Military Parade in China Gives Xi Jinping a Platform to Show Grip on Power

“War is the sword of Damocles that still hangs over mankind,” Mr. Xi said from the viewing deck overlooking the square in a speech at the start of a vast military parade in central Beijing.

Mr. Xi indicated that he wanted to show other countries — many of them wary of China’s growing military strength — that they had nothing to fear from the procession of tanks and missiles that rumbled down Chang’an Avenue while fighter jets roared overhead.

But the highly public manner of Mr. Xi’s announcement that 300,000 military personnel would be demobilized, China’s largest troop reduction in nearly two decades, carried another implicit message. He was demonstrating his grip on the military and on the party, amid economic squalls and a grinding anticorruption campaign that have left some wondering whether he and his agenda of change — including in the People’s Liberation Army — were faltering, several experts said.

“It’s Xi in command,” Andrew Scobell, a political scientist at RAND Corporation who studies the Chinese military, and who was in Beijing during the parade, said of the announcement of the cuts.

But he said Mr. Xi faced challenges in forcing through his broader program of change in the military, which would reshape the command structure and knock away the longstanding power of regional military commands across China.

“If it does happen, then this is confirmation that Xi Jinping is the most powerful commander in chief China has seen since Deng Xiaoping,” he said. “This is about showing Xi as the strongman.”

Mr. Xi on Thursday did not give any details of the troop reductions. But the cut appeared sizable and was aimed at making the People’s Liberation Army more efficient and ready for combat, foreign experts said.

According to the story, pandering to his king, Dionysius, Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority surrounded by magnificence, Dionysius was truly extremely fortunate. Dionysius then offered to switch places with Damocles, so that Damocles could taste that very fortune firsthand. Damocles quickly and eagerly accepted the king's proposal. Damocles sat down in the king's throne surrounded by every luxury, but Dionysius arranged that a huge sword should hang above the throne, held at the pommel only by a single hair of a horse's tail. Damocles finally begged the king that he be allowed to depart because he no longer wanted to be so fortunate, realizing that with great fortune and power comes also great responsibility (and danger).[2][1]

King Dionysius effectively conveyed the sense of constant fear in which a great man may live. Cicero used this story as the last in a series of contrasting examples for reaching the conclusion he had been moving towards in this fifth Disputation, in which the theme is that virtue is sufficient for living a happy life.[3][4] Cicero asks, "Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?"[5]

For all the pomp, bluster and circumstance, not to mention the testosterone and macho BS being projected...you would think the HCIC would get to ride in a car just a little better than a Lada ripoff with a sun roof.

They shined it up real pretty, though.

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