In an article in The Australian, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, informed Australians that China would mark the 80th anniversary of victory in the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War on 3 September. He reminded us that Australia and China had stood together and that China’s people had made enormous sacrifices in that war.

To Australians reading the ambassador’s 22 August article, it may come as a surprise that their parents and grandparents fought in something called ‘the World Anti-Fascist War’. Some may recall former senator Sam Dastyari congratulating China 10 years ago, on the 70th anniversary. But even Dastyari was unclear on what it meant; he thought it was the Chinese term for World War II.

In fact, the phrase was coined by the Communist International (Comintern) during the Spanish Civil War to entice liberal democrats to join forces with communists against their common enemy, fascism. For a while, it worked. But as George Orwell found, the communists in that war were on the far right of the beleaguered Spanish government and differed little from the ‘more naked’ fascism of Francisco Franco‘s Nationalists.

Orwell went to Spain in December 1936 to support the Republican cause under the Comintern’s anti-fascist united front. What he witnessed of Joseph Stalin’s treachery on the front lines made him the go-to English-language essayist on the deceptive appeal of Stalinist political language. He emerged from the war hostile to fascism and communism alike and dedicated the rest of his life to warning of totalitarian political systems’ gap between words and meanings.

In Comintern minutes and Stalin’s speeches, the phrase ‘World Anti-Fascist War’ was premised on the belief that liberal capitalism was in league with fascism and was the underlying cause of all modern wars. Stalin planned to mobilise the global communist movement to root it out. The phrase still carries that ideological load today. Loose use of the term indulges in Stalinist fantasies and loses sight of World War II as a collective battle against repressive states and ideas.

To the Nationalist government of the Republic of China—whose forces bore the brunt of the fighting—the war was known simply as the ‘war of resistance against Japan’. During much of that war, the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Japan, so the term ‘World Anti-Fascist War’ bore no reference to the struggle underway in China. Among Stalin and his supporters, it referred to Europe.

At that time, Stalin was eager to placate Japanese forces in China. In 1943, he insisted the allies’ declaration on German atrocities should omit mention of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese atrocities. The anti-communist Republic of China representative walked out of those talks in protest.

For Mao Zedong, however, the phrase captured the strategic vision he shared with Stalin of waging communist struggles with liberal democracies in the post-war period.

In On Protracted War, Mao argued that China’s war with Japan was the product of a ‘general crisis of world capitalism’ which only communism could overcome. After the war, he argued, world communism would wage revolutionary wars to eliminate capitalism and usher in an era of perpetual peace under a communist-led world order. The Republic of China’s government, along with liberal democracies, would be counted as enemies of communism.

Under General Secretary Xi Jinping, On Protracted War is set reading for party cadres to steel them for the party’s contemporary protracted struggle with liberal democratic countries, including Australia and Japan.

In urging Australians to uphold a ‘correct’ historical perspective on the war, China’s ambassador is echoing instructions from his general secretary as well.

In a 2020 talk, on the 75th anniversary of allied victory, Xi Jinping warned of the need to be ‘correct’. His subject was victory over Japan, but his focus was the history of his own party: ‘The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force to distort the history of the Chinese Communist Party or smear the party’s nature and mission’, he said.

Xi also announced then a new series of prohibitions known as the ‘five never allows’ to police compliance with the party’s ‘correct’ historical perspective on the war. Top of his list of prohibitions was alleged distortion of the party’s role in the war and in the brutal revolution that toppled the government of the Republic of China which had, in fact, accepted Japan’s surrender.

The Chinese leadership’s insistence that we should uphold the standing of the party and its leaders’ authority by adopting a ‘correct’ historical perspective does little justice to the enormous sacrifices China’s people made in the war.

Xi’s prohibitions cannot be enforced in Australia. We are free to acknowledge that Australia fought with the Republic of China and the allies to overcome Japanese militarism and to recognise the immense sacrifices of China’s people, but we can’t honestly commemorate shared victory in the World Anti-Fascist War. Australians went to war to save their families and their country from militarism and totalitarianism in every form. They fought to preserve their liberal democracy.