Beijing Parade
- Today &
Yesterday
It was a
beautiful autumn Sunday morning. Along
the CBD Chaoyang 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)
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