China Celebrates 60 Years of Communist Rule

The New York Times posts a small but excellent collection of photos taken yesterday in Beijing for the 60th anniversary of the communist rule of China.

China’s leaders marked their nation’s 60th anniversary on Thursday with a precision display of military bravado, a fleet of floats representing everything from a giant fish to Mount Everest and, improbably, a female militia unit toting submachine guns and attired in red miniskirts and white jackboots.

The celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was immense, powerful and flawless, down to the crystal skies which, just a day earlier, had been laden with smog.

In all that, it was a fitting analogy for how China’s Communist Party leaders wanted their citizens and the world to regard them — and, perhaps, how they may be feeling themselves these days. The last such parade, in 1999, was of interest mainly to foreign military analysts and China hands. This time, the world’s news outlets reported raptly on the significance of every detail, and China’s state-run television network streamed video coverage over the Internet, in English and other languages, to viewers worldwide.

Beyond that, however, the Chinese made few concessions to their global audience. The 60th celebration was slightly kitschy and indisputably retro, a carbon copy of the prior once-a-decade celebrations. “On one level, they are naturally aware of the international audience, but in the end this is a parade and show for Chinese leaders and the people of China,” Geremie R. Barmé, professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University, said in an interview. “It has always been such a show. It is a display of China’s might and power. When it comes to this kind of parade, international perceptions are just not that important.”

A confident President Hu Jintao, clad in a high-collared Mao-style jacket, told the invited guests — the general public was not allowed to attend the parade — that “infinitely bright prospects” lay ahead for the world’s most populous nation.

“Today, a socialist China geared to modernization, the world and the future has stood rock-firm in the east of the world,” Mr. Hu said in a brief speech speckled with boilerplate references to Chinese-style socialism. The Chinese people, he said, “cannot be prouder of the development and progress of our great motherland

.”