In a rhetorical escalation, the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper compared Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to the Nazis, echoing Russia’s justification for its invasion of Ukraine. This is part of China’s broader pattern of weaponising and rewriting history to suit its needs.

On 28 August, the party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily, featured an article by Wang Yingjin, head of the Center for Cross-Strait Relations at Renmin University in Beijing. In it, he argued that the DPP’s recent drive to unseat dozens of opposition legislators through mass recall votes was doomed to fail.

Wang attributed the failure to a litany of problems with the party, including dissatisfaction with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s governance, partisan misuse of democratic mechanisms and harmful policies. Moreover, he feigned concern for Taiwan’s democracy, branding the DPP guilty of ‘green terror’ and ‘dictatorship’.

Specifically, he argued that two civil society groups, the Kuma Academy and Bluebird Movement, ‘expose the dangerous tendency of “Taiwan independence” forces becoming increasingly Nazi-like.’

In reality, the Kuma Academy is a non-profit aiming to train and empower citizens in emergency response, civil defence and media literacy. The Bluebird Movement is a grassroots pro-democracy civic movement, advocating for greater legislative transparency and government accountability.

China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwanese democratic institutions is part of a long-running campaign. For instance, during large-scale Chinese army drills around Taiwan in April, party-state propaganda arms depicted Lai as a literal ‘parasite’.

However, referencing the Nazis is the ultimate political slur, a global fallacy that dehumanises opponents and silences debate. Wang’s charge is more consistent with Moscow’s playbook in Ukraine, where ‘Nazification’ has been used as a pretext for Russia’s illegal invasion.

Is this a precursor to a Chinese ‘de-Nazification’ campaign? Beijing’s immediate aim is likely more tactical: to sow division, weaken the DPP and erode Taiwan’s democratic institutions.

It would have been far harder for the party to weaponise the term had it not first been normalised at home. Taiwan’s opposition leader, Kuomintang chairman Eric Chu, used it this year by likening the DPP to Nazi Germany and Lai to Hitler.

This comparison drew sharp rebukes from Germany’s and Israel’s de facto embassies in Taipei, both condemning the trivialisation of Nazi atrocities and Holocaust memory. Yet Chu only doubled down.

Incidentally, as Wang’s article was in the printing press, the Chinese embassy in Israel marked the 80th anniversary of the ‘War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’.

Over the years, Beijing has reframed the plight of Jewish refugees in Shanghai as a story of Chinese exceptionalist national benevolence. Shanghai was one of the few places where Jews fleeing Nazi persecution could enter without a visa, providing a haven for more than 20,000 refugees.

In Beijing’s revisionist telling, however, China is framed as an eastern ‘Noah’s Ark’, a saviour that welcomed Jews ‘with open arms’. Scholars such as Mary Ainslie argue this form of historical statecraft erases Jewish voices and casts China as global moral protector of a ‘rightful’ civilisational centre.

This stands in stark contrast to Beijing’s open hostility toward Israel since 7 October 2023. China refused to condemn Hamas’s terrorist attacks and hostage-taking, even lending legitimacy to Hamas’s actions at the International Court of Justice.

Party-state propaganda outlets and state-led disinformation campaigns such as Spamouflage have amplified anti-Israel disinformation and antisemitic tropes; posts across Chinese social networks compare Israel’s campaign against Hamas and other Iran-backed proxies to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

On 14 June, Xue Jian, China’s consul in Osaka, explicitly compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In previous posts, the diplomat likened Israelis to Japan’s Imperial Army and circulated AI-generated images portraying them as ‘baby-devouring demons’.

Yet Israel is often not so much the primary target as it is a proxy in the great-power battle of narratives.

On 17 August, the United States and China released annual reports condemning each other’s human rights records. The US State Department’s report opened with the word ‘genocide’, describing China’s actions against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. In response, China’s State Council Information Office, a front of the CCP’s Propaganda Department, accused the US of aiding ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

On 3 September, Beijing staged its largest military parade in a decade. President Xi Jinping has cloaked the spectacle in anti-fascist rhetoric. Its real purpose, however, was to deter rivals, shape global perceptions and mask the most aggressive military buildup since 1945, including a 7.2 percent increase in defence spending, a massive shipbuilding capacity and a growing nuclear arsenal.

Works such as British historian Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally highlight the real sacrifices of the Chinese people in World War II (both Communist and Nationalist) in resisting Japanese imperialism. But in 2025, the Chinese leadership’s commemorations of ‘anti-fascist’ solidarity will be attended not by Western allies, but by despots including Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Burmese dictator Min Aung Hlaing.

We may honour the Chinese people’s past sacrifice and heroism, but the party-state’s rhetoric and actions should give us pause about its future trajectory.