Western military hawks have pointed to this as evidence that their Chinese counterparts are itching for a fight; that its brinkmanship in the East Sea and South China Sea could easily escalate into conflict, whether through miscalculation or overreach.

The massive public parade of tanks, missiles and goose-stepping soldiers set to roll through the heart of Beijing on Thursday morning will do little to assuage the view that China is increasingly keen to project itself as a major military power, growing fast in both capability and ambition.

Beijing is billing the parade as a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, but most Western leaders have shunned the event.

While the essence of the parade is to "uphold peace", Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu says, it is also true it contains an inherent warning for strategic rivals like the United States and Japan.

"What's the warning?" he told Fairfax Media in a rare interview with a foreign news outlet. "Don't try to counter China with armed means, don't adopt military and warfare tactics to contain China's development and rise, contain the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."

As one of the earliest and most influential proponents of the idea of a "peace disease" afflicting the world's largest army, Colonel Liu, of the National Defence University, goes as far as describing peace as the "graveyard of the military".

"In the past 30 years, the PLA is almost the only force without real combat experience, so it has the peace disease," he says. "'Peace disease' means there is only peaceful development in this era, there is no threat of war. This is wrong, there does exist the serious threat of war in this world."

It's not all doom and gloom, however, Colonel Liu says. The arrival of President Xi Jinping – who as chairman of the Central Military Commission is also the commander-in-chief of China's armed forces – has seen him begin to right many of the past wrongs, he says.

China's army would never "fire the first shot", Colonel Liu says, but now had enough "muscle" to retaliate if attacked.

"Xi Jinping is a commander-in-chief who can fight and win wars," he says.

Mr Xi, who has cultivated an image as a strongman leader, has pushed hard to strengthen the fighting ability of China's 2.3 million-strong armed forces.

China's defence budget has jumped by double-digit percentages in each year since he took power – outpacing the country's economic growth.

The military has also been one of the key staging grounds of Mr Xi's war on corruption; the worry had been that the pervasive buying and selling of ranks within the armed forces had produced a generation of officers who were not promoted on merit and more intent on trading their senior ranks for material gain, rather than fight for their country.

"They put on military uniforms but in fact they don't know tactics, strategy, or war, they don't know how to fight a war," Colonel Liu says. "These people are incapable on the battleground but are very capable around dining tables."

President Xi's new broom has seen the fall of disgraced senior military figures like Xu Caihou, Guo Boxiong and Gu Junshan for corruption.

But particularly key, military analysts say, has been a marked step-up in the professionalism and intensity of live-combat simulations and joint training exercises between different military regions and between navy, air and ground forces.

"In terms of the attention that XJP has placed, he's spent far more time and effort and his political capital in promoting the military modernisation [than recent predecessors]," Tai Ming Cheung, the director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict & Co-operation in San Diego, says.

"Both in terms of war-fighting but also in terms of trying to address these deep-seated structural problems, whether it's corruption or processes in the PLA."

With Sanghee Liu 

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