China marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II (WWII) with an orchestrated set of events designed to visualize how much the current world order has changed. It convened a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that included Xi Jinping’s announcement of a Global Governance Initiative (全球治理倡议 Quanqiu zhili changyi), and staged a massive military parade that highlighted the advanced technology of China’s armed forces. Donald Trump’s typically hostile and narcissistic reaction showed how successful it had been.
The end of WWII redefined the world order around the nation-states. Institutions of global governance were created to prevent future world wars. The United Nations Organization was an attempt to remedy the failures of the League of Nations. The Bretton Woods institutions, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, and successive global regulatory institutions, were meant to promote decolonization and eradicate the poverty that could lead to new wars. Despite these intentions, the structure of the UN Security Council and the governance of the Bretton Woods institutions were hijacked by the strategies of the Cold War. In a move that would cripple the UN, the five Allies who “won” the war—the U.S., the UK, France, the USSR, and the Republic of China—were made permanent members with veto power, ensuring their ability to protect their own national interests and those of their allies. (In 1949, the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan, but retained its seat on the Security Council. The People’s Republic of China was not allowed to represent China until 1971, when Richard Nixon pivoted toward the PRC as a counterweight to the USSR.)
China’s commemoration highlights an alternative vision of WWII and its aftermath, whose narrative had been hijacked by Cold War ideologies. Europe commemorated the eightieth anniversary on V-E Day, 8 May, the day of the German surrender, although Russia commemorated it on 9 May, because of the time difference. The US and Asian countries commemorated it on 2 September, the day that Japan surrendered. Nor is there any agreement on when WWII began. For the European Allies, it was 1 September 1939. For the U.S., it was 7 December 1941. For the then Republic of China, it was 19 September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or 7 July 1937, when Japan invaded China. For the Allies, the turning point of the war in Europe were the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944. For Russia, it was the Battle of Stalingrad, 17 July 1942 – 2 February 1943. The amount of suffering varied greatly as well, with the number of Russian or Chinese casualties far exceeding those of the Western Allies.
Such discrepancies in the narrative are not trivial. Trump reacted angrily to the Chinese commemoration. “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America,” he wrote to Xi and “Many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory. I hope that they are rightfully Honored and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice!”. The discrepancy between Trump’s version of the War in the Pacific and China’s interpretation is very pertinent to the symbolic meaning of Beijing’s commemoration. The standard U.S. line recognizes the role of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government—the official Republic of China at the time, and the recipient of massive U.S. military aid—and denigrates the contribution of the Communist “bandits,” despite the fact that by late 1936 a United Front had been established against Japan.
Military historians agree that Chinese engagement with Japanese occupying forces sequestered a significant portion of Tokyo’s military capacity that would otherwise have been available to combat the U.S. in the Pacific, thereby saving American lives and shortening the war. Yet U.S. military and diplomatic advisers on the ground, like Gen Joseph Stillwell or John S. Service, recognized that Chiang was hoarding his arms and holding back from engaging with the Japanese forces to prepare for a coming civil war with the Communists, who, by contrast, gained popular support precisely because they did engage with the Japanese. They were ignored.
When the Communists won the civil war in 1949, a hysterical debate about the “loss of China” broke out in the U.S., led in part by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a major architect of the mid-century “Red Scare” phenomenon that eerily anticipated what is happening today under the Trump regime.
Noam Chomsky wrote that the terminology “loss of China” is revealing: “It is only possible to lose something that one owns. The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world, much as postwar planners assumed,” and called it “the first major step in ‘America’s decline’.” Historian Maochun Yu has written that “the questions asked and the issues debated often reflected American partisan politics and policy spins rather than Chinese reality,” a problem that continues to plague the West’s response to China’s role in the world today.
“China’s Xi, flanked by Putin and Kim, holds military parade in defiance of West,” wrote Reuters, while Bloomberg called it “a historic show of united defiance against the US-led world order.” Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fonatine have labelled this in Foreign Affairs the “Axis of Upheaval”. Dennis Staunton explains “Why the West misreads the room with its ‘Axis of Upheaval’ narrative”: “The problem with this analysis is that the emerging alternative order is neither an axis, nor is it interested in upheaval. When Iran was attacked by the US and Israel this year, the other members of this putative axis looked the other way. In addition, although China has given Russia diplomatic and economic support during the war in Ukraine, it has not offered military help.”
