Free Peking Story by David Kidd Page B

According to Aunt Chin, Peking fell to the Communists because someone opened the city gates and let them walk in. This was sufficient explanation in itself, but she would sometimes hint that she knew of another, and even more important, reason, and she would speak cryptically of the return of Peking’s magic luck. Then she would change the subject, because she prided herself on understanding things of that sort, and felt that most other people — and especially foreigners — couldn’t.
    What she meant by her hints was, I learned, that the magic power — or, as she called it, “luck” — of the city was returning to make it once again the capital of China. For twenty-one years, despite its nine-hundred-year history as a seat of authority, it had been treated as an ordinary city by the Nationalists. Peking people have remained much the same through all their history. The Mongols, the Tartars, the Japanese — coups, counter-coups, and the fall of empires — have left little impression on them, and the arrival of the Communists, who were, after all, Chinese, seemed to them not so much a conquest as a change of regime. Aunt Chin, like all the rest of the family, cared little for the Communists, but like many others who were unenthusiastic about their regime, she felt a reluctant pride at the thought of the city’s rising again to its proper place.
    On the eve of the inauguration of the new Communist government — October 1, 1949, the day on which Peking was again to become the capital — Aunt Chin, her companion, and my wife, Aimee, and I were in Aunt Chin’s rooms playing a game called
losung
, or Russian poker. “This government is putting on new clothes tomorrow,” Aunt Chin said. “Do you think it will be much of a show?”
    Aimee and I said that we thought it would be, and we described to her, as well as we could, the state of excitement the city was in. Schools, government offices, and labor organizations were all working on their contributions to the great parades that were to celebrate the occasion. Dance groups were practicing the Planting Dance, imported by the Communists from the provinces. Everyone was busy learning the songs of the New China, making costumes, and, because the demonstrations would last into the night, making lanterns.
    The most spectacular preparations were centered on the walled plaza in front of the main gate — the Gate of Heavenly Peace — of the old Imperial Palace. From a balcony high up on the gate, Mao Tse-tung, all the officials of the new government, and the chiefs of those who are now known in China as “democratic personalities” (pro-Communist nonrevolutionaries) were to review the parades. Lesser “personalities” were to sit in grandstands built in front of the gate. There had formerly been groves of silk trees in the plaza, but these had been removed, and where they had stood, new concrete had been poured and flagstones laid. Floodlights had been mounted on steel towers all around the plaza. A famous pair of huge marble columns flanking the gate had been moved back to widen the road. Loudspeakers and microphones had been installed. The flaked red wall around the plaza had been repainted, and festoons of colored lights and banners — most of them bearing the legends “Long Live Chairman Mao Tse-tung!” and “Long Live the People’s Republic of China!” — hung everywhere.
    On the ramparts of the palace wall, at either side of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, stood four tall, slender poles, with an immense banner of gossamer red silk hanging from each of them. Under the eaves of the roofed, red-and-gold gate, nine ten-foot-high silk lanterns hung. In the middle of the plaza, workmen had drilled a hole as big as a well. It had turned out to be the foundation for a huge flagpole, on which now waved the flag of the People’s Republic — one large and four small gold