Society

Update:Gallery: Chinese national day military show 2009, Beijing

Gallery: Chinese national day fighters' show 2009, Beijing

Gallery:China's National Day fireworks show

A series of official and community celebration activities will be held to celebrate the once a year Chinese National Day.  In 2003, for instance, a flag raising ceremony was held in the morning at the Golden Bauhinia Square outside the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai.  A sea parade and a fly-past were staged in the ceremony.  Variety shows were organized in various districts and the whole day finished with a fireworks display in the evening.

A new subway line starts operation in Beijing September 28^th just before China's National Day on October 1^st.

With a total length of 28.2 kilometers, the Subway Line 4 runs through the city from the northwest to the south.

Update:Gallery: Chinese national day military show 2009, Beijing

Gallery: Chinese national day fighters' show 2009, Beijing

As the political center, Tian' anmen of Forbidden City and other popular tourist venues will begin closing to visitors from Tuesday, just two days out from The ChineseNational Day holiday.

Iconic venues including the Forbidden City, Tian'anmen Rostrum, and the Great Hall of the People will close tomorrow at 3 pm, and reopen on Friday at the earliest, the Tian'anmen Square managing authority told METRO.

Tian'anmen Square will be closed on Wednesday and Thursday.

President Hu Jintao, along with other State leaders and VIPs, will watch a two-hour military and civilian parade from the rostrum on Thursday at 10 am.

A gala event organized by Olympic ceremony director Zhang Yimou and fireworks designer Cai Guoqiang will be staged later that night.

Beijing police expect tens of thousands of tourists to visit the square when it reopens on Oct 2. The authority is yet to announce the exact time when the square will reopen.

Many visitors were expected to watch the regular flag raising ceremony at Tian'anmen on Thursday.

METRO has also learned the Great Hall of the People will be closed four days longer than other venues in Tian'anmen Square. It will reopen to visitors on Oct 6.

Meanwhile, the newly renovated China National Museum on the east side of the square, which has set up an observation deck for visitors to enjoy Tian'anmen Square's decorations, will reopen its doors to visitors free of charge on Oct 3.

The Forbidden City Museum will be reopened on Friday morning. The museum's ticket office said in order to ensure the safety of visitors, the south gate will be used as the entrance and the exit will be two gates in its east and west wings.

Meanwhile, security is tight in Beijing, with police officers citywide and in nearby provinces being mobilized for the operation. The city's 1 million security volunteers, including expatriates living in Beijing, will work full-time starting today.

On Wednesday, the capital's 7,000 traffic police, equipped with GPS devices, will be in charge of clearing a path for thousands of servicemen and women, armed vehicles and 200,000 performers for the parade.

A command center has been set up at the Imperial Ancestral Temple, just east of Tian'anmen Square, to monitor security during the celebrations. From there, military, police and officials will monitor live footage from 40,000 cameras in Beijing.

Major hotels along Chang'an avenue, where the parade will be held, will be closed from Monday until Friday.

BTW, Beijing MERO Line 4 is open today, now the Chinese capital is set up for next stage.

Update:Gallery: Chinese national day military show 2009, Beijing

Gallery: Chinese national day fighters' show 2009, Beijing

 

What is so wrong with this people complaining 2-3 hours delay?

The parade has been announced since May! Duh!

If I were a passenger I would rather set back and relax at that beautiful and new,fresh smelling Beijing International Airport rather than worry that one Fighter jet might collide with the plane I'm on.

This 60th anniversary happens only ones in a lifetime. I'm very supportive of it.

Visitor's comment

The Beijing capital airport will shut down for three hours starting from 9:30 am on Oct 1 for the National Day parade, affecting some 180 flights and thousands of passengers.

The capital airport is the busiest airport in the country, with at least 1,000 flights taking off or landing per day, or at least one flight every minute.

A spokesman for the Beijing Capital International Airport said yesterday that it will close its three runways starting from 9 am, and restart runway lights and navigations systems at noon.

An Air China spokeswoman said that all its domestic flights to and from Beijing during the three hours have been cancelled, but all its international flights will be rescheduled to other times in the day.

"We will rearrange planes to guarantee enough transport capacity and reduce troubles for passengers as much as we can," she said.

She declined to disclose how many Air China flights will be affected.

Air China is based at the capital airport, accounting for nearly 80 percent of the operations in the airport's largest terminal building.

China Southern, another major airline based in Guangzhou, said at least 40 of their flights will be affected.

"But only very few passengers will be affected, as tickets for affected flights stopped sales quite early," a China Southern spokesman said.

Major airlines, including Air China, China Southern and Hainan Airlines, said they will refund or reissue the tickets without charging extra fees for passengers who bought tickets for flights during those three hours,

Similar restrictions were adopted on the opening night of the Olympic Games last year, as more than 300 flights were cancelled or postponed from 7 pm to midnight.

"It is wiser to simply travel at another time. I want to sit in front of the TV and watch the live broadcast of the parade that morning anyway," Beijinger Wang Yingchao said. She planned a trip to Hainan province during Golden Week and has now decided to leave on Oct 3.

Meanwhile, Beijing will see large-scale traffic control on Oct 1 to make way for the National Day parade, officials said.

Since more than 200,000 people and 8,000 vehicles will descend on Tian'anmen Square from all corners of the city for the parade that day, traffic on main streets and ring roads in downtown Beijing will be affected, said Shao Jie, head of Beijing's traffic command center.

Some 7,000 traffic police will be dispatched onto the streets that day from the wee hours until midnight, he said.

In some areas, such as Tian'anmen Square, Olympic Green, the Summer Palace, Fragrant Hill and along the Badaling expressway, traffic control measures will continue until the end of Golden Week, but trucks will be affected the most, according to a notice issued by the municipal traffic control bureau.

On National Day, some 10,000 residents who live in communities near Tian'anmen Square will also be affected, as they are required to hold temporary passes to go in and out of their communities on Oct 1.

The special passes will be issued to residents in nine communities of Dashila area until Tuesday at local community committees. Residents should provide their identification certificate to get the passes.

Let's waiting for the great parade and wow with the follow idea.

I love parades. When I was a girl in the 40s we didn't have many parades because the Japs were always invading. But I love them now and I have 32 grandchildren. How about that?