Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Last Wednesday, Tiananmen Square was the scene of an elaborate seventy-minute military parade held before 50,000 spectators. Xi Jinping welcomed 26 foreign heads of state, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, to the first public gathering of the “Axis of Upheaval.” This parade was officially a celebration of Chinese victory over the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II (a triumph that belongs by right to the nationalists, who did all the fighting, while the communists were hiding up in the mountains). Xi Jinping, however, is concerned less with 20th-century history than with the chance to display China’s current strength to a watching world.

We were shown the DF-5C nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, which is technically capable of striking targets anywhere in the world; the AJX002 underwater drone, which is more like a submarine at 65 feet in length; and the LY-1 laser weapon, which is designed to neutralise drones, missiles, and aircraft at the speed of light. We saw robot wolves, a new cyberspace unit, and tens of thousands of troops. “Very, very impressive,” concluded Donald Trump.

But Beijing has a tendency to wildly overhype its war-fighting prowess. The Communist Party’s past victories, the people are told, “shocked the world and caused ghosts and gods to weep.” But even by CCP standards, Wednesday was a striking example of compensatory bravado; a showcase of strength concealing huge systemic weaknesses. The entire military parade was a distraction, aimed at audiences both external and internal.

The Chinese economy is in trouble. Financial services company Nomura warns of a sharp economic deterioration during the second half of 2025 caused by a “cliff-like” drop in demand. Firms front-loaded shipments in the first half of the year to avoid tariff risks, and we’re now seeing an inevitable slowdown. The producer price index (PPI) remains in negative territory: a deflationary trend that has lasted 33 months now. The authorities’ stimulus measures have lost steam. Even as Xi thunders that he will “fully unleash” China’s consumers, retail sales are slowing down.

Across China, strikes and demonstrations are rising precipitously. China Dissent Monitor (CDM) documented 1,219 labour protests in the first half of 2025: a 66 percent increase compared with the same period in 2024. It’s not just labour protests that are increasing. Multiple groups within society have been coming out to air their grievances. Protests by consumers, investors, and small-business owners saw a 200 percent year-on-year increase in the second quarter of 2025.

We heard a lot about China’s real estate crisis in the Western media back in 2021 and 2022. We don’t hear much about it these days, but it hasn’t gone away and it deepens with every passing month. Homebuyers are heavily represented in these new protests, along with homeowners, unpaid construction workers, people who purchased property in stalled housing projects, and so on. And there’s more. Retirees protest over unpaid benefits. Rural residents protest against local developers over land disputes. Former shareholders protest against legal provisions that make them responsible for the liabilities of indebted companies. With careful understatement, CDM concludes that “the impact of China’s economic pain may be broadening.”

China’s elderly look to become the largest and most desperate of the disaffected groups, as hundreds of millions of citizens are about to reach retirement age with no hope of provision from family or government. The demographic time-bomb has finally exploded, and its mushroom cloud will continue to expand in slow motion over the coming years and decades. Behind all the noise and drama of the future, the wars and the headlines and the international incidents, it will always be there—the story of the century, ignored by most, silently growing until it fills the sky and its socioeconomic effects blot out all competing news stories.

Beijing has other concerns for now. Earlier this year, I reported on a spate of random killings in China. Disaffected individuals were running riot: driving cars into crowds or stabbing strangers to death in broad daylight. In response to this crisis, the CCP has launched a new agency. The Central Society Work Department focuses on “five-loss individuals”—those negatively affected by investment failures, family disputes, mental disorders, emotional imbalance, or other life setbacks. The department screens for such people, runs background checks on them, and reports their information to a higher-level agency twice a month. Counselling is provided and debt repayment deadlines are delayed, but the main aim of the new department appears to be surveillance. As a bankrupt resident of Shanghai told the Wall Street Journal: “It’s not about rescuing the so-called ‘five losses’ at all, it’s about control … [five-loss individuals] are seen as potential terrorists.”

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One nightmare haunts the CCP more than any other. Just a few days before the military parade, slogans of dissent were projected onto a university building in Chongqing. These slogans echoed the now-legendary Bridge Man protest of 2022. “Down with red fascism,” read the projection. “Overthrow the communist tyranny.” Chongqing’s mysterious dissident had inverted CCP propaganda, turning such phrases as “Without the Communist Party there would be no new China” into “Without the Communist Party there would be a new China.” Most ominously for the CCP, the protester included quotes from the Chinese national anthem (“Rise up, people who refuse to be enslaved”). This was an appeal to patriotism in a message condemning the CCP—that crucial break between Party and people that the Chinese education system has sought to make cognitively impossible.

The projection came from a hotel near the university. When police stormed the room, they found a handwritten letter addressed to them: “Even if you are a beneficiary of the system today, one day you will inevitably become a victim on this land.” Within hours, the faces of the hapless officers were plastered all over the internet, a hidden camera in the hotel room having filmed their raid. An X post of the projections by exiled citizen journalist Li Ying gained eighteen million views in just four days.

Back in 2022, the Bridge Man was detained after his demonstration, and earlier this summer, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. This new protester—his name is Qi Hong—decided to do things differently. Nine days before the protest, Qi Hong fled to Britain with his wife and daughters. On the eve of Xi Jinping’s grand declaration of Chinese strength, a projector and camera were switched on remotely in an empty hotel room, and giant characters were beamed across the street, spelling out the forbidden sentiments of the Chinese people in the heart of the world’s most surveilled city.

