Holding a military parade to mark the victory in the war against Japan demonstrates China's strength as a world power amid geopolitical tensions, according to a historian.

Lau Chi-pang, who's a history professor at Lingnan University and a lawmaker, also said showcasing military power highlighted the progress made by China in the decades since the end of the war.

"This is almost the only conclusion of how to maintain peace on this planet, which is at least to make ourselves a military power in a way to fend off all sort of invasions or intentions of invasion from foreign countries," he told RTHK.

"This year is particularly important because in the past few years, China has been quite disturbed by this global geopolitics. And also with the gradually intensified US-Sino relations, we need to tell everybody on this planet that we're no longer a country back in the mid-19th century, we are now a world power."

A massive military parade is scheduled for September 3 at Tiananmen Square as part of official events marking the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.

President Xi Jinping and 26 foreign leaders, among them Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, will attend.

Lau stressed the need to highlight China's history of resistance.

The September 18 Incident in 1931, in which Japanese troops blew up a section of railway under their control near Shenyang today and accused Chinese troops of sabotage and used it as a pretext to invade China, is an event considered as the beginning of the war.

But according to the Western narrative, the start of the conflict is often defined by the Lugou Bridge Incident on July the 7th, 1937, which marked Japan's full-scale invasion.

"Even though in recent years, there were scholars and academics who began to look more closely on China's role in World War II, still today we're following the Western perspective of World War II," he said.

"When we look at China, there's still a debate on whether the anti-Japanese war was 14 years or just eight years."

Lau added that a critical role that China played during the war was to contain Japanese troops.

"China was the first country who fought against fascism in the East. And also, this Chinese theatre was basically one of the bigger and longer battlegrounds during World War II," he said.

"The Chinese army tied down quite a good part of Japanese forces, in particular land forces in this Chinese theatre. Data showed that at least more than half of the Japanese troops were kept within China... In a way, China helps to contain Japanese forces in the East, so as not to affect the major battleground in Europe."