Sit down children. We have been urged to learn the lessons of history but those lessons have been much mangled lately so let us straighten a few things out.
- China did not win World War Two. In fact if it had been left up to the Chinese war effort we would all be speaking Japanese now. Chinese people suffered terribly, but the efforts made on their behalf were totally unsuccessful. They were rescued by the Russians, like the rest of us.
- The atom bombs did not end World War Two. Never mind the argument about whether the Japanese were sincerely considering surrender before the bombs were dropped. If you look at the records of Cabinet meetings afterwards the atomic bombing was scarcely mentioned. The US Air Force had been incinerating Japanese cities by less technological methods for months. This was not a government to be discouraged by civilian casualties. The decisive point was that the Russians had declared war on Japan and would, as they did, rapidly “liberate” the occupied parts of China, and gobble a few fragments of Japan itself.
- The Communist Party did not win the Civil War because of all that interesting metaphorical stuff about the fish and the sea, surrounding the cities with the countryside and such like. There were big setpiece battles and sieges of mediaeval ferocity. The Party’s advantage was that the Russians handed them an army’s worth of good conventional equipment. The Americans were less generous to the nationalists and their stuff was not as good.
- Since the war the PLA has seen action in North Vietnam, India, Russia, Tibet and Korea. In that time Japan has had a pacifist constitution and followed it. The Chinese constitution is rewritten every ten years or so and nobody follows it anyway. Who would you regard as an uneasy neighbour?
- Parades for Peace???
tim's experiment 
Unfortunately, most people think that the Americans won World War II on both the European and Pacific fronts. To what extent this is true loses relevance in the face of what people believe. The myth of America as the planet’s savior is slowly eroding, but, as the Chinese saying goes, the beast with a hundred legs is a long time a-dying. Meanwhile, the confusion provides opportunity for propagating other myths. It is easier to add distortions to a picture that is already skewed, and more difficult for us ever to see it straight again.
Rather late with my take:
I agree that China’s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II was over the top, but I also can’t bring myself to stand in Japan’s camp. Sure, Japan, has a pacifist constitution and most of her citizens want it to remain that way, but its leadership is rattling the saber with the backing of the U.S.
In that case, I say to the parties involved: “All y’all better chill out!”
Also, I’m not too sure about the U.S. equipping the KMT less lavishly than the Soviets did for the CCP. The U.S. apparently supplied the KMT with over US$4 billion in aid after WWII, which allowed the KMT to hold the early edge when the Chinese Civil War resumed.