Live: China 60th anniversary celebrations

Our correspondent reports on all the action in Tiananmen Square as China celebrates 60 years with a spectacle of power

(Ng Han Guan/AP)

Tanks roll past Tiananmen Gate at the start of the military parade to mark the 60th China anniversary in Beijing

And in a blaze of colour, it’s over. At 12.30 on the dot. What organisation.
More than 5,000 children filled the final float, each carrying red balloons and tinsel hoops. With a shout they let go the balloons into the sky – now a deep deep blue – over the square. The balloons were joined by 60,000 doves released from their cages.
The children, clearly one of the few groups not regarded as a security threat, raced up to the foot of the podium to wave their hoops in a rainbow array of colours to the Communist Party leaders. Adorable. It’s becoming something of a tradition at these parades.

The leaders even seemed to show a little animation. They achieved a few smiles. But it would have been fun to seem them digging each other in the ribs and giggling over the floats. In the grainy footage from 60 years ago, that can be found on this China Heritage project site, there is a clear sense of excitement as the leaders of that era chat and point and show their evident delight at the moment of that day.
These days it’s all a lot more serious. The spontaneity has been lost as China takes itself ever more seriously. It is a nation that knows it is hovering on the brink if not of great power status, then of regaining greatness.
12.25 (05.25 BST):
Perhaps the most important floats were at the front. These showed China’s leaders. Behind-the-scenes fighting had been fierce in the secret conclaves at which Communist Party leaders make their decisions. Just which leaders should be represented?
Now we see that everyone got a look-in. The quick and the dead.
First came Chairman Mao in portrait showing him announcing the founding of Communist rule 60 years ago today. Unsurprisingly, he was followed by Deng Xiaoping, the leader who oversaw the 1984 parade and is credited with the sweeping and daring reforms that transformed China from a backward nation mired in poverty, a state-planned economy and held back by socialist dogma into the third-biggest economy in the world.
The arguments were over whether to include the living. In the end, they did. We had Jiang Zemin, the previous president, who did his best not to smirk as he watched from the podium as his own portrait paraded in front of him. He was followed by a picture of Hu Jintao. A compromise must have been reached in those secret meetings. You couldn’t have Jiang Zemin without his successor, after all. So they both appeared