By Huan Yuping, People’s Daily

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the restoration of the People’s Republic of China’s lawful seat in the United Nations (UN).

Over more than half a century, China has steadily evolved from a participant in the international system into a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a defender of the international order. This journey reflects not only a major country’s growing engagement in global governance, but also how the spirit of the UN Charter has taken root in the modern world.

On Oct. 25, 1971, the 26th session of the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758 by an overwhelming majority, deciding to restore all the rights of the People’s Republic of China in the UN and recognizing the representatives of its government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the UN.

In his article “Renewing Multilateralism: China and UN in the 21st Century,” former UN Resident Coordinator in China Siddharth Chatterjee wrote that, 55 years on, this decision endures as a defining milestone in the evolution of the international order.

Over the past 55 years, China has evolved from embracing international rules to contributing ideas for global governance. Throughout this journey, it has consistently supported the UN, upheld the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and played an active and constructive role within the UN framework. China has advanced the building of a community with a shared future for humanity and made significant contributions to world peace and development.

Stephen Jackson, the UN Resident Coordinator in China, noted that China brings a distinctive perspective from the Global South to the UN, helping to create a more balanced global governance landscape.

China has always been a builder of world peace. Guided by the Chinese nation’s deep-rooted commitment to peace, China has chosen the path of peaceful development, rejecting the traditional route of aggression and expansion taken by major powers. Among the world’s major countries, China has the best track record with respect to peace and security.

China is the second-largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget and the largest provider of peacekeeping personnel among the permanent members of the UN Security Council. To date, it has dispatched more than 50,000 peacekeepers to 29 UN Security Council-authorized peacekeeping operations.

As conflicts continue to flare around the world, China has worked to promote peace and dialogue. From the Russia-Ukraine conflict to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has pursued approaches to resolving hotspot issues with Chinese characteristics and played a constructive role in easing tensions and resolving disputes.

China has consistently contributed to global development. It achieved the poverty reduction goals set under the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule and contributes around 30 percent of global economic growth.

It is now a major trading partner for more than 160 countries and regions and has signed 24 free trade agreements with 31 countries and regions. The country has signed Belt and Road cooperation documents with over 150 countries and 30 international organizations, injecting fresh momentum into global development.

In response to widening global development gaps, China has actively worked to put development back at the center of the international agenda and help developing countries strengthen their capacity for self-sustaining growth, so that the benefits of development can be shared more widely and equitably among people in all countries.

China has always upheld the international order. Over the past 55 years, it has firmly defended the UN-centered international system, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms governing international relations, founded on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

China advocates and practices true multilateralism and actively leads and advances multilateral cooperation. It is a member of almost all universal intergovernmental organizations and a party to over 600 international conventions and their amendments. It has put forward Chinese solutions in emerging areas such as climate change and AI governance.

China has successively proposed the four major global initiatives and taken the lead in implementing them, contributing Chinese wisdom and solutions to addressing deficits in peace, development, security and governance.

The world is undergoing profound change and growing turbulence, while global challenges continue to mount. The international community must build consensus and work in concert to meet the challenges of our time.

We should uphold fairness and justice, and strengthen the foundation of sovereign equality. The international community must firmly oppose hegemonic practices that allow the strong to bully the weak and must never let the world revert to the law of the jungle. International affairs should be discussed and decided by all countries together, and the legitimate concerns of developing countries must be heard and taken seriously. Only in this way can the foundations of the multilateral international order remain firm.

We should uphold fundamental principles while breaking new ground to improve UN governance. Upholding fundamental principles means adhering to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, safeguarding the international system and the basic norms governing international relations established after the end of World War II, and remaining committed to multilateralism.

Innovation means responding to the changing times by enabling the UN to adapt and reform itself, continually improving its internal governance mechanisms, enhancing its effectiveness and better reflecting the concerns of developing countries.

We should shoulder our shared responsibilities and put multilateralism into practice. The more than 190 countries in the world are all aboard the same big boat, bound by a shared destiny. Only by working together can they weather the storms ahead.

All parties should embrace the principle of extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit, explore new approaches to cooperation and develop innovative cooperation models, while continuing to advance multilateralism in response to changing global circumstances, and working together to address global challenges such as climate change, food security and digital governance.

