(Op-Ed Analysis) On September 3 this year, Beijing filled Tiananmen Square with missiles, tanks, and goose-stepping soldiers to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II.
President Xi Jinping used the occasion to remind the world that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had “led the people to victory” against fascism.
It was a powerful display. It was also a fiction.
The truth is that Mao Zedong’s Communists played only a marginal role in defeating Japan.
The real fighting—and the real dying—was done by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and China’s civilian population, aided by the United States, Britain, and, in the final weeks, the Soviet Union.
The myth
For decades, the CCP has taught that its guerrilla armies were the “pillar of resistance” against Japan.
Every schoolchild in China learns that Mao’s partisans tied down Japanese divisions and mobilized the countryside for a “people’s war.”
This narrative has become foundational to the Party’s claim to legitimacy: it rules because it “saved” China.
Yet wartime records tell a different story. Of the 23 major battles fought in China, the Communists played a part in just one¹.
Out of roughly 40,000 skirmishes, their forces accounted for barely half of one percent².
Even Zhou Enlai, Mao’s trusted lieutenant, admitted privately in 1940 that less than three percent of Chinese casualties came from Communist units³.
The reality
Mao understood that confronting Japan head-on would risk annihilation. Instead, he pursued a strategy of survival: avoiding decisive battles, consolidating Communist-controlled villages, and expanding his army while others fought.
Propaganda turned small ambushes into epic victories, helping to recruit peasants disillusioned with the Nationalists.
By 1945, the CCP had grown from a few tens of thousands of fighters into more than a million—without having fought many of the war’s hardest battles⁴.
More damning still, archival evidence shows that Mao’s envoys made quiet overtures to Japanese officers.
Pan Hannian, a senior Communist agent, passed stolen Nationalist intelligence to the Japanese in exchange for money and breathing space⁵.
In 1941, Mao even floated a truce: the Communists would stop harassing Japanese troops so long as Tokyo focused its fire on Chiang Kai-shek⁶.
Who really stopped Japan
It was Chiang’s Nationalists who tied down the bulk of Japan’s army—nearly 70 percent of its divisions by 1941⁷.
Their troops fought brutal battles at Shanghai, Wuhan, and Changsha, losing millions of men. American pilots flew supplies over the Himalayas; British and Indian troops fought in Burma; and U.S. Marines and sailors clawed their way across the Pacific.
The final blow came when the Soviet Union crushed Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria⁸. When the surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri, the CCP was a bystander.
Why the myth endures
When the Communists won the civil war in 1949, they faced an awkward fact: their claim to power came from defeating fellow Chinese, not from defeating Japan.
So they rewrote history. Textbooks minimized Nationalist sacrifices, erased inconvenient evidence, and elevated every Communist ambush into a national triumph.
Today, questioning that narrative inside China is condemned as “historical nihilism.”
The myth serves three purposes. Domestically, it binds the Party’s rule to national pride. Internationally, it keeps pressure on Japan, which Beijing accuses of failing to face history.
And symbolically, it portrays the CCP as the inheritor of an antifascist victory, legitimizing its authoritarianism as historically necessary.
Why it matters now
This is not just a quarrel over the past. By claiming a victory it did not win, the CCP cloaks itself in borrowed legitimacy to justify its power today.
Xi Jinping’s parade was less about 1945 than about projecting strength in 2025: linking the supposed triumph of Mao’s guerrillas to China’s modern arsenal.
History, however, matters. The Party that says it defeated Japan did not. The Party that says it saved China spent much of the war preparing to seize it.
Recognizing this truth does not diminish the courage of ordinary Chinese who resisted occupation—it restores it to those who actually fought and died.
The CCP has built one of its greatest myths on World War II. For the rest of the world, and for future generations of Chinese, separating propaganda from reality is not just a scholarly exercise.
It is a reminder that a regime willing to falsify its past will not hesitate to distort its present.
Read the full in-depth research by riotimesonline.com here.
Sources
- Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2013)
- The Diplomat, “China’s WWII Propaganda” (2015).
- Zhou Enlai’s 1940 report to Stalin, cited in Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters (Stanford, 2003).
- Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (2005).
- Endo Homare, Japanese archival research on CCP–Japan contacts, summarized in Voice of America (2016).
- Iwai Eiichi, Memories of Shanghai (Japanese diplomatic memoirs, 1950s).
- U.S. War Department, Reports on the China Theater, 1941–45.
- Soviet General Staff, The Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945 (translated reports).