Xi shows his muscles in the big military parade

In 2015, the military parade for the 70th anniversary of the victory over Japan came as a shock to the whole world. The anniversary of the victorious resistance to Japanese aggression, capable, in the Chinese vulgate, of bringing the country back to the top of the international community, was celebrated with great pomp in a Beijing red-hot and empty as an eggshell, for security reasons. Xi Jinping, in power for just three years, former Field Commander of Defence, announced from the stage in Tian Anmen Square with a giant portrait of Mao Zedong underneath him the reform of the Armed Forces, a drastic cut of 300,000 to make it 'a modern corps capable of winning a war'.

Since then, China's defence budget has been increasing steadily, up to 7.5% in 2025, among the world's first in the sector. Next to him was Russian President Vladimir Putin who had just trespassed in Crimea, absent Kim Jong un, to spite South Korean President Park Geun-hye had dispatched envoy Choe Ryong-hae. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was there, as well as Sudanese Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a personal capacity. Xi wanted his wife Peng Liyuan next to him and, as a sign of continuity, the old guard, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, former prime ministers Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, Wen Jiabao, later decimated by age and internal feuds, a court that is no longer needed, indeed. Even then, the parade was proof of the purge at the top of the People's Liberation Army, with high-ranking military personnel such as Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, former vice president of the Central Military Commission, absent from the roll call.

Xi Jinping paraded among the twelve thousand military personnel lined up in a Sedan, paying tribute to the troops for their hard work, who hailed him with a "Hello Commander! We serve the people!" Deployed 500 heavy vehicles including the DF-21D anti-aircraft carrier ballistic missiles, J-15 carrier-borne fighters, amphibious vehicles and new drones, the DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles, with a range of 15,000 kilometres and the DF-26 medium-range ones of 'only' 4,000 kilometres with anti-ship capability but with an even greater range than the DF-21D, the WZ-19 attack helicopters, the H-6K bomber copy of the Russian Tupolev Tu-16, the 99°2 tanks, as well as artillery pieces and combat vehicles.

In between, in 2019, there was the military parade for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, another show of fifteen thousand soldiers divided into 59 phalanxes, but already the old Russian- or Ukrainian-made contraptions had been shelved replaced by Made in China, with the debut of the DF-41, the Dongfeng intercontinental hypersonic nuclear missile, the 30-metre-long 'wind from the East'. The JL-2, the ballistic missile that can be launched from the navy's nuclear-powered submarines, and, the icing on the cake, the H-6NA bomber known as the 'carrier-killer', were also reinforced.

Today, the game, even technological, is getting tougher if possible, even at the foreign and domestic policy and military level, with means to satisfy the finest defence palates.