At this new historical juncture, China will continue to be a staunch supporter of the UN and a steadfast practitioner of multilateralism, working hand in hand with other countries to build a community with a shared future for humanity and create a better world for all.

By He Yin, People’s Daily

On Oct. 22, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, delivered an important speech at a gathering commemorating the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army’s Long March.

Xi offered profound insights into the keys to the CPC’s and the people’s army’s success in pressing forward, as demonstrated by the victory of the Long March, and set out five requirements for carrying forward the great Long March spirit and succeeding in the new Long March.

He noted that the new journey is a long expedition filled with glory and dreams, and is a new Long March for the Party and the people. As China commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Long March victory, it will continue to advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through Chinese modernization and, in doing so, make greater contributions to human progress.

Ninety years ago, the Long March was a remarkable revolutionary epic forged by the CPC and the Red Army, offering the world a new perspective on China. The Long March forged an unshakable faith. Driven by unwavering faith in their ideals and convictions, the Red Army soldiers broke through enemy encirclement and overcame tremendous hardships to blaze a trail forward.

Since then, the story of the Long March has drawn sustained international attention. From Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, which introduced the truth about the Long March to readers overseas, to German writer Christian Y. Schmidt, who cycled nearly 7,000 kilometers to retrace the route, generations of foreign visitors have followed in the Red Army’s footsteps, seeking to understand the power of faith forged through that arduous expedition and uncover the inner strength that has enabled China to overcome challenges and move steadily forward.

Not long ago, Celso Malavoloneke, a Central Committee member of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, visited Long March sites in southwest China’s Guizhou province. He said his greatest takeaway was a deeper understanding of the Chinese people’s spirit, which he would take back to his own country. Rooted in truth and concern for the people, this faith has become a spiritual bond that resonates with people across national borders.

The power of the human spirit can transcend mountains and seas and resonate with people around the world. Forged through firm ideals, fearlessness in the face of sacrifice, a commitment to seeking truth from facts, unity, and reliance on the people, the great spirit of the Long March is an integral part of the spiritual heritage of CPC members. It transcends time and space and continues to flourish.

British scholar Martin Jacques has observed that the Long March revealed the remarkable capacity of Chinese society to mobilize around a common vision.

Over the past 90 years since the Long March victory, the CPC has united and led the Chinese people in carrying forward the cause of revolution, construction and reform, and in pursuing the great endeavors of the new era, overcoming challenges at every stage. Drawing on the valuable experience of upholding independence and self-reliance and relying on the people, the CPC has continued to break new ground in advancing its cause.

William N. Brown, an American professor at Xiamen University who has lived in China for nearly 40 years, said the Long March spirit is a shared spiritual treasure of humanity, and that it belongs to everyone in the world who strives unremittingly amid uncertainty.

The road to achieving ideals has never been smooth. The CPC has always stood on the right side of history and on the side of human progress. Holding high the banner of building a community with a shared future for humanity, it puts the people’s interests first and works for the common good, continually contributing positive momentum to global stability and development.

The Chinese military has participated in 26 United Nations peacekeeping operations, and dispatched over 50,000 peacekeepers. For years, China has contributed around 30 percent of global economic growth. It has signed 26 free trade agreements with 33 countries and regions, steadily expanding its global free trade network.

China has proposed and taken the lead in implementing the four major global initiatives, making important contributions to addressing the deficits in peace, development, security and governance.

The Long March’s most valuable lesson for the world today is the importance of staying the course, maintaining a focus on long-term goals and persevering through adversity amid turbulence and change, said José Luis Centella, president of the Communist Party of Spain.

The history of the Long March is never far behind us, and its journey continues. Amid profound changes in the world, the times and history, China will continue to carry forward the great spirit of the Long March and forge ahead on the new Long March in the new era. Through its own steady development, China will bring confidence to a turbulent world, work with other countries to tackle common challenges and share development opportunities, and contribute to building a community with a shared future for humanity.

By Wu Xian

When people use Japanese to ask leading international large language models about historical facts from World War II, the answers they receive may already have been deliberately distorted. 

