Russia Screens WWII Film in Taiwan, Alarms Taipei — SkimNews
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- Russia screened a film on Japanese "militarism" and WWII at its diplomatic mission in Taiwan, prompting Taipei to accuse Moscow of amplifying China's anti-Japan narrative to undermine Taiwan's ties with Tokyo and Western partners.
- China claims 35 million of its people died in the war, calls the conflict the "Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression," and asserts that China and the Soviet Union were the "mainstay" of resistance against Japan and Germany.
- Taiwan (the Republic of China) argues that Beijing is claiming credit for a war fought before the PRC existed; the ROC was the country's wartime government, Taiwan itself was a Japanese colony, and Chiang Kai-shek signed the Japanese surrender as a formal Ally.
- The Soviet Union entered the East Asian war only in its final weeks, and Soviet troops seized four islands off Hokkaido — known as the Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan — blocking a formal WWII peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo to this day.
- Soviet forces withdrew from most of northeastern China in 1946 and handed captured Japanese weapons to Mao Zedong's communists, despite a prior Soviet-Chinese friendship treaty; Moscow recognized Mao's PRC in October 1949 after Chiang's ROC government fled to Taiwan.
- Taiwan's government argues that Mao's communists exploited the war to strengthen their forces rather than fight Japan, and says the Beijing government has no right to claim the victory as its own.
Why it matters: The dispute matters because each actor's WWII narrative carries present-day strategic weight: Beijing uses the war to legitimize its claim to a leadership role in Asia and frame Japan as a threat, while Taiwan's counter-narrative directly contests the PRC's claim to represent Chinese wartime sacrifice — making the film screening a tool of information warfare aimed at the ROC's international standing and its security partnerships with Tokyo and the West.
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