The 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China: Viewed better from not being there
Credit to Author: MAURO GIA SAMONTE| Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2019 17:17:16 +0000
First of a series
Months before the occasion, I was already part of a planned 10-couple, 10-day tour to China during a period in which the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China would be celebrated.
As in a person’s lifetime, 70 is a milestone, traditionally celebrated with much pomp and pageantry, so to speak. How much more if such is the age of the greatest surviving, persistent and resolutely persevering socialist state in the world!
The grandeur would be unimaginable.
And so since the plan was bared to me sometime in June, I already took to counting days to the trip. Come August though I got a notice that my participation in the journey was declined for reason of my age — 78.
Nothing missed
Not much regrets really, in any case. I learned from the head of the returning couples that though they made their itinerary to various sites in China, including Beijing, they never made it to Tiananmen Square. I understand there was a blockade of visitors into Tiananmen not accredited to attend the event as early as a week before the festivities. The only Filipino allowed to participate in the festivities, I was told, was Ambassador Chito Sta. Romana, the Philippine envoy to China.
I doubted it anyway whether I could have enjoyed the spectacle if I were in the midst of those millions in attendance in Tiananmen, where I think I could have been practically reduced to that frog in the Chinese fable speaking from deep in the well: “Wow, the sky is as big as the mouth of the well.” The dialectical view of course is, only one teeny-weeny portion of the sky is as big as the mouth of the well.
For being taken out of the media entourage to China, I thought I had the privilege of a frog having been made to leap out of the well to marvel at one enormous horizon, reaching no limits far into infinity.
That’s what a non-attendee in the Chinese anniversary celebration gets to have in watching the event through the internet: a grand overview of the spectacular event not given any of those in attendance.
It seems some law of physics anyway, that for you to get a correct, comprehensive view of a phenomenon, you must get out of it.
Better than being there
Outside of the Chinese celebration, I got the best view of it through a rich array of video coverages, quite a number of them, each one centering on a topic of choice: the biggest display in history of China’s military hardware; the female component of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who, for all the rough touches of their martial apparel, nonetheless scintillated with womanly allure as their military skirts swayed rhythmically to the cadence of their marching steps, their white-skinned legs evoking imageries of twin machine levers, each pumping up and down at perfect intervals; the amazingly fluid turns of the faces of the marching soldiers as they passed the presidential dais of the Tiananmen Square to pay a look of respect to President Xi Jinping, contrapuntal to the brisk mechanical movements of their legs; and the similar mechanical swing of their arms from the side to the breast which upon passing the president suddenly shift into perfectly-timed chorus of salutes.
These details and many more, could I have recorded them as vividly as I do now had I been in the midst of the celebration?
One for the esthetes
One thing one immediately notices of the occasion was that it was conceived by people with flair for esthetics, in all forms in theatrics, visual arts and music.
During the civilian portion of the parade for instance, when an ocean needed to be depicted, the crowd in the moving tableau did a coordinated waving of blue silken drapes, imparting the image of an ocean, whereupon flying fish depicted in cardboard facsimiles on sticks jumped in and out of the surface as executed by participants who were holding them.
A truly absorbing spectacle of sound, shape, color and motion.
And rich with drama, too, as surviving members of the Communist Party of China, quite aged and near-immobile, were on hand to evoke memories of those times of hard struggle: the workers strikes at Shanghai; the great encirclement campaign of the Kuomintang that sent the Party making that historic ingenious Long March in which Mao Zedong began to gain the indisputable leadership of the people’s protracted struggle that culminated in his proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949.
A grand tableau of Chinese people’s progress
The civilian parade actually amounted to a great narrative of how the People’s Republic of China has progressed since 1949. From among one of the poorest nations of the world at the time, China succeeded in propelling itself to what most analysts regard as the second largest economy in the world, but which I, in a column almost two years ago, proclaimed as already the largest (search
“Thanks to me, China has become the largest economy in the world” [The Manila Times, Dec. 29, 2017], actually an apologia for what I considered as a mistake, but a reader was quick to assert that I was right.) Certain rules in the World Trade Organization give preferential treatment to developing countries, so China finds it advantageous to stay categorized as a developing nation and be happy being just the second largest instead of the largest already as I had the nerve to proclaim a year ago.
For this achievement, giant photographs of Chinese leaders who had made it possible were at the head of civilian groups representing various stages in Chinese economic rise: beginning with Mao Zedong, then Deng Xiao Peng, followed by Jiang Xemin, who was visibly teary-eyed as he sat watching at the presidential dais, then Hu Jintao and finally Xi Jinping.
All the provinces of China were depicted in the event for their respective developments, but whatever the case was, the artistic vents of the organizers were ever there in the method of messaging. They would even go much beyond the traditional one-dimensional milieu like painting and illustration; in the case of one province which had attained a high-level of industrialization, the hallmarks of developments were not confined to mere illustration boards but were presented in not just tri-dimensional replicas but moving ones, too, like that minuscule train which actually ran round and round on a railway on a float.
Illusion and reality
Viewed from above, the participating crowds in the civilian portion of the parade seemed to be not marching but rolling on their feet. It’s actually an optical illusion created through perfect synchronization of otherwise rough-edged shifting of feet on a mass scale.
But going non-illusory now, it is interesting to note how the organizers of the show had structured the presentation. It came under two main themes. The first was the war capability of China; the second, the progress of the people. I wondered: Was it not China’s way of telling the United States, “Hey, Uncle Sam, you had better not hurt my people; I have the capacity to wipe you out?”
To begin with, the celebration began with 50 cannons firing 70 times each, corresponding to the 70 years existence of the People’s Republic of China.
Talk of real time then. If that were the mode for displaying the war capability of China, which after all was the entry point of the extravaganza, would that have required the actual blasting of a missile, albeit in minuscule scale?
(To be continued next Saturday)