Roundup: Italian official, experts highlight peace message from China's V-Day parade

The V-Day parade in Beijing on Thursday was a commemorative event of "extraordinary importance" to celebrate peace and condemn war, Italian experts said.

"In Beijing for the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Memory shall help peace," Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said in a message posted on a social network and published on the Italian foreign ministry's website as he witnessed the celebrations in the Chinese capital.

"Sept. 3 represents for Asia what May 9 represents for Europe. That is to say, the victory of the world against the European Nazi-Fascism and the Japanese Imperialism," Davide Rossi, a historian and director of the Locarno-based ISPEC Institute of History and Philosophy of Contemporary Thought, told Xinhua.

"These two dates should be always celebrated with the highest level of participation and significance," Rossi said.

"Unfortunately, the Western world tends to consider these dates just as those for commemoration by the Chinese and the Russians. It is of extraordinary importance instead that China celebrated Sept. 3 in the most solemn way with such a big parade, inviting heads of state from all over the world to participate in it," Rossi said.

Underlining the speech of Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered at the parade, Rossi said that the parade was a "clear message of peace."

On the Tian'anmen Rostrum where late Chinese leader Mao Zedong pronounced the birth of New China 66 years ago, Xi, dressed in a sharply cut, high-collared Mao suit, highlighted China's aspiration of peace.

"China will remain committed to peaceful development. We Chinese love peace. No matter how much stronger it may become, China will never seek hegemony or expansion. It will never inflict its past suffering on any other nation," Xi said.

Xi also announced in his speech that China will cut its armed forces by 300,000 troops.

"It is well-known that China, its people and government, have never shown expansionist or aggressive aims in the past, and especially since the People's Republic of China was born (in 1949)," Rossi said.

Rossi said that the People's Liberation Army of China is a "defensive military force oriented to the values of peaceful coexistence and at the service of a world that believes in respect for each country, their borders and internal democratic dynamics, without interference, invasions or turmoil of terrorist groups."

Giuseppina Merchionne, a professor of Chinese language and culture at the Catholic University of Milan and at the University of Trento, said the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II on Thursday can also be seen as an occasion for China to "simply show what it is: the second largest economic power in the world -- according to international parameters -- a defensive military power and a huge expanding market."

Different from other world powers, including the United States, Japan and most European countries, which have opted for a policy of cautious "understatement," China has not been afraid to show the world its "true path for growth," she told Xinhua.

This path for growth is made of "enhanced domestic consumption, the epochal transformation of hundreds of millions of peasants from small producers to consumers, and a civil society that does not only import goods but also knowledge," Merchionne said. Endi