By Owen Schalk
Oct 1-15, 2025 People’s Voice (Canada)
On September 3, the People’s Republic of China celebrated the 80th anniversary of its victory over Japanese fascism. The resistance began September 18, 1931 with the Mukden Incident – a false flag operation that Japan organized as a pretext to invade and occupy China’s Manchuria region – and ended fourteen years later with the Chinese people’s victory
The Chinese resistance, which constituted the eastern theatre of what the government calls the “World Anti-Fascist War,” resulted in massive military and civilian casualties – as much as 35 million by some counts. The Communist Party of China (CPC) played the leading role in the national resistance to Japanese expansionism.
On the 80th anniversary of the triumph over fascism, China hosted a spectacular victory parade, attended by family members and descendants of resistance fighters and twenty world leaders from around the globe, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. The CPC used the anniversary to look backward, honouring the immense sacrifices of the Chinese people in defeating fascism, but also to look forward, to- ward a global vision of peace and development that contrasts sharply with the United States’ ongoing descent into violence, lawlessness and impunity.
During the victory parade, Xi Jinping proclaimed that China sacrificed tens of millions of its people “for the salvation of human civilization and the defense of world peace.” China’s leader asserted that his country would continue to work toward “peaceful development” and the construction of “a community with a shared future for humanity.”
The Tianjin Declaration
Two days prior to the victory parade, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) gathered in Tianjin for its largest-ever summit. With a cumulative economic output of $30 trillion, the SCO is the world’s largest regional organization consisting of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz- stan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus. It is thus highly significant that the SCO’s Tianjin Declaration stresses the need for a peaceful, multipolar, UN-centric world order that sheds the blunt unilateralism that increasingly characterizes US and Western foreign policy.
The document reads:
“Member States advocate respect for the right of peoples to independently and democratically choose their own paths of political and socio-economic development, and emphasize that the principles of mutual respect for sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity of states, equality, mutual benefit, non-interference in internal affairs and non-use of force or threat of force are the basis for the sustainable development of international relations.”
China’s current vision of international development, one characterized by peace and non-exclusion, evidently appeals to the global majority. For decades on end, the world has been forced to watch or directly suffer violent interventions by US- led imperialism, undertaken at the behest of a codependent knot of Western corporate interests and narrow-minded political elites. These interventions have killed tens of millions.
According to the Watson School for International and Public Affairs, the US-led “Global War on Terror” killed over 4.5 million people and displaced millions more. Meanwhile, research conducted by Lancet medical journal found that US and European Union sanctions have killed 38 million people since 1970.
Given the tremendous devastation caused by Western warmongering and weaponization of financial institutions, it is hardly surprising that alternative forms of international cooperation championed by China, including the SCO and BRICS, are gaining influence each year.
The Tianjin Declaration of September 1, 2025 paid homage to those who fought against global fascism during the Second World War. “The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of Victory in World War II and the creation of the United Nations (UN),” the declaration states. “The Great Victory, which was made possible by the unity of the peoples of all peace-loving countries in their opposition to Nazism, fascism and militarism, determined the further course of world history.”
During China’s victory parade two days later, Xi Jinping warned that “humanity is again faced with a choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, and win-win outcomes or zero-sum games.” Any reasoned analysis of global affairs bares the essential fact that the powers stoking war, confrontation and zero-sum games are not China and the global majority, but US imperialism and its allies including Canada.
US Wars of Hegemony
Washington’s efforts to maintain its waning hegemony have been marked by appalling bloodshed and destabilization. The Israeli genocide in Gaza, backed by the US and Western governments, aims to secure one of Washington’s most valued imperial outposts. Destroying the Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonialism, and weakening Iran and its regional allies, will permit the US to reorient its military resources toward a coming war with China. US author Thomas Friedman described this regional agenda as “the Biden doctrine.” It is also the Trump doctrine.
The US has affirmed – through the mass slaughter of Palestinians and the bombing of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran – that it is more than willing to deploy enormous violence in order to subjugate the region to US-Israeli hegemony.
Meanwhile, the US government has intensified its attacks on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The latest phase represents a perilous convergence of two devastating logics of war: the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror.” The Trump administration’s designation of drug cartels as “terrorist organizations,” and its baseless assertion that the Venezuelan government heads a transnational cartel, seems designed to justify forthcoming strikes against the South American country.
The drug trafficking accusations are, of course, groundless – one would do better to look at Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa, who has been directly accused of involvement in cocaine trafficking to Europe through his family’s globe-spanning banana business. Noboa, however, is a staunch ally of US imperialism, so his suspect business conduct gets a pass.
A US intervention against Venezuela would be a criminal war of aggression designed to reassert US hegemony over the Western hemisphere. As Nick Corbishley writes:
“How many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been ruined by the US and Israel’s Global War on Terror? How many lives destroyed? How many more “terrorists” created? The Empire of Chaos ripped asunder an entire region, using it as a laboratory for its robot planes of death. It now intends to do much the same to its own ‘backyard’ by melding together the failed War on Drugs with the failed Global War on Terror. By designating drug selling businesses as “terrorist” organizations, the US president can draw up arbitrary kill lists and visit death and destruction from the skies. The war drums are beating loud and clear.”
Celebrating Violence and Impunity
The Trump administration openly celebrates its violence and impunity. On September 3, Washington ordered the illegal bombing of a small speedboat in international waters, which it accused of trafficking drugs from Venezuela. The strike, which killed 11 people, was conducted without the slightest legal justification. When an X poster told Vice-President J.D. Vance that the bombing was an obvious war crime, Vance responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
Three days later, the Trump administration officially rebranded the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Materi- ally, this makes little difference – regardless of its official title, the US military has long been an unaccountable war machine. Even so, the name change marks a clear shift in US rhetoric, away from any sem- blance of legalism toward the open lionization of murderous aggression.
Compare this to China’s endorsement of peaceful global development, or the SCO’s assertion that non-interference and non-use of force are “the basis for the sustainable development of international relations.”
As the global majority increasingly looks toward integration and cooperation, albeit in varied forms and with various socio-economic contradictions, the US government has clearly committed itself to a policy of unmasked aggression aimed at drowning in blood any systemic alternatives to US-led Western imperialism.
Canada’s Support for US Imperialism
Shamefully, Mark Carney’s Liberal government has enlisted Canada on the side of the aggressor.
Shortly after becoming prime minister, Carney bowed to Trump’s demand for massively increased military spending. He also continued to support the Israeli genocide in Gaza and vocally backed the US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran.
On September 6, three days after China used the occasion of the anti-fascist victory parade to call for global peace and cooperation, the Canadian government dispatched a warship to the Chinese coast alongside an Australian naval vessel. China condemned the Canadian military maneuver as a “provocation” – and undoubtedly it was – designed to demonstrate that despite superficial disagreements between Trump and Carney, the Liberal government remains devoted to the US and its global aims.
The world is left with a stark choice: stubborn alignment with a declining and combative US imperialism, or an embrace of the development possibilities afforded by deepened cooperation with China and the global majority. Unfortunately, Canada’s capitalist class – including the governments that represent it – has unambiguously chosen the former.
Faced with the dangers inherent in this situation, it is critical that working people in Canada redouble the fight for an independent foreign policy based on peace, disarmament and international cooperation.
PHOTO: In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, his wife Peng Liyuan and foreign leaders pose during a family photo of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Tianjin on August 31, 2025. – AFP
