China’s 60th anniversary stirs pride

China celebrated its rise to a world power over 60 years of Communist rule on Thursday, staging its biggest-ever parade of military hardware with over a hundred thousand marching masses in a display that stirred patriotism -- and some unease.
Police blocked off a wide area around central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic. City residents were told to stay away and watch the events on television.
President Hu Jintao, dressed in a gray Mao tunic instead of the business suit he usually wears, reviewed the thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks and other weaponry, shouting “Hello, comrades” while riding in an open-top, domestically made Red Flag limousine.
During the two-our-plus festivities, dozens of Chinese-made fighter jets were to stage a fly-over.
After the armaments, 60 floats celebrating last year’s Beijing Olympics, China’s manned space programme and other symbols of progress rolled by as tens of thousands of students flipped coloured cards in unison to make pictures.
The events were meant to underscore what the leadership calls the “revival of the great Chinese nation.”
We “have triumphed over all sorts of difficulties and setbacks and risks to gain the great achievements evident to the world,” Mr. Hu later said standing atop Tiananmen gate in a speech that referred to his Communist Party predecessors and China’s success. “Today, a socialist China geared toward modernization, the world and the future towers majestically in the East.”
The feel-good, if heavily scripted moment tapped into Chinese pride surrounding the country’s turnaround from the war-battered, impoverished state the Communists took over in 1949 to the dynamic, third-largest world economy of today.
“I think all 1.3 billion (Chinese) people are happy about this because of our standard of living,” said 53-year-old Xu Deqing, walking in an alley a few blocks off the parade route. “When you compare with 30 years ago ... back then people’s stomachs were empty. Now we have really made it to a higher level.”