October 1st is the National Day of the People’s Republic of China. It is the equivalent of July 4th in the US. This year, 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the current government and the highlight is a military parade in Beijing. The only other times a big parade was performed was in 1984 and 1999. This time I was in Beijing.
The highlight for me was actually not the parade but the new subway line that opened a few days before. It was only the afternoon before that the new Line 4 opened. I got pretty excited because this kind of thing is unheard of in my hometown. The new line stops at Zhongguancun electronics market, The National Library, and the new South Railway Station among other things. The city is going to have one of the largest metro systems in the world only a few years from now.
As for the military parade, no one is allowed to see it in person. It seemed like half the city’s roads were shut down, a few subway stations shut down, buses diverted. People in buildings next to the parade were not even allowed to look out the windows. At least I got to see one of the relics of Communism on TV. Troops from the various divisions of the military marched in front of Tian’anmen Square, followed by vehicles and tanks, followed by missiles including ICBMs, followed by aircraft (I did get to see some helicopters and airplanes flying outside the windows).
After all the military they have a civilian parade. This included floats from each province of China. Of course you expect China to do things big. In this case they had 100,000 people marching in the parade.
Later that night, they have another entertainment portion of the day which included a lot of fireworks and pyrotechnics. I remember they had one huge “screen” stretched across Tian’anmen Square made out of pyrotechnics and it was drawing out images such as mountains.