Beijing Parade
- Today &
Yesterday
It was a
beautiful autumn Sunday morning. Along
the CBD Zhaoyang avenue, Beijing
International Tourism-Culture Festival
2006 held a carnival parade of
spectacular floats and multi-cultural
street entertainment which are joined by
2,500 performers from China and 33
countries, many of them are tourists. The
organisers have a clear intention to make
it a special preview of what will be like
on the Beijing streets during the Olympic
2008: a party that transcends the
barriers of race, culture and faith.
Classic Confucius
basically
does not believe in absolute evilness in
any human individual ("人之初性本善"), but
regards that "within the four seas,
we are all brothers" ("四海之内皆兄弟"). Instead of
dividing people into opposing camps, it
pursuits a utopia of one
humaniny one family ("世界大同").
As this
year’s Beijing festival tries to
reflect the traditional teachings as
such, it makes a sharp contrast to the
Beijing parades of the past.
During the
Culture Revolution years when very
Western idea of class struggle became the
core message of the official doctrine,
the annual Beijing parades in Tiananmen
Square were more a demonstration of one
camp’s solidarity against another than
a celebration of the national unity.
Accordingly, the parades looked
pathetically like performed by an army of
robots.
A parade of '70s
in the Tiananmen Square
A
participant later described what she
remembered of the occasion:
"When
our arts matrix passed the three-tier
watch stands, I saw the leaders,
representatives and foreign dignitaries
were all watching us. I stood on a float
with a fixed ‘stride forward’
posture, and kept in this way for a good
20 minutes."
A float of '70s
displying new industry product passed
the Tiananmen Square
Source of the
original colour photos: Zhou Yao (周跃), Beijing
Scientists Association Info Centre (市科协信息中心) – Beijing
Science Net (首都科技网)
China
stories are told at wenhousecrafts.com
Similar
Stories:
List of All
Stories
|
