The forgotten truths of 1945 resurface — Koreans who fought in Mao’s ranks, collaborators who prospered in Seoul, and an American narrative that never fit the facts.
On September 3, Beijing will stage a Victory Day parade to mark the eightieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. Tens of thousands of troops will goose-step across Tiananmen Square; squadrons of aircraft and columns of tanks will roll past the reviewing stand. Xi Jinping will preside, with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un — his daughter in tow — occupying seats of honor. The irony is almost too thick to cut.
This pageant commemorates the end of the Pacific War, yet the roles of Russia and Korea were not as peripheral as Western memory often suggests. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, when Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov informed the Japanese ambassador in Moscow.
On August 9, the Red Army launched a massive invasion of Manchuria on three fronts, fulfilling Stalin’s pledge at the Yalta Conference of February 1945 to enter the war within three months of Germany’s defeat. But in the Chinese view, it was not only Soviet steel that mattered in Manchuria.
Koreans had been fighting for years in Mao’s armies, and by 1945 a majority of his guerrillas in the northeast were Korean partisans. Far from marginal, their contribution was woven into the very fabric of China’s resistance — a fact largely erased in the Cold War histories told to Americans.
Kim Il Sung, later the founding leader of North Korea, rose directly from these partisan ranks. His credentials rested not on Moscow’s favor but on years of leading cross-border raids against Japanese forces. That legacy mattered deeply to the Chinese: the blood shed by Koreans in Manchuria bound the two revolutions together. When Kim Jong Un now arrives in Beijing, in a train outfitted with French wine and lobster, the symbolism reaches back to those days when Korean fighters were anything but bystanders in China’s long war of resistance.
Meanwhile, south of the thirty-eighth parallel, the story was very different. Many of the men who would later run the Republic of Korea collaborated with the Japanese colonial state — policing their neighbors, staffing the bureaucracy, or profiting from wartime industries. After 1945, the Cold War inverted these realities. Washington needed Seoul as its client state, so collaboration was overlooked, even rewarded, while Kim Il Sung’s anti-Japanese record was buried beneath the label of communist villainy. The American narrative cast South Korea as heroic and North Korea as criminal, but the deeper record shows that the partisan tradition of resistance lived in the North, while a collaborator class entrenched itself in the South.
India’s story adds another irony the parade will not acknowledge. In 1945 it was not Modi’s India, proud and independent, but the Raj — a British colony whose soldiers fought and died in Burma, Malaya, and the jungles of the Pacific. Indian divisions were crucial in halting Japanese advances, yet today New Delhi’s leader rides to the parade alongside Putin, not under the Union Jack. History turns quickly; remembrance is more selective still.
The Chinese themselves, however, have an unimpeachable claim to this commemoration. From the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937 until the bombs fell in 1945, China endured an occupation of unrivaled brutality. Tens of millions died, villages were torched, and entire cities starved. To march across Tiananmen Square in 2025 is to assert that China’s suffering — and its victory — were not secondary to the American narrative of Midway and MacArthur, but central to the defeat of Japan.
Yet even here irony intrudes. The reviewing stand overlooks the very square where, in 1989, Chinese tanks rolled against their own people. The “Victory Day” parade reveals as much about present power as past sacrifice. Beijing is not merely remembering the end of World War II; it is announcing, with martial precision, that it has arrived as the region’s unchallenged military power.
Most Western leaders will stay away, citing Russia’s war in Ukraine. Their absence is a reminder that commemoration is never innocent. Victory Day in Beijing is less about 1945 than about 2025: about China’s tightening embrace with Moscow and Pyongyang, about Southeast Asian leaders lining up to be counted, about India hedging its bets.
For Americans, the irony is sharpest of all. The Pacific War ended with the U.S. Navy anchored in Tokyo Bay. Eight decades later, the victory is celebrated in Beijing, with American leaders conspicuously absent — a drama in which the authors of surrender are reduced to spectators, watching from afar.