The SCO summit convened ten Member states, seventeen Partners, and four guests, including ASEAN and the UN. In demographic and economic terms, it represented most of the world’s population and the largest share of its economy. It did not include the U.S., NATO, the EU, South Korea, or Japan. This, together with the BRICS grouping and the G20—the Global South—represents a loose but evolving alternative to the Bretton Woods world order. For these states, Ukraine and Gaza are not priority concerns; far more pressing are U.S. and EU sanctions, especially secondary sanctions.
The U.S.-dominated Bretton Woods world order long justified itself by guaranteeing stability and growth, albeit “trickle down” growth that maintained the predominance of the “West”. The Trump regime has changed everything. The EU and the U.S. accused China of being a revisionist country out to destroy the “rules-based order”. It is the U.S. that has thrown those rules out the window, abdicating to China the role of guarantor of stability and order.
What the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) seeks are new rules to that order, rules more favourable to the development of the Global South. The context of the GGI is the parallel history of the Cold War: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of 121 countries—which positioned themselves outside both NATO and the Warsaw Pact—founded in Yugoslavia in 1961 but based on the principles of the Bandung Conference of 1955. These are the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (和平共处五项原则 Heping gongchu wu xiang yuanze) that were first announced as principles of Chinese foreign policy by Zhou Enlai in 1953, reiterated jointly with Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and co-operation for mutual benefit; and peaceful co-existence.
Xi’s GGI is the fourth in a series of global initiatives announced in recent years, the others dealing with security, development, and civilization. Together, they are stages in a strategy Xi calls a “community of common destiny for mankind” (人类命运共同体 renlei mingyun gongtongti). The Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant had a theory of global governance based on the concept of “universal reason”. The modern Chinese reformist Kang Youwei proposed a theory of global governance based on Confucian principles. Contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang also draws on Confucian principles to propose a world order based on “one world” (天下 Tianxia).
Xi´s GGI builds on this lineage, outlining five guiding principles: adhering to sovereign equality, abiding by international rule of law, practicing multilateralism, advocating a people-centred approach, and focusing on taking real actions. The GGI Concept Paper elaborates on these principles and their application. At the SCO summit, Xi stressed that “Global governance has come to a new crossroads.” By emphasizing that “all countries, regardless of size, strength, and wealth, are equal participants, decision-makers, and beneficiaries in global governance,” he denounced “no double standards” and declared that “the house rules of a few countries must not be imposed upon others.”
Trump’s erratic and capricious use of tariffs, sanctions, and secondary sanctions, and exceptionalism to dictate or alter the policy of sovereign foreign states are all examples of imposing one’s own house rules on others—trying to impede the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro or Benjamin Netanyahu, or to force Mexico and the EU to place punitive tariffs on Chinese exports. His “America First” is incompatible with global cooperation on the climate crisis or the eradication of poverty and inequality. Ignoring the International Criminal Court by hosting Vladimir Putin or Netanyahu and the agreement that based the UN headquarters in New York by denying visas to foreign diplomats shows nothing but contempt for international norms or cooperation, making America progressively less great and abdicating to China the role of offering a more rational and mutually beneficial alternative to international cooperation. The increasingly autocratic nature of the Trump regime weakens criticism of the autocratic nature of the Chinese regime and allows Xi to take the high ground by calling for “greater global cooperation to better tackle the common challenges for mankind, better narrow the North-South gap, and better safeguard the common interests of all countries.”
Robert Kaplan recently suggested that “Donald Trump can read the mobile phone, but he does not know history, he does not read books.” Whereas Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were able to see that the PRC and the USSR were not a monolithic block and could alter their foreign policy accordingly to drive a wedge between them, Trump’s mishandling of Narendra Modi pushes India and China closer together. The situation is fluid. Whereas the West assumes that China wants to usurp its dominance and power, confusing the beam in their own eye for the mote in China’s, Dennis Staunton suggests that “The defiance towards the West on display … is not a sign of the emergence of a new bloc to counter the US and its allies. It is evidence that much of the world outside the US and Europe recognises a new, multipolar reality and wants to adapt the international system into one that can accommodate it.”
Cover image: In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, (L-R) Russia’s President Vladimir Putin walks with China’s President Xi Jinping and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un before a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on September 3, 2025. (Photo by Sergey Bobylev / POOL / AFP)
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