Special to WorldTribune.com

China issued a warning to Japan after parliament in Tokyo passed two landmark bills allowing Japanese troops to fight abroad for the first time since World War II, 70 years ago.

China plans to mark the end of World War II in the Pacific theater with a large-scale military parade even though the Chinese Communist Party was at the time more focused on defeating the Nationalist Chinese who did the bulk of the fighting against Japanese forces in World War II.

The new laws would permit the Japanese government to deploy soldiers abroad in UN peacekeeping missions and for collective defense, in alliances such as with the U.S. and Australia, and in the face of a direct threat to Japanese security.

Ironically the primary impetus for the shift in Japan’s strategic posture from that of a pacifist nation following World War II is China itself and the burgeoning military power which the communist party in Beijing is moving to project throughout its maritime neighborhood in the west Pacific and the South China Sea.

“It is fully justified to ask if Japan is going to give up its exclusively defense-oriented policy,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. “We solemnly urge the Japanese side to … refrain from jeopardizing China’s sovereignty and security interests or crippling regional peace and stability.”

Japan’s lower house of parliament approved the two bills despite widespread political controversy. Parties opposed to the measures staged a walkout before the vote and tens of thousands of protesters demonstrated outside parliament.

The outcome of the vote was not in doubt, though, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) controls two-thirds of the seats in the lower house. The legislation now goes before the upper house, where the LDP and its allies are also in the majority.

The vote comes amid heightened tensions with China, which regularly criticizes Abe, accusing him of staging a return to its militaristic past.

Referring to the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in what Beijing calls “the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression,” Hua said: “We solemnly urge the Japanese side to draw hard lessons from history.”

Beijing’s official Xinhua news agency said of the Japanese vote: “A nightmare scenario has come a step closer for Japanese people and neighboring nations,” adding the bills would “tarnish the reputation of a nation that has earned international respect for its pacifist constitution over a period of nearly seven decades.”

  Japan’s lower house shocks China, LDP, lower parliament, passes landmark legislation allowing its troops to fight abroad, Shinzo Abe, WorldTribune.com