Why Is China Parading Missiles on TV?

Even by the standards of military parades, Chinese leaders needed something big. They had chosen a name for a national celebration, on Thursday, that necessitated an extravaganza: “The Commemoration of the Seventieth Anniversary of Victory of the Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and World Anti-Fascist War.” Beijing quantified the arrangements precisely: twelve thousand troops; five hundred weapons’ systems; two hundred aircraft; thirty heads of state or government; a red carpet on Tiananmen Square that was a hundred and twenty-one steps long, one step for each of the years since the first shot was fired in the wars with Japan. Nothing was left to chance: among the extraordinary preparations, the authorities dispatched specially trained monkeys to remove nests that could house birds that might get in the way of the airplanes.