China commemorated 80 years since the end of World War Two this week with a massive military parade against a backdrop of a disputed history about who ultimately defeated Japan.

The issues, including Japan's reckoning with its wartime record in China, are bound to flare again in December, a flashpoint anniversary of the mass killing in Nanjing by invading Japanese troops.

Below is an explainer about what the different - and disputed - points of view are.

WHAT IS CHINA'S VIEW?

For the Chinese government sitting in Beijing, this is a clear-cut issue: China sacrificed 35 million people in a heroic and brutal struggle against Japan that began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of its northeastern region of Manchuria. Western countries, particularly the United States, have downplayed China's contribution.

China calls the conflict the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and, for World War Two, the World Anti-Fascist War.

It says China and the Soviet Union served as the "mainstay" of resistance against Japan and Germany, with communist guerrilla forces acting as the "backbone" of the fighting in China.

WHAT ABOUT TAIWAN?

Some of the most bitter comments about how China has marked the anniversary have come from Taiwan, whose formal name is the Republic of China. During World War Two the island itself was a Japanese colony.

During the war, the Republic of China was the country's government. Much of the fighting against Japan was done by their forces, who put a civil war on hold to form an uneasy alliance with Mao Zedong's communists.

It was the Republic of China, under Chiang Kai-shek, who signed the Japanese surrender along with the other allies, and the "Flying Tigers" of volunteer U.S. pilots flew for the Republic of China air force.

Taiwan's government says Mao's communists only used the war to strengthen their own forces, and that the Beijing government has no right to claim the victory as its own.

The civil war resumed after the end of World War Two. Chiang and his government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after Mao was victorious and proclaimed the People's Republic of China.

The de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan this week highlighted the role of the "Flying Tigers" on its Facebook page. "Their sacrifices not only protected lives and liberty but also forged a bond of friendship and solidarity that lasts to this day," Raymond Greene, the top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan, wrote.

WHAT ROLE DID THE UNITED STATES PLAY?

Trump said after the parade that China's "beautiful ceremony" should have highlighted the role that the U.S. played in Japan's defeat.

The United States provided military aid and training to the Chinese forces.

One notable area of cooperation was "the Hump", where the U.S. Air Force flew hazardous missions over the eastern part of the Himalayas to supply China.

There were no American government representatives at the 80th anniversary event.

WHAT ABOUT JAPAN'S RESPONSIBILITY?

Japan's government has apologised for the suffering it caused in World War Two going back to 1995. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe angered China in 2015 by stopping short of a renewed apology, saying future generations of Japanese should not be "pre-destined to apologise."

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama attended the 80th anniversary event in Beijing this week and offered a personal apology, prompting criticism by some in Japan.

China's messaging this week focused more on its rise than Japan's wartime responsibility.

A gala in the Great Hall of the People attended by President Xi Jinping told the story of the war from 1937 to 1945 while avoiding any direct depiction of Japanese atrocities.

The performance depicted battles using the sound of offstage machine-gun fire that mowed down on-stage Chinese soldiers, some wearing light-blue uniforms historically associated with the Republic of China, rather than Mao's communists.

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Opinion - China’s impressive military parade masked shortcomings

In an April 1976 interview, Gen. George S. Brown, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sarcastically dismissed the British military, stating, “All they’ve got are generals, admirals and bands.” Less than a half-dozen years later, Britain’s victory over Argentina in the Falklands War demonstrated that the U.K.’s forces amounted to something rather more than just senior officers and marching bands, and for that matter, troops on parade and aircraft flyovers.

Yet Brown’s point about bands providing little evidence of military prowess has some validity, and the same is true of military parades.

Soviet Russia’s annual May Day parades were impressive enough, but they concealed the reality that the Red Army was far less capable than its displays appeared to indicate. Moscow’s continuing May Day parades likewise have masked its military’s shortcomings, as Russian performance in the Ukrainian War, especially during its earlier phases, has amply demonstrated.

The same might well be said of the massive Chinese military parade that just took place on the occasion of China’s 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan and the end of World War II.

