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Waving beatifically over the crowd of 50,000 spectators assembled in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Wednesday, Xi Jinping exuded an aura of confidence that many leaders in the west could only envy. To his left stood North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of an increasingly strident hermit kingdom. To his right was the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Xi’s “old friend” and China’s biggest ally in opposing the US-led world order. The last time that the leaders of these three countries were together in public was at the height of the cold war.
“Humanity once again faces the choice between peace or war, dialogue or confrontation,” the Chinese president told the gathered crowds. His insistence that China would “adhere to the path of peaceful development” was punctured somewhat by the country’s biggest ever military parade that marched through the square beneath his rostrum atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to the Forbidden City that has – on and off – been the seat of Chinese power since the 15th century.
Alongside Xi, Putin and Kim, a gaggle of global autocrats solemnly watched the display of Chinese military might.
Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which provided a forum for networking at a level normally seen only at the United Nations. Photograph: Suo Takekuma/Reuters
The same day, more than 5,000 miles away, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his allies assembled in Paris for a summit on the future of Ukraine, a country that has been racked by war since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The “coalition of the willing”, led by the UK and France, did not include the US. The optics of the new global order could not be clearer: an anti-western bloc, helmed by China, on one side, and a western alliance of democracies, lacking its traditional leader in Washington, on the other.
China’s military parade, in which more than 10,000 soldiers marched in unison alongside a sabre-rattling lineup of nuclear-capable missiles and underwater drones, was designed to celebrate 80 years since the end of the second world war. The parade had two aims: to promote the Chinese Communist party’s narrative about its role in defeating the Japanese in 1945, and to display Beijing’s political and military might on the world stage in 2025. Both serve to underline the legitimacy and power of the party, helmed by Xi, at home and abroad.
Faced with a challenging domestic economy and a bruising trade war with the US, the parade was also a chance for China’s 72-year-old leader to whip up nationalism and provide what some analysts say is a much-needed distraction from China’s problems at home.
“This kind of event is never about building bridges,” said Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House. “It is more about building a political theatre to tell your own version of the story.”
The ‘coalition of the willing’ gather in Paris for a summit on the future of Ukraine. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/Shutterstock
In Washington DC, there was a growing sense of unease as Xi feted the leaders of some of the world’s most notable pariah states, including Russia, Iran and North Korea – a trio of countries that, along with China, has been described as “the axis of upheaval”. It is a consolidation of alliances that has been accelerated by Donald Trump’s use of political and economic pressure against his friends and foes around the world.
“It’s being perceived as an inflection point here in Washington, I think also in Europe too,” said Brian Hart, the deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Western governments are “seeing that Xi Jinping is doubling down on his relationships with these countries, despite concern around the world”.
Trump, who staged his own somewhat lacklustre military parade in Washington in June, quickly responded on social media.
“May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”
A Kremlin aide denied that any conspiring was taking place in Beijing. “No one has been plotting anything,” Yuri Ushakov said. “None of these three leaders had such a thought.”
Still, the show of unity among countries broadly sceptical of the US could not have been clearer.
While the concrete results of the parade and the ensuing meetings between the delegations were limited – and many analysts thought that any real agreements to collude among the US’s rivals would remain hidden – foreign policymakers such as the EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas warned in strident tones that the meeting was “an authoritarian alliance seeking a rapid process towards a new world order”.
‘This kind of event is never about building bridges,’ said Yu Jie, a senior research fellow at Chatham House. ‘It is more about building a political theatre to tell your own version of the story.’ Photograph: China News Service/Getty Images
But the “axis of upheaval” is riven by significant internal fractures, analysts said, and the propaganda effect may have been greater than the real threat to the international rules-based order.
“People in the west are freaking out, as if there is something that’s really big and meaningful and there is this alternative world order and everything,” said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “And I think that the major reason here is really the dysfunction brought into the western family by Donald Trump.”
