BEIJING—The dress rehearsals for the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary began two weeks ago, with the whup whup whup of helicopters above Beijing’s main boulevard, some of the world’s most tightly restricted airspace. Multiple helicopters in tight aerial formation—forming the numerals “100”—flitted past my window. Then came the jets trailing blue, yellow, and red smoke plumes, screeching toward Tiananmen Square. There was no military parade in this practice run. When Chinese military hardware is paraded down the main drag, people living nearby normally are told to shut their windows, draw the curtains—and don’t peek.
China’s tech-savvy commissars don’t really need real-life parades to celebrate the party’s centennial. With digital effects and 22,000 spectators filmed by drones, Beijing’s centennial extravaganza at the National Stadium on Monday evoked Chinese triumphs through elaborately choreographed scenes playing out onstage and onscreen: engineering marvels, space probes, precision fireworks, submarines, 2008 Olympics highlights, doctors battling COVID-19, and at one point real-life vintage cargo trucks. It was a dazzling socialist-realist-Fast and the Furious moment made for YouTube. (Except in China YouTube access is banned by internet censors.)
