Tiananmen Square on National Day

October 1st is National Day in China. It is the start of a week long holiday period. I went to Tiananmen square to see Chinese nationalism in full effect. If I was willing to stay out all night I could have saw the flag raising ceremony which is aparently the thing to do. I was unwilling to do this, but I did get out of bed before 7am and take the train down there. Even at 8:30 in the morning the square was packed.

I’m a little disappointed in my pictures. For one the sky was typical Beijing, grey from pollution. And I was unable to get enough elevation to show the sheer mass of humanity. In hindsight I should have climbed the steps of the national museum and taken a picture from there.

2013 Update

People complained about the weather and the air when I was living in Beijing. I dubbed the sky “Beijing Grey” which you can see in this picture I took in Tiananman Square on National Day (October 1st) 2005, but based on these pictures I just saw on Twitter things are considerably worse now. Apparently bad air in China is good for the Vancouver real estate market.

2024 Update

Now it is many years later and China at least in Beijing may have improved their pollution problem, alas there are many other problems of a socioeconomic nature. I don’t keep in touch with too many people but I am still on WeChat and Twitter having lived in China for years. The US and by extension the world is headed for another Trump VS Biden showdown if the legal system doesn’t catch up to Citizen Trump first, but there is also a growing division of the West along with other democracies such as Japan and Korea and the Philippines joining forces against China, whose principal allies seem to be Russia and Iran.

All I want to do is update my blog and redo my WordPress taxonomy, but there are a lot of sad posts still, even though many were deleted. I hope cooler heads prevail as an escalation in Europe or East Asia will not be good for Canada and the world. If you want to read some happier travel tales, might I suggest my recent trip to Scotland.

You of course can leave a comment if you must, but many of my old posts have comments closed because of spammers.

This entry was originaly posted on October 1st, 2005, it was last edited on October 14th, 2024 and is filed under: Travel and tagged: Beijing, China, Tiananmen Square.