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How Beijing celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1959
- British journalist Christopher Dobson was given unrivalled access to cover the festivities
- Sixty years later, his son recounts his father’s stay in the fledgling nation, and how the experience would last a lifetime
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The sun beat down from a blue autumn sky onto the patient crowds crammed into Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of thousands had come from the countryside by trucks and trains and were camping throughout the city. The banging of drums and the blare of bugles had ensured they had all been awake since dawn, waiting for the grand parade and the patriotic speeches to celebrate the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
My father, Christopher Dobson, had arrived a few days earlier from his base in Moscow, where he covered the Soviet Union for the Daily Express newspaper, to report on the 10th anniversary celebrations of Mao Zedong’s triumph over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces and the beginning of Communist rule.
The London-based Daily Express was one of the largest-selling newspapers in the world at the time and its publisher, Lord Beaverbrook, decided my father would open the first foreign newspaper bureau in Moscow since the war. So, after an eight-month wait for a visa, he arrived in January 1959.
On September 28, after flying from the Soviet capital via Omsk, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator in a Tupolev TU 104, the clouds parted at 20,000 feet as the jet started its descent to Peking to reveal the Great Wall of China “snaking away across the bare grey and brown mountainsides”.
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