Back in the days of the Roman Empire, during parades in their honour Roman commanders used to have someone standing behind them whispering ‘Remember you are mortal’ to prevent the pomp and pageantry going to their heads.
So, as Xi Jinping watched his massed military goose step through Tiananmen Square it’s very useful for him to have had the embodiment of authoritarian overreach and military hubris right there beside him the in the person of Vladimir Putin. Even if he wasn’t whispering.
Xi hosted Mr Putin, along with Kim Jong Un, Iran’s President Pezeshkian and pretty much every other authoritarian strongman willing to leave their fiefdom—as well as inviting two Australian former statesmen, Dan Andrews and Bob Carr —to watch thousands of People’s Liberation Army personnel towing, driving and flying hundreds of pieces of gleaming green and red military hardware parade through and over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. (Mr Andrews stayed for the authoritarian leaders’ yearbook photoshoot, while Mr Carr decided to be in Beijing but not at the parade…..)
As usual with authoritarian strongmen, this year’s parade had massed military personnel marching with impeccable precision in freshly-pressed outfits. And it displayed powerful and novel weapons. The purpose is familiar: to portray Xi as the Great and Powerful Oz against whom none can stand – without any of that unhelpful Roman-style whispering about how pride comes before a fall.
Unusually for an American President, Donald Trump engaged in this type of display of US military power in Washington DC earlier this year. His parade was apparently about celebrating the US Army’s 250th birthday, not his own that fell on the same day. Strongmen love a parade.
Back in May, Vladimir Putin used his own annual parade as Xi just has – with Russian Iskander ballistic missiles accompanied by nuclear weapons, battle tanks and a sprinkling of the latest Iranian and Chinese-derived drones along with hypersonic missiles, and advanced Sukhoi and Mig fighters flying overhead.
Xi Jinping echoed all this with his own event. Putin had 20 world leaders at his parade. Xi one-upping him by having 26. He’s shown off the PLA’s DF-17 long range anti-ship missiles (nicknamed the ‘carrier killer’), as well as DF-61 nuclear capable intercontinental missiles.
Tanks rumbled through Beijing’s streets too, although, unlike in 1989 when they crushed Chinese democracy protesters, today they were watched by large numbers of internal security personnel and carefully vetted spectators and VIPs.
And, following the strongman recipe, we saw the Chinese military reveal some new tech, including a variety of armed and stealth drones, new hypersonic missiles, mobile laser air defence systems, along with its latest J-20 and J-35 combat aircraft. This was to tell us all that Xi’s army has built a high tech military not just a large one.
The Chinese propaganda machine has been at warp speed to create the narrative that just like the Communist Party’s victory over Japan in World War Two, China and its parade friends will be victorious in modern conflicts and struggles. That story has the fatal flaw of being largely untrue: it was Chinese Nationalist forces that did the hardest and most fighting against Japan in their 1937-45 war. Mao’s Communist forces saved themselves to fight the civil war against the depleted Nationalists.
Interestingly, Mao’s forces succeeded in the civil war by not fighting just as a conventional force, but by using guerilla and insurgency tactics and what we now call asymmetric warfare. It wasn’t conventional military power that led to the Communist victory in 1949.
That’s a message that have disturbed Xi as he watched his gleaming People’s Liberation Army. He has set his military the top priority mission of conquering Taiwan’s 24 million people and assimilating the island democracy into mainland China under Party control. Xi probably prefers a relatively peaceful takeover – like Hong Kong – but he has said multiple times that he’s willing to use force if necessary – and if he thinks he will win easily and quickly.
But as Putin knows, even the largest, seemingly well-equipped, militaries can have wonderful parades and fail disastrously in war when they are faced with capable, courageous and innovative opponents who refuse to lose or fight the way their enemy prefers.
If the lessons of Chinese history around asymmetry and insurgency aren’t enough for Xi, then the Ukraine war is another dose of sobering reality, because of the additional difficulties out of Taiwan’s location and the parallels between features of the Taiwanese and Ukrainian economies and populations.
Putin had easy, wide access to Ukraine for his invasion because of the lengthy land border they share. Xi’s military faces a rough body of water between them and Taiwan that at its narrowest is about 130km wide, with limited landing places on a mountainous main island after that. That’s a big difference presenting a powerful obstacle.
But the parallels were maybe more disruptive and disturbing for Xi as he chatted with his good friend Mr Putin.
Like Ukraine, Taiwan is filled with highly educated people with technical capabilities that are valuable in peacetime but turn out to be critical in wartime. Ukraine was a technology and industrial centre from aeronautics to space inside the Soviet Union and retained that mastery after independence in the 1990s.
Taiwan is a – perhaps the – global centre of expertise for digital technologies as well as a capable high technology manufacturing centre. Like Ukraine, its people value their freedoms and understand what would be lost if they were governed by the authoritarian power next door. Like Ukraine, there is the obvious potential for these features of Taiwanese capability and society to be turned to military uses during a war.
The lesson of the Ukraine war as it approaches its fourth year is that smaller defenders who are fighting for their nation’s survival and their freedoms can stalemate and frustrate even a major power’s forces. And Ukraine has shown that military power created through rapid development and production of weapons based on commercial digital technologies can give a decisive edge to smaller defending forces. Ukraine’s military and its supporting industrial base are now the most powerful and creative in Europe.
Taiwan has parallel strengths in the digital tech sectors to apply these lessons quickly and at scale.
Worse still for Xi’s ambitions and for everyone in his PLA parade teams, Ukraine and Taiwan are cooperating closely on lessons and approaches. Xi and Putin are certainly also cooperating, with Chinese production, supplies and cash keeping Russia’s military in the war. But the speed of innovation and development Ukraine and its partners have achieved has continued to outpace Russia’s – with the cause being both motivation for survival and the creativity in free societies.
The parade was full of pomp and glitz and practiced and drilled for weeks to be predictable and clean. As Putin has discovered though, war is none of those things.
A version of this article was first published in the Financial Review.