Beijing on lockdown for October 1 parade
Chinese state media websites are celebrating the People’s Republic’s 70th birthday with an oratorio of praise-songs to the achievements of Party since it took Beijing on October 1, 1949. But the residents of Beijing are not being encouraged to party: The city is virtually under lockdown.
The centerpiece of the Party’s party is an enormous military parade in Beijing, set to begin at 10 am local time. You can watch a live feed from CGTN here. According to CGTN:
For the mass parade, 100,000 people and 70 sets of flower-festooned floats form 36 formations. The mass parade will last 65 minutes. The military parade will showcase China’s achievements in building its national defense and armed forces in the past 70 years and reflect the outcomes of the reform of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
“The military is expected to show off new weapons, including an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, supersonic drones along with tanks,” according to this parade day primer from the New York Times. Some of the weapons to be displayed are missiles that are “spooking the U.S.” per Bloomberg.
Here’s some more context:
The China Project’s science columnist Yangyang Chen has written a birthday letter to the People’s Republic, published by ChinaFile. It’s not the kind of letter that would be published in the China Daily.
Also see:
“22 percent of urban Chinese consumers would permanently leave China if they had the means to do so, according to a survey by FT Confidential Research,” according to this tweet by Financial Times correspondent Tom Hancock. The percentage rises to 36 among “high-income consumers.”
