Tony Blair will fly into Beijing next month to take part in high-profile Chinese commemorations of the end of the second world war, which observers say are mainly designed to boost the domestic political standing of President Xi Jinping.
On 3 September more than 10,000 Chinese troops will parade through Tiananmen Square, marking 70 years since Japan’s surrender in 1945 with a massive show of military hardware.
Vladimir Putin, to whom Xi is close, will attend the event and 1,000 foreign troops will also take part, Xinhua, China’s official agency, announced on Tuesday.
Other leaders are said to include Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who as an ICC warrant out against him, and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The parade – the first Beijing has held to mark the end of the war – is widely seen as an attempt to project China’s growing military and political might at home and abroad. It is also viewed as an attempt to attack Japan, with which China is engaged in a slow-burning territorial feud.
For those reasons western leaders including Barack Obama, David Cameron and Angela Merkel are understood to have declined invitations.
On Monday Japan announced that its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, would also shun the parade in protest at what it sees as Beijing’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy in the East China Sea.
But Tony Blair will attend Beijing’s two-day Victory Day commemorations, which start on 2 September, according to Xinhua. It is not clear if he will attend the parade itself.
Former foreign leaders including Tomiichi Murayama, Gerhard Schroeder & Tony Blair to attend China WWII #VDday events pic.twitter.com/fOM8LtRsBC
— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) August 25, 2015
The British embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for information about Blair’s trip or which British officials, if any, would attend China’s commemorations.
The former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the former Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama will also travel to Beijing for Victory Day events, according to Xinhua.
Since leaving office in 2007 Blair has nurtured his ties with Beijing, making repeated trips to China to meet with senior Communist party leaders. A Chinese-language version of his memoir, A Journey, was published here in 2011.
But Blair’s appearances in the country have not always pleased the Communist party. After a 2007 speaking tour to Guangdong province – when he was reportedly paid $500,000 for a single lecture – state media lashed out at “gold-digging” foreign celebrities who were trying to line their pockets in China.
“Like reports made by some local officials, there was nothing new in his views … so was the speech worth the large sums of money paid out by local officials and businesses?” the government-controlled China Youth Daily asked.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political scientist from Hong Kong’s Baptist University, said the main aim of Beijing’s parade was “bolstering Xi’s role as China’s supremo”.
“Xi wants to consolidate his power and to show that two and a half years after [becoming president] he has been able to really become the full commander-in-chief of the nation and the armed forces,” he said.
At a time of growing chaos in the Chinese stock market, the parade would also serve as a welcome “diversion from economic hardship”.
Chinese officials have rejected claims that Xi’s parade is an aggressive move or one designed as a deliberate attack on Japan.
Zhang Ming, a vice-minister for foreign affairs, said the march was designed to “remember history, cherish the memory of China’s revolutionary martyrs, uphold peace and create the future”.
“The celebrations are not targeting Japan nor the Japanese people,” he said, according to Xinhua.