The parade was certainly impressive, featuring all three elements of China’s strategic nuclear triad, in addition to supersonic anti-ship and land-attack missiles. The J-35 stealth fighter, in public for the first time, flew over Tiananmen Square together with other fighters.

This doubtless had the desired effect on President Xi Jinping’s most prominent guests, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Moreover, Xi asserted that the Chinese people “are not afraid of violence and are self-reliant and strong.”

Yet, to draw indirectly upon Brown’s statement — despite his misplaced characterization of British capability — parades, like marching bands, do not necessarily indicate how troops will perform in a real conflict.

Apart from short-lived confrontations in the South China Sea, China has not been involved in an extended intensive military conflict for nearly a half century, when it invaded Vietnam in February 1979. The People’s Liberation Army suffered huge casualties and withdrew from Vietnam less than three weeks later. And just as the relatively untested Chinese forces encountered stiff resistance from the battle-hardened Vietnamese, in the event of a conflict with the U.S., China’s military would find itself confronting a significant core of American forces that have years of recent combat experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Red Sea.

If relative lack of experience would put Chinese forces at a disadvantage against American forces — and, for that matter, British forces, which fought alongside the U.S. in all three operations — so too would the nature of Chinese command and control.

Precisely because China is a top-down, authoritarian society, its officer corps is not conditioned for tactical flexibility. Instead, Chinese commanders would more likely refer back to their own leaders as tactical circumstances change. Again, the U.S. military benefits from a distinct advantage, since even its junior officers are trained to make difficult choices in an ever-changing tactical environment.

Given China’s technological advances, and its massive military industrial output, however, the advantages that result from the experience and training of American military personnel would be wasted if cost growth and schedule delays were to keep plaguing Department of Defense programs. American force levels continue to shrink, and high technology cannot fully compensate for that shrinkage.

Recent directives from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Steve Feinberg, his deputy, attempt to address both of these decades-old challenges by streamlining the requirements process and shortcutting the so-called “valley of death” in acquisition programs. Whether these directives will actually yield the results that the Pentagon leadership seeks is far from guaranteed, however. All too often, senior Pentagon bureaucrats will salute smartly in response to any directive they receive and then continue to carry on as before, waiting for changes at the top and a new set of instructions that they anticipate would accompany those changes. Moreover, there is a culture of risk-aversion that has long plagued the Pentagon and will not be easily overcome.

Only with sustained, unchanging and direct multi-year supervision and oversight — not only from the secretary and the deputy, but crucially also from their future successors — can real change in the nature of U.S. defense acquisition actually come about. Without such systemic change, America could well find itself at a disadvantage in any military confrontation with China that might take place over the next several years, however capable U.S. fighting forces might actually be.

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China ‘stole data from every American’ in years-long hack.

"America is like a male goat who often claim authority but sleeps leaving his balls out without cover"

China may have hacked data from every single American in one of the largest-ever cyberattacks, experts fear.

Hackers backed by Beijing targeted more than 80 countries, stealing information on telecoms, transport and military infrastructure in a year-long campaign, investigators concluded in a report released last week.

Since 2021, the group, known as Salt Typhoon, has accessed data that could enable the Chinese intelligence services to monitor global communication networks and track targets including politicians, spies and activists.

Even the telephone conversations of Donald Trump and JD Vance were compromised, according to the FBI.

Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government “are targeting networks globally, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks”, the joint statement, from agencies including the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI, said.

The attack was “unrestrained” and “indiscriminate”, according to British and American officials.

“I can’t imagine any American was spared given the breadth of the campaign,” Cynthia Kaiser, a former top cyber official in the FBI, who oversaw investigations into the hacking, told The New York Times.

The breach was first uncovered last summer by Microsoft cybersecurity employees and has been linked to at least three China-based security companies operating since 2019.

According to the statement, these companies work for China’s military and civilian intelligence services, giving Beijing the capability to identify and track their targets’ communications and movements around the world.

The full extent of the attack was not immediately understood, but investigators soon realised it stretched to the highest levels of politics and national security.