The July 7th Incident in 1937, also known as the Lugou Bridge Incident, which marked the beginning of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, is described as a “Sino-Japanese military conflict.” The Nanjing Massacre is downplayed as the “fall of Nanjing.” Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia is sanitized as “an interest in southern resources.”

These distortions stem from coordinated efforts by Japanese right-wing groups to inject biased historical narratives into AI training datasets. Simultaneously, major AI systems frequently draw upon records from Japan’s National Archives, where sensitive wartime details have been deliberately minimized.

Manipulating artificial intelligence through dataset bias represents a sophisticated new strategy for historical revisionism. Its stealth and global reach far surpass traditional methods such as textbook censorship or inflammatory public statements. This development demands sustained international scrutiny.

Today, Japan’s historical revisionists operate through a highly organized ecosystem that blends private initiative with state support to reshape historical narratives via AI.

At the grassroots level, a factory-style disinformation network has emerged. Right-wing operators run incentive programs that pay approximately 5,000 yen ($31.72) for each 30-second AI-generated video promoting historical revisionism. Content targeting China reportedly yields over three times the standard payout per thousand views. These low-cost, high-volume outputs — denying acts of aggression and glorifying wartime actions — spread rapidly across digital platforms, normalizing distorted historical accounts.

More concerning are state-level initiatives. Japan’s government has allocated 4.4 billion yen to develop Gennai, a domestically built AI. Reports indicate that during the construction of its foundational knowledge base, data collection was intentionally limited to post-May 1947 documents. This cutoff excludes critical records of Japan’s wartime aggression, including the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan’s full-scale war against China, the Nanjing Massacre, and Allied judgments from the Tokyo Trials. Such omissions cannot be dismissed as technical limitations; rather, they structurally embed revisionist perspectives into the architecture of publicly accessible AI knowledge systems.

The political objectives driving these efforts are evident. In recent years, Japan’s political landscape has steadily shifted toward conservative nationalism, accompanied by resurgent militarist tendencies. By leveraging digital technologies to reconstruct historical narratives, authorities aim to normalize revised accounts within mainstream discourse, dilute international consensus on wartime responsibility, and overcome the legacy of postwar subordination. Ultimately, this strategy seeks to legitimize constitutional amendment, military buildup, and a gradual departure from Japan’s postwar pacifist constitution — a transformation that elevates historical revisionism from isolated advocacy to a systematic, state-backed technological enterprise.

The repercussions of digitized historical distortion extend across domestic, regional, and global spheres. 

For younger generations in Japan, the absence of accurate and comprehensive history education, combined with prolonged exposure to false narratives, risks eroding their ability to make basic judgments about aggression and the justice of war. 

It may weaken their capacity for reflection and their vigilance against militarism, ultimately severing historical empathy with people in countries that suffered under Japanese aggression and creating fertile ground for extremist ideas.

Across Asia, manipulated historical accounts threaten to unravel the hard-won postwar consensus, impede diplomatic reconciliation, and destabilize regional security. Globally, the continuous ingestion and dissemination of biased data by major AI systems risk permanently altering international understanding of World War II, with enduring implications for historical memory and scholarly discourse.

By selectively editing historical records through algorithms and systematically excluding documentary evidence of its wartime crimes, Japan is using digital technology to conceal the truth and attempting to erode the foundations of postwar historical justice at their roots, thereby undermining the legal foundations of the postwar international order established after World War II. 

This comprehensive system for distorting historical understanding operates at both ends: it shapes the foundations of national education while infiltrating online information channels, social networks and public discourse. In doing so, it systematically weakens the social foundations for an accurate understanding of World War II.

AI should be a force for the benefit of humanity and the advancement of civilization. It should uphold values that promote the common good and serve truth, peace and justice. It must never be turned into a political tool for concealing crimes, distorting history or fomenting confrontation.

The Japanese government’s use of state resources and cutting-edge technologies to rewrite established historical facts only exposes its unease and anxiety in the face of an irrefutable historical record and international legal judgments that cannot be overturned. 

The global community must maintain heightened vigilance, actively resist technologically enabled historical revisionism, protect the collective memory of World War II, uphold the postwar international order, and preserve the historical foundations essential for enduring peace and stability in East Asia.

(Wu Xian is an associate researcher at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.)