CHINA-RUSSIA: 70TH ANNIVERSARY PARADE OF WW-II
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China was represented at the 70th anniversary parade of WW-II in Moscow by a 102-strong Honour Guard whose average height was six foot. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his wife were in the audience. The honor guard gave a rousing rendition of the Russian wartime ballad “Katyusha” during a parade rehearsal in Russia—the clip of the singing has been viewed more than 16.5 million times on Chinese video-sharing website Youku. Four Chinese citizens were to carry portraits of their ancestors or relatives and join the proceedings in Moscow’s Red Square. The four were: Liu Aiqin, daughter of former president Liu Shaoqi; Liu Li, granddaughter of general Zhu De; Li Duoli, son of former Heilongjiang governor Li Fanwu, and Liu Xia, the first Russian broadcaster in state-owned broadcaster China Radio International. Li Min, Mao Zedong’s daughter, was scheduled to march, but withdrew owing to an illness.
The Chinese regime’s enthusiastic participation in Russia’s Victory Parade comes as its military ties with Moscow are growing; China and Russia held joint naval exercises recently, and China is buying Russian missiles.
In a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin on May 8, Xi JInping said that the celebrations “are aimed at remembering history and paying tribute to martyrs,” according to Xinhua.
(Comment: Interestingly, former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai wrote to Josef Stalin in a 1940 secret report that the CCP would support “the key position of the Kuomintang in leading the organs of power and the army throughout the country.” He also noted that as of August 1939, only 3 percent of the over a million Chinese who died in combat were CCP forces. Analysts found the choice of those representing China intriguing as: General Zhu De, who is represented by his granddaughter, was a “figurehead who listened to Mao” and “didn’t do much during the war nor was part of a decision making process,”; Liu Shaoqi, once Mao’s hand picked successor, had his family torn apart during the Cultural Revolution; Liu’s daughter Liu Aiqin, who received an honorary medal from Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War,” recounted calmly to Chinese media the death of her father in detention, her elder brother’s suicide on a railway track, the jailing of her younger brother, who nearly became insane from torture, and how her second husband left her at the most difficult time of her life; former Heilongjiang provincial governor Li Fanwu was denounced as a “capitalist roader” and hazed because his haircut was too similar to Mao’s during the Cultural Revolution. Li Fanwu was later purged and criticized over two thousand times; and Liu Xia is very little known.)
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