China's 60th anniversary parade marches into my living room

My lady wife has been behaving strangely. Yesterday she announced she was going to bed at 7 p.m. Why was this? Because she wanted to be up at 2 a.m. to watch the 60th anniversary parade live from Beijing. Of course it didn’t quite work out – she couldn’t sleep, because she was hungry, so she came down and ate half my dinner and tried to change the channel 10 minutes before the end of Man United-Wolfsburg, but that’s par for the course. However, at 2 o’clock, there she was.

I was content to watch the replay at a more civilised time. After all, it’s not exactly an unpredictable cliff-hanger. It’s just a huge number of people marching up and down and singing, waving sheets of coloured card to make precisely coordinated pictures. Somewhat daringly, I asked her how she’d got herself up in the middle of the night to watch all 146 balls-aching minutes of this orgy of leader-worship. She said I’d have enjoyed it too if I’d got up early enough to see the military parade at the beginning. I replied that I did not enjoy the sight of tanks trundling down Chang’an, for reasons which she well knew. But our weapons are peaceful, she said; we don’t go round invading other countries like certain people. I said I was well aware that Chinese weapons are only used against their own people, and the “clash of civilisations” argument took its predictable course. Sometimes it leads to me breaking into Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, but not today, or I’d probably have got a chopstick up my jacksie.

The thing is that my wife is neither a convinced Communist nor a raving nationalist. It was just nostalgia and a bit of homesickness. This is what she grew up with; she was singing along to the songs of her childhood, just as I might to the Beatles or Led Zep. And I had to admit that there was nothing offensive in what I saw, having missed the military tosh: yes, there was a richly decorated float for each province, and yes, that included Taiwan, which isn’t part of the PRC just yet: but the commentary was peaceful and only referred to improved commercial and cultural links across the Taiwan Straits.

Obviously the problem for us is the sight of more than 100,000 people, most of them children, marching in tight regimentation. I had to explain about Triumph of the Will. But then, what are our young people doing instead? Lovers of freedom would have to say they’d rather their kids were slobbing in bed and playing video games than goose-stepping through the streets, but sensible ones will hesitate just a little. And the kids can be corralled like this, not because they’re used to endless Maoist regimentation as my wife was in the Seventies, but because they’re used to doing four or five hours of homework a night under the loving but firm pressure of their parents. Snap judgments on China are out of place: the first ever Communist country to actually function economically demands more careful attention.