National Day celebrations; Missiles galore; Hong Kong violence; US tour guide charged as MSS spy

The National Day celebrations went off without a hitch in Beijing and General Secretary Xi has already issued an order of commendation for everyone who participated in his first National Day military parade as General Secretary, President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The hardware highlight was the missiles, weapons that are giving US defense planners a lot of heartburn. In past parades some of the weapons on display may have been fake, but I will bet the ones in this year’s show are real, and I hope that US and other intelligence services were not surprised by anything they saw.

Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, absent from the big dinner Monday night, walked onto the Tian'anmen Rostrum with Xi. Their portraits appeared in the parade after the military one, as did those of Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping (poor Hua Guofeng, the forgotten leader…). Zhu Rongji missed both the Monday evening event and the parade, so it appears he may be quite ill.

Xi appeared to be quite comfor…