The Day China Stood Up: A New People's Republic Is Proclaimed
On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, before some 300,000 people gathered in the square below.
At three o'clock on the afternoon of October 1, 1949, a hushed announcement rolled across a sea of faces in Beijing. Some 300,000 soldiers and ordinary citizens had packed themselves into Tiananmen Square, and now every head turned toward the great gate at its northern edge.
High on the rostrum of Tiananmen stood Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Moments earlier, the day's master of ceremonies, Lin Boqu, had declared the proceedings open. Now Mao leaned toward the microphones and spoke the words that ended one era of Chinese history and began another: "The Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China is founded today."
Then he pressed a button. Slowly, the new national flag of China — the five-starred red flag, unveiled only days before — climbed the pole for the very first time as a 21-gun salute boomed in the distance and the band played "March of the Volunteers," the provisional national anthem. Behind the flag came the rumble of the People's Liberation Army's first public military parade.
The road to that square had been a decade of war. The Chinese Communists and the Nationalists had been fighting for control of China since the late 1920s, pausing only to resist Japan. After Japan's surrender in 1945, the civil war resumed in full force — and this time the Communists, disciplined and well-organized, steadily gained ground. Beijing fell to them in January 1949, and through the rest of the year city after city accepted Communist rule while the Nationalist government retreated south.
In September, Mao and his allies moved to build the new state's foundations. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference opened in Beijing on September 21, drawing 662 delegates from across the country. They chose Beijing as the capital, adopted the Gregorian calendar, and approved the flag and anthem. Opening that conference, Mao told the delegates that "the Chinese people, comprising one-quarter of humanity, have now stood up" — the line that would echo through decades of Chinese rhetoric.
October 1 made it official. The old Republic of China government would linger on the mainland only a few more weeks; by December it had retreated to the island of Taiwan. A country holding roughly a fifth of the world's people was now a Communist state, and the Cold War had a new center of gravity in Asia.
It matters because that afternoon's ceremony still sets the calendar for one-fifth of humanity. October 1 is China's National Day, marked every year with celebrations and a week-long public holiday. Whatever one thinks of what followed — and the decades ahead held triumphs and terrible suffering alike — the founding ceremony was the moment modern China, as a political fact, came into being: a quarter of humanity standing, as Mao put it, in Tiananmen Square.
No verifiable public-domain or Creative Commons photograph of the October 1, 1949 founding ceremony at a usable resolution could be found on Wikimedia Commons, so this story runs without an image.
