Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com

China’s big show in Beijing is over, but its impact may not be as deep and far-reaching as forecast and hoped for.

The soldiers have pranced around Tiananmen Square, the planes have swept overhead and President Xi Jinping has basked in glory 70 years after the defeat of Japanese forces that marauded the Chinese mainland for decades.

Yes, President Park Geun-Hye chatted with President Xi about North Korea, but it’s unlikely they’ve resolved any underlying problems. China remains North Korea’s only ally, its benefactor and protector. The Chinese, the source of all North Korea’s oil, may refuse to give the North enough to fuel a war, but they will keep the North on life-support while Kim Jong-Un asserts his power with rhetorical flourishes that no one takes too seriously.

Yes, having pressured North Korea to come to face-saving terms with the South in prolonged negotiations at Panmunjom after Kim had declared a “semi-state of war,” China may go on pressuring for six-party talks, suspended nearly seven years ago, on the North’s nuclear program. They won’t get anywhere, though, since North Korea has proclaimed its right to nuclear weapons in its constitution.

The most anyone can hope for is that North Korea does not stage a fourth nuclear test. China, however, may not want to force the issue by seriously slowing the flow of oil, food and other supplies into the North.

For China, the anniversary show was an affirmation of its growing supremacy as Asia’s biggest, most feared power. President Park’s presence dramatized the supreme importance South Korea attaches to the Chinese relationship even while closely allied with the United States for more than six decades after the U.S., Republic of Korea and soldiers from 14 other countries came together under the U.N. banner, battling Chinese “people’s volunteers” after Kim Il-Sung’s army lost most of the north.

Just because Kim Jong-Un did not attend the events in Beijing does not mean China isn’t dedicated to the North’s interest over those of the South. Kim has not left North Korea since assuming power after the death of his father, Kim Jong-Il, nearly five years ago. He visited Beijing at least once while his father was alive, and he was educated in schools in Switzerland, where he learned French and German.

President Xi is said to have spurned hints the young man might like to see him. Certainly they’re not getting along well as lesser Chinese dare advise their North Korean contacts on what to do.

Whatever happens, though, Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang rests on the strategic necessity of North Korea as a buffer against Japan and the U.S., not on Kim’s rapport with Xi.

As the display fades from memory, harsh realities remain. China is in the throes of economic turmoil that has roiled markets and economies worldwide.

The country faces unrest as seen in protests and uprisings by ethnic minorities and in rising class warfare 65 years after the Communist revolution was to have produced an egalitarian society. Corruption is pervasive while the rich get richer and the poor remain mired in poverty.

In affirming the historic role of “The Middle Kingdom” before whom vassal states, including ancient Joseon, paid homage, Xi Jinping may have deepened divisions with other powers.

Japan, whose defeat was celebrated, responded indignantly to news that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon would attend the anniversary parade.

The U.S. was officially polite, but President Obama turned down his invitation as did the leaders of all the other Western powers. By contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin, straddling the line between West and East, was on hand, a living reminder of how close the two nations were in the era of hard-line Communist rule in both China and the Soviet Union before the Sino-Soviet split.

Amid such memories, however, hypersensitive historical points were brushed aside. No one mentioned why war against Japan ended as it did. The surrender of the Japanese to the Americans after the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a detail the Chinese don’t stress. Nor do they note that Chiang Kai-shek’s “Nationalist” Chinese, the Kuomintang, did most of the fighting against the Japanese, before Mao Zedong’s Red Army defeated Chiang’s forces nearly four years later.

Certainly no one, aside from pesky journalists, would have been so impolite as to evoke memories of Chinese volunteers, little more than a year later, guaranteeing survival of the Kim Il-Sung regime.

Talk of such harsh realities would definitely have upset the rapport between President Xi and his honored guests, especially President Park. By sweeping less pleasant facts of history under the rug, though, they may have hurt the cause of lasting peace.

China has to recognize that the U.S. and Japan are major powers with whom it must cooperate as much as compete with. South Korea may do well to look for a pivotal role, but China’s grand parade was as much a cover-up as a celebration ― glorification of a regime that teeters uneasily among conflicting forces both at home and abroad.

Donald Kirk has been covering war and peace in Asia for decades. He’s at kirkdon4343@gmail.com.

  The Middle Kingdom’s glory day, WorldTribune.com