Mr Trump and Mr Vance’s phones were targeted during last year’s presidential campaign, potentially giving Beijing access to their call and text records.

Democrats were also said to have been targeted, including members of Kamala Harris’s campaign team and staffers for Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader.

The attackers took advantage of aging computer systems and weak cybersecurity to steal data from telecommunication and internet service companies, as well as lodging and transport companies.

In total, more than half a dozen US telecommunication companies were infiltrated, including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, permitting hackers to listen in on telephone conversations and read unencrypted text messages, the Senate Intelligence Committee said last year.

Of particular concern was the ability of the hackers to burrow into the systems used for “lawful access” – the metaphorical backdoors telecom networks are required to set up to allow law enforcement implement wiretaps.

John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google’s threat intelligence group, said that “In addition to targeting telecommunications,” hostile actors also reportedly targeted hospitality and transportation which “could be used to closely surveil individuals”.

“Information from these sectors can be used to develop a full picture of who someone is talking to, where they are, and where they are going,” Mr Hultquist added.

In Britain, Salt Typhoon penetrated critical national infrastructure, GCHQ revealed last week, prompting officials to warn those organisations affected to fix security vulnerabilities.

“We are deeply concerned by the irresponsible behaviour of the named commercial entities based in China that has enabled an unrestrained campaign of malicious cyber-activities on a global scale,” Dr Richard Horne, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, said in a statement.

“It is crucial organisations in targeted critical sectors heed this international warning about the threat posed by cyber-actors, who have been exploiting publicly known – and so therefore fixable – vulnerabilities.”

His comments echoed those of Ciaran Martin, the former National Cyber Security Council chief executive, who wrote in March that the success of Salt Typhoon was dependent on the “exploitation of out-of-date kit”.

“What is now known publicly about the Salt Typhoon spying intrusion in particular is that central to the operation was the exploitation of out-of-date kit. This is a long-standing and well-known problem, especially in the telecommunications sector,” he wrote for the Royal United Services Institute.

Criticising the focus of the telecoms security debate on “banning Chinese companies”, he added: “The problem is that the hack had nothing to do with Chinese kit. Every part of the Chinese campaign exploited vulnerable Western-manufactured infrastructure.”

The latest advisory, co-signed by 13 countries, rebuked Beijing’s activities and issued instructions to agencies about how to root out the ongoing threat.

It encouraged organisations to “hunt for malicious activity” to “reduce the threat of Chinese state-sponsored” cyber activity.

Since the hack was exposed last year, the Chinese intruders seemingly disappeared, according to experts, suspending their intrusion to prevent their activities from being detected.

‘A high level of technical sophistication’

The true extent of the breach remains unclear, as do the steps Western intelligence agencies have taken to respond.

Lauryn WIlliams, deputy director in the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Telegraph that the attack as “unprecedented”, adding that she expects Congressional hearings will take place to ascertain the extent of the breach.

Experts have warned that the Salt Typhoon hack signals a new era in Chinese cyber capabilities, which may now rival those of the United States.

“In many ways, Salt Typhoon marks a new chapter,” Jennifer Ewbank, a former CIA digital innovation expert, told The New York Times.

“Today, we see patient, state-backed campaigns burrowed deep into the infrastructure of more than 80 countries, characterised by a high level of technical sophistication, patience and persistence,” she added.

Chinese actors have previously targeted American companies, including the Marriott hotel chain, health insurers and the US Office of Personnel Management, which holds government security clearance files.

In Britain, GCHQ has previously blamed Chinese-affiliated entities of targeting the electoral commission in 2021-2022 and surveilling MPs who criticised Beijing.

The agency has also accused a group of Chinese hackers known as Flax Typhoon of taking over around 8,500 devices in the UK for the purpose of espionage. Beijing has denied the allegations.

Anne Neuberger, a Biden administration cybersecurity official, said that Salt Typhoon was “more than a one-off intelligence success for China”.

“It reflected a deeper, troubling reality,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine. “China is positioning itself to dominate the digital battle space.”