BEIJING DAYS: Dispatches From the Middle Kingdom

The Chinese Adore a Military Parade; Then I Came Along

It was just before 10 a.m. on a Thursday and the streets of China’s capital city were strangely quiet: no cars, no people. A national holiday had been declared by the Communist government to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two.

Like my wife’s family, the collective nation sat around their television sets watching what would be a display of Chinese military might — perfect-specimen soldiers, weapons of mass destruction — for all the world to see. This wasn’t as much a commemorative party as it was a global warning:

Don’t even think about messing with China, folks.

My wife, her mother, her brother and girlfriend and a cousin, all sat in the living room, in front of the big-screen high definition TV and watched proudly. Mama had a small chair pushed up close, so she wouldn’t miss a thing. She loves boxing matches and the portent of violence. Her eyes were wide.

I walked in and took a seat. The way I figured it, these people needed me. A little bit of Western perspective. I was Stuttering John, or one of those little robots in a right-front seat ready to riff on the flabby old black-and-white movies shown on Mystery Science Theater. If I had to play the Grim Reaper of Reality, then so be it.

Time to educate and enlighten.

Tiananmen Square was empty of its usual throngs and the Boulevard of Heavenly Peace was devoid of its honking incessant traffic.

In their place was an ocean of red carpet. In front of the People’s palace and its mammoth portrait of Chairman Mao, President Xi Jinping addressed a collected gathering of world leaders (sort of) and tens of thousands of soldiers and green camouflaged military hardware.

I saw Vladimir Putin and nobody else I recognized, just a collection of graying party leaders who looked like they’d been dosed with embalming fluid and propped up along a viewing railing in the warm September sun.

Time for my first volley.

“The entire world is pretty much ignoring this bash,” I said. “If Vlad the Impaler is the best you can get, your party is pretty much a flop.”

Some murmurs of reaction. And an elbow to the ribs.

My wife.

“Hey, you’re an American!” I protested.

“I’m an American when I’m in the U.S.,” she said. “When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”

OK, suit yourself.

Xi droned on. I got enough of a translation to know that he was proposing a cutback of 300,000 soldiers in the interest of world peace. Or something like that.

But then I noticed something funny going on: The audience wasn’t buying it.

“This is boring,” said my wife’s cousin. “Who wrote this speech? Obama could do much better. He talks like a real person. He has mannerisms. He’s cool. Not like Xi.”

The cousin is 24; he speaks perfect English and works as an accountant for a large company whose offices aren’t far away from where the president’s speech is taking place. He likes hip-hop.

Perhaps I had an ally.

The soldiers began their goose-stepped march, in perfect unison, to raise the Chinese flag in the middle of the square. Somebody mentions that the soldiers are all hand-picked for this duty. all 30 or so of them are exactly 6-foot-three, to give the impression of a perfect healthy race of young talented soldiers.

In a gesture straight out of Hollywood, or Patton’s third army, one soldier gives the flag a final throw into the air as it’s raised up the pole.

“I used to do that in job in grade school,” the cousin mentions.

Then Xi is in a large Chinese-made limousine driving slowly down the boulevard to address the troops. He pops out of the sunroof and shouts good morning to each battalion, which shots back. It looks pretty impressive, pretty choreographed.

The sun is shining and I suddenly think of Dallas and JFK and 1963.

Aren’t they worried about, ahem, an assassination attempt?

“No way,” the cousin says, “This is China. They’ve taken all the precautions.”

He tells me that his office, located along the parade route, was closed a week before. Nobody could even have as much as a pair of scissors in their desks. Sharpshooters took to the roofs.

The parade droned on. Suddenly I looked in front of the TV to see a collection of Minion toys my wife’s cousin had bought at McDonalds to give to his younger sister. They looked like little yellow soldiers, lined up for inspection.

I have an idea.

Within minutes, the Minion army was in position. My wife’s cousin had retrieved a small yellow car the big enough for a child to sit inside. The video cameras are out.

We’re ready.

In front of the TV screen showing the real deal, I push my wife’s cousin in the little yellow car, slowly passing in front of the Minion army. He waves to the troops, in an stiff-elbowed gesture, as Xi does.

Everyone laughed. They took pictures. We did it several times to get it right.

Suddenly, nobody is watching the military might extravaganza anymore.

Political free speech happens in the most unlikely of places.