For the first time ever, China has held a military parade, complete with its most modern missiles and watched over by 30 visiting Heads of State, to mark the defeat of Japan in 1945.
The decision to mount this display in the first place, and the way it was staged, tell us quite a bit about what Beijing intends to do with the new kit it showed off.
Many headlines in the West - whose leaders largely stayed away - framed the parade as an aggressive show of force. And there are loud voices among US military officials, commentators and politicians accusing Beijing of modernising its armed forces for nefarious purposes - namely territorial expansion.
Some of China's neighbours, especially Japan and the Philippines which both dispute ownership of islands and atolls with China also level this charge.
They point to China's rapidly increasing spending on its military and its more assertive approach to territorial disputes in the past five years as evidence.
In the past few months, they have focused criticism on Beijing's island building programme in the South China Sea where small islands and atolls have been expanded and some equipped with airstrips capable of handling military aircraft.
But is this evidence of expansionism?
President Xi Jinping used his speech at the parade to try to reassure onlookers, announcing a 300,000 cut in the number of troops and insisting his is a peace-loving country.
While it's true China's defence spending has been rising at unprecedented rates, Beijing's budget is still dwarfed by Washington's, both in dollar terms and as a proportion of GDP.
Also, Beijing is not the first country to indulge in "island building" in the South China Sea, other claimants were at it before the Chinese, even if the scale of what Beijing has been doing is much larger.
But if you compare American and Chinese history there is a big difference - in both motivation and approach.
One of the messages President Xi is sending with the September 3rd parade is that China will stand up for itself and never again allow itself to be invaded and intimidated.
It's easy for non-Chinese to forget how the country was invaded, first by the British who seized Hong Kong in the Opium war of 1839-42 and culminating in the full-scale Japanese assault of 1937 with its accompanying atrocities and the death of up to 20 million Chinese. What is called "the century of humiliation" in China.
The territorial claims Beijing makes today are also based on its interpretation of history, rather than a future scheme to conquer its neighbours.
The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands it disputes with Japan in the East China Sea are nearer Taiwan than Japan and were taken by force by Tokyo during war with China in the 1890s. China argues they should have been returned after 1945 under the Potsdam Declaration.
Instead the US kept them, using the islands as firing ranges until 1972 when it returned them to Japan which by that time had become a close American ally.
The Chinese also argue their claims in the South China Sea are historical, although these are a lot vaguer than those in the East China Sea.
Compare that with the United States.
It grew from the original thirteen colonies on the East Coast to include Hawaii, 2,400 miles from the West Coast.
The justification for this expansion - much of which was achieved by military conquest - wasn't history. It was the nineteenth century idea of Manifest Destiny - that despite the presence of indigenous peoples, Americans had a God-given right to take the land they wanted.
It was a powerful, unequivocally expansionist ideology.
Washington has never really looked back and today its military bases have spread to at least 74 countries and its navy patrols the world's seaways unhindered.
It routinely sends spy planes and ships right up to the territorial waters of other countries, including of course China. When others do the same to the US - and Chinese ships were sighted off Alaska at the same time it was parading military hardware through Tiananmen Square - the Americans don't exactly welcome it.
The modernisation of China's armed forces and its assertion of its maritime claims can be seen as normal business for a large country with an economy dependent on oil imports which have to pass through the South China Sea.
To its east, there's no doubt Beijing is also trying to develop the military capability to prevent US forces from intervening to stop it retaking Taiwan - if it ever judges its attempt at gradual, peaceful reunification has failed. Although, Beijing sees this as completing its historic mission to win back all the territory lost in the recent past.
This doesn't mean a rising China isn't capable of aggression.
It does mean its territorial ambitions are probably much more limited than some seem to fear and Washington's ever were.