CHINA’S parade marking 80 years since victory over Japan has prompted alarmist coverage in Western media.

The sight of Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un together has led to panicky talk of an “axis of upheaval” aimed at toppling the so-called “rules-based order” — with pundits’ dismay increased by the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit just before, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared alongside Putin and Xi.

Their anxieties were stated with typical bluntness by US President Donald Trump, who asked Xi to “give my regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”

All the political grandstanding about a China threat boils down to that message: domination of the world by the United States and “the West” is right and proper; any challenge to that is conspiracy, rebellion against the natural order.

It’s clear from the responses to Modi’s recent presence in China. Many op-eds worried that Trump’s tariffs may have driven the Indian leader into the arms of the West’s enemies. Far fewer acknowledged anything wrong with the stated reason for those tariffs — India’s purchase of Russian oil — or asked themselves why the United States has the right to tell India who to trade with.

Trump’s assumption that any meeting without the United States must involve conspiring against it is echoed in claims Xi gave Putin and Kim Jong Un pride of place among foreign guests as a deliberate snub to Western sensibilities. Actually it makes sense at an event commemorating the end of the war with Japan, since the Soviet Union liberated northern China from Japanese occupation in 1945 and Korean communists fought alongside their Chinese allies in the resistance to the Japanese empire which had also occupied Korea. There are stories that do not revolve around ourselves.

But if it was a show of defiance? If the showcased military might was a warning, is China threatening us?

Here, Xi’s words at the parade are worth weighing: “Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation.”

It is not China pushing war. China does not deploy its navy to patrol the US or European coasts — but Britain and the US patrol China’s.

China does not have a ring of military bases around the US — but the US does around China, with tens of thousands of soldiers stationed in South Korea and Japan. Indeed, it has just one overseas military base compared to the US’s 800.

China has not been at war since the 1970s — whereas the US has hardly been at peace since then, and since the late 1990s Britain has joined it in attacking Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, wars of aggression that expose the West’s “rules-based order” as a sham.

If China is strengthening its armed forces, maybe that’s because a US general predicted two years ago that his country would be at war with China by now. Even so, it spends far less per head on the military (1.7 per cent of GDP) than any Nato state and less than a third of what the US spends. The US’s Nato alliance accounts for 75 per cent of worldwide military spending.

As for its nuclear arsenal, China is the only UN security council member with a no-first-strike policy and the only one to store warheads and delivery systems separately to prevent accidental or knee-jerk launches.

So we should not fall for talk of a need to rearm against an “axis of upheaval” — as if the long trail of destabilisation and destruction left by Nato wars does not suggest that cap better fits the Western alliance.

We should recognise that the threat to peace comes first and foremost from our own governments — and their determination to prevent the rise of a multipolar world, which all on the left should welcome.