathered crowds. His insistence that China would “adhere to the path of peaceful development” was punctured somewhat by the country’s biggest ever military parade that marched through the square beneath his rostrum atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to the Forbidden City that has – on and off – been the seat of Chinese power since the 15th century.
Alongside Xi, Putin and Kim, a gaggle of global autocrats solemnly watched the display of Chinese military might.
The same day, more than 5,000 miles away, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his allies assembled in Paris for a summit on the future of Ukraine, a country that has been racked by war since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The “coalition of the willing”, led by the UK and France, did not include the US. The optics of the new global order could not be clearer: an anti-western bloc, helmed by China, on one side, and a western alliance of democracies, lacking its traditional leader in Washington, on the other.
China’s military parade, in which more than 10,000 soldiers marched in unison alongside a sabre-rattling lineup of nuclear-capable missiles and underwater drones, was designed to celebrate 80 years since the end of the second world war. The parade had two aims: to promote the Chinese Communist party’s narrative about its role in defeating the Japanese in 1945, and to display Beijing’s political and military might on the world stage in 2025. Both serve to underline the legitimacy and power of the party, helmed by Xi, at home and abroad.
Faced with a challenging domestic economy and a bruising trade war with the US, the parade was also a chance for China’s 72-year-old leader to whip up nationalism and provide what some analysts say is a much-needed distraction from China’s problems at home.
“This kind of event is never about building bridges,” said Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House. “It is more about building a political theatre to tell your own version of the story.”
In Washington DC, there was a growing sense of unease as Xi feted the leaders of some of the world’s most notable pariah states, including Russia, Iran and North Korea – a trio of countries that, along with China, has been described as “the axis of upheaval”. It is a consolidation of alliances that has been accelerated by Donald Trump’s use of political and economic pressure against his friends and foes around the world.
“It’s being perceived as an inflection point here in Washington, I think also in Europe too,” said Brian Hart, the deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Western governments are “seeing that Xi Jinping is doubling down on his relationships with these countries, despite concern around the world”.
Trump, who staged his own somewhat lacklustre military parade in Washington in June, quickly responded on social media.
“May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”
A Kremlin aide denied that any conspiring was taking place in Beijing. “No one has been plotting anything,” Yuri Ushakov said. “None of these three leaders had such a thought.”
Still, the show of unity among countries broadly sceptical of the US could not have been clearer.
While the concrete results of the parade and the ensuing meetings between the delegations were limited – and many analysts thought that any real agreements to collude among the US’s rivals would remain hidden – foreign policymakers such as the EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas warned in strident tones that the meeting was “an authoritarian alliance seeking a rapid process towards a new world order”.
But the “axis of upheaval” is riven by significant internal fractures, analysts said, and the propaganda effect may have been greater than the real threat to the international rules-based order.
“People in the west are freaking out, as if there is something that’s really big and meaningful and there is this alternative world order and everything,” said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “And I think that the major reason here is really the dysfunction brought into the western family by Donald Trump.”
A Chinese academic, who asked to remain anonymous, also said that there were cracks in the seemingly robust anti-west alliances, particularly between the two most powerful members: China and Russia.
China is “pretending to have a strong relationship with Russia to push back against pressure from the US and other western countries,” the academic said.
“China says there is ‘no limits’ to its relationship with Russia, but in practice, it hesitates, constantly looking over its shoulder, wary of pressure from the west, the EU and Nato.”
Although China has been criticised for providing economic and political support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, the academic noted that Moscow turned to Pyongyang, not Beijing, for extra boots on the ground. North Korea is thought to have supplied about 15,000 troops to the Russian armed forces – something that Putin thanked Kim for in Beijing.
Xi, thought to be keen to assert his dominance in the Russia-North Korea relationship, also held talks with Kim this week. The Chinese leader said China and North Korea were “good neighbours, good friends and good comrades”, according to North Korean state media.
The parade came shortly after the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit took place in Tianjin, a city that neighbours Beijing. The blandly named conference was another diplomatic coup for Beijing. Dozens of leaders travelled to China for the economic and security conference, which provided a forum for networking at a level normally seen only at the United Nations.
Most notable among the guests was India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose own relationship with China has been frosty owing to a border dispute and trade spats. Days after being hit with US tariffs of 50% as a punishment for buying Russian oil, Modi was tweeting in Russian about his “excellent” meeting with Putin in Tianjin.
But this week was not just about diplomacy. It was also about guns.
Wednesday’s parade was closely watched by military analysts for clues about the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s modernisation. China’s military uplift has in recent years made it a naval power and put it on track to be capable of a full-scale invasion of Taiwan and the potential war with the US that such an act might spark.
Several newly developed weapons and aircraft were revealed, including hypersonic missiles designed to take out ships at sea, underwater drones and electronic warfare planes that can fly with fighter jets to track moving targets for them while also drawing away fire. An unnamed aircraft that was either a real or mocked up stealth drone fighter also turned heads. Meanwhile, the appearance of new submarine-launched and road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles confirmed that China now has a solid and diverse delivery system for nuclear strikes – from land, air and sea.
“Did we know China had a nuclear triad? Yes, we did. But, that image really brings it home,” said Jennifer Parker, an adjunct fellow in naval studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.
“That capability sets China apart from other nuclear states, alongside Russia and the US.”
Still, analysts noted that none of China’s shiny new weapons have been tested in combat.
And diplomatically, Beijing still faces challenges. For all its talk of being a stable alternative to Washington, it’s economy is only 60% the size of the US, and its ongoing stability is reliant on agreeing a trade deal with Trump.
“China is far from being able, or willing, to replace the US as a global public goods provider,” said Alicja Bachulska, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Nevertheless, it is willing to exploit the current situation to build its image as a responsible and reliable partner, unlike the US under Donald Trump, and to capitalise on it.”
Additional research by Lillian Yang
Dressing to suit the occasion
In a show as tightly choreographed as China’s biggest ever military parade, it is a sure bet that Xi Jinping’s sartorial choice of suit was as carefully selected as the spotless uniforms of the president’s synchronised soldiers.
Xi presided over the 50,000 spectators in Tiananmen Square in an instantly recognisable “Mao suit”, chosen to signal the leader’s frugality and revolutionary spirit.
The simple, tunic-style jacket, with four pockets said to represent propriety, justice, honesty and humility, was first adopted by Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist revolutionary who helped to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Blending Chinese and western elements, the utilitarian jacket symbolised a rejection of imperial decadence. In Chinese, the suit is still known as a “Zhongshan suit”, after the name Sun is known by in China.
But to the outside world the outfit is better known as the Mao suit. Chairman Mao Zedong wore one to declare the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Since then, the suit has gone out of fashion among the masses, but it is still the outfit of choice for Xi when he wants to project authority as the vanguard of China’s Communist revolution.
The suit is “saturated [in] political meaning,” said Sari Arho Havrén, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “It commemorates the revolutionary past of the Communist party” and “shows the separation from the west”.
For day to day diplomacy, Xi tends to favour a western-style suit and tie. But for major events, such as when he attended a state banquet at Buckingham Palace in 2015, he dons the Mao suit.
Amy Hawkins