It’s impossible to know how many Qi Hongs there are in China. But Qi Hongs can be created very quickly. No one was prepared for the White Paper Revolution in 2022, when the lockdown-traumatised people of Shanghai and Chengdu and Beijing came out en masse to demand that Xi Jinping step down. Chinese dissidents themselves weren’t prepared. One said to me at the time, genuinely dazed: “It feels like a dream.” The lesson of the White Paper Revolution was that modern CCP brainwashing cannot bear the strain of economic hardship: under the right conditions, it will shatter like a Ming vase.

Consider the Taiwan question. Surveys show strong Chinese support for the idea of invading the island nation, but it’s possible that many of those polled simply don’t know themselves well enough. One particular anecdote sticks in my mind. In August 2022, a plane approached Taipei carrying US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was believed among sections of the Chinese public that if the plane landed, the CCP would declare a red line to have been crossed, at which point the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would go to war. On that day, American expat Blake Stone-Banks was sitting at a business dinner in Anhui, in eastern China. No business was discussed. Each diner just spent the whole evening staring at their lap in mute horror. Every smartphone in the restaurant was tracking the progress of Pelosi’s plane. Stone-Banks recalls that the only sound in the room was an eerie bleep-bleep—the radar livestream. Bravado is easy when conflict is still hypothetical, but when the Chinese public is suddenly confronted with the imminent invasion of Taiwan, all that noisy and exuberant war-lust is replaced by dry lips, pale faces, and deathly quiet. It is almost as if they are not convinced of victory.

It’s likely that indoctrination has something to with this. A key feature of modern Chinese schooling is the emphasis on humiliation—specifically the “national humiliation” that China suffered from the mid-19th century until 1949, when the CCP took power. Students are taught to feel rage and shame at this history: emotions that keep them loyal to the Party, because the Party is supposedly engaged in a century-long process (1949–2049) of reversing China’s ignominy. Shame is a crucial ingredient here—anguish at past indignities—but it may have undermined the entire project.

China, students learn from an early age, was weak: continually and catastrophically weak, for a hundred years. Despite assurances of China’s subsequent strength, the original and abiding lesson is one of weakness. As a result, today’s Chinese nationalists hide a deep sense of inferiority behind all their vainglorious bluster. This remained largely hidden during the years of China’s rise, but in 2022, everything began going wrong. The bluster cracked, and the nationalists (or at least some of them) gave up the Party faster than anyone predicted.

There may be wisdom in this lack of faith. While the PLA is a much stronger force today than it was only a decade ago, none of the impressive-looking equipment on show at Wednesday’s parade has ever been tested (unlike most Western military equipment). Indeed, the PLA has gone half a century without fighting a war. Scholars Hal Brands and Michael Beckley put the point with acid candour: “Because the PLA has mainly killed its own people since the invasion of Vietnam in 1979, it hasn’t tested its command-and-control processes under wartime stress.”

Just a few weeks ago, out in the South China Sea and far from any carefully rehearsed parades, the grey-zone tactics of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) gave us a glimpse of what we might be dealing with. Chinese ships had been chasing and harassing Philippine fishing vessels near the Scarborough Shoal when two Chinese vessels collided—a PLAN ship and a coast guard ship, the latter of which sustained “substantial damage.” When I saw the news, I recalled that propaganda drivel about the mighty PLA “caus[ing] ghosts and gods to weep.” Weep with laughter, maybe.

At least Wednesday’s parade made one thing clear—the armed wing of the Communist Party is very good indeed at tightly synchronised marching. Not a hair out of place. “The troops goose-stepped past in unison,” marvelled the BBC. “Even the choir stood in perfectly even rows.” Of course, we might debate the effectiveness of meticulous marching in a modern warfare situation. PLA soldiers would probably make good dancers, though.

None of this means that Xi Jinping won’t make his move on Taiwan. Evidence of a planned invasion continues to mount. The hacker group BlackMoon accessed internal Russian and Chinese government documents earlier this summer, revealing joint work on an automated command-and-control system for landing PLA airborne units. For all its ineptitude, an invading PLA would still inflict enormous damage. But nothing is preordained. I see a fragility and self-doubt that should give us hope, and spur a stronger public commitment to Taiwan.

In his speech on Wednesday, Xi instructed “Chinese people of all ethnic groups” to “follow Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents [doctrine of Jiang Zemin, Deng’s successor], and the Scientific Outlook on Development [doctrine of Hu Jintao, Jiang’s successor], and fully implement the thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.” Uncharacteristically, the President neglected to mention his own doctrine, Xi Jinping Thought, which has been relentlessly forced down the throats of the Chinese people at every opportunity for the past decade. His speech hailed each leader of communist China as a foundational figure whose personal ideology contributed to China’s rise—each but one.

Xi is not a man given to humility (to put it mildly). In the highly scripted world of Chinese politics, where nothing is ever ad-libbed, his omission is undoubtedly significant. What does it mean? I have no idea. For about a year now, rumours have been swirling about Xi’s loss of power behind the scenes, and I don’t want to add to what seems like wishful thinking until I have clear evidence. All I will say is that such an omission at such a parade feels fittingly symbolic—it captures the reality behind the façade of modern China. At first glance, we see pomp and swagger and declarations of irresistible strength. This is what makes the headlines. When we look a little closer, we see a striking lack of self-confidence.