Beijing: Few things distract an anxious nation in economic trouble quite like a jaw-dropping military parade featuring a cavalcade of gleaming high-tech weaponry, 12,000 goose-stepping soldiers and fighter jets filling the skies with synchronised plumes of candy-coloured smoke.

President Xi Jinping ordered up the festivities long before the latest round of economic news, but the timing could hardly be better for the Communist Party as it grapples with a slumping stock market and fears that a slowdown could spur social unrest.

The event allows Xi to push a much bolder nationalist agenda just as the Chinese public is beginning to question the party’s main source of legitimacy: its ability to deliver economic growth.

“As social conflicts continue to sharpen, the party needs to divert attention, and, of course, a parade is a good way to do that by whipping up nationalist fervour,” Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing, said.

Though billed as a commemoration of the war’s end, the holiday has been carefully conceived to project Xi’s vision for a “rejuvenated” China: a rising military power that will stand up to rivals — most notably Japan and its main ally, the United States. But the turn to the past has left the party open to criticism that it is manipulating the history of the war to overstate the Communist role in ending Japan’s 14-year occupation of parts of China.

Inside China, critics have questioned Xi’s decision to break a tradition that calls for a military parade only once every decade to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The next anniversary, in 2019, will signal 70 years since Mao Zedong’s rebels vanquished the Nationalists after a bloody civil war, and Chinese officials have not said whether they will hold another parade just four years after this one.

“Every emperor has his weakness, and Xi wants to demonstrate his might and prestige,” Hu Jia, a prominent Chinese dissident, said. “The parade is a chance for the Communist Party to show its gleaming knives and shiny boots so the people will submit to the fear and the charm,” he added.

Perhaps the most stinging criticism has come from historians in China and abroad, who have accused the party of distorting the narrative of China’s fight against Japan.

Historians generally agree that the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek, not Mao’s Communist guerrillas, did the bulk of the fighting against the Japanese. The majority of the estimated 3 million Chinese soldiers who died from 1937 to 1945 wore the Nationalist uniform, while the Communists, nearly vanquished by Chiang at the time of Tokyo’s invasion, spent most of the war rebuilding behind enemy lines and only occasionally ambushing Japanese troops.

The decision to cast Japan as an unrepentant enemy of the Chinese people was made after 1989, when the party’s violent suppression of student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square prompted a crisis of faith among the educated elite. In the years that followed, Chinese leaders introduced a patriotic education campaign that emphasised Japanese wartime atrocities and the indignities wrought by a century of foreign invasions.

Zheng Wang, director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Seton Hall University, said the ideological re-education campaign had largely succeeded in forging a national identity based on a narrative that is part myth, part trauma.

Xi has taken that narrative further in promoting “the Chinese Dream,” an emotional appeal for national rejuvenation and military greatness.

“The humiliation narrative is a very important part of China’s identity formation, but I didn’t expect President Xi to continue on the same track, as his China has already risen to be a major world power,” Wang said. “In fact, the current administration has been giving even more emphasis to that narrative.”