Nothing was left to chance. Martial law was proclaimed for the day to ensure order and discipline, windows along the parade route were sealed, and the city was locked down tightly.
Those invited to attend - no spontaneous gatherings were allowed - had to assemble at different points around Beijing at 5 a.m. to be taken in closed buses to Tiananmen Square.
There we were treated to an awesome spectacle marking China's emergence as an economic and military power, and underlining the continuity of the present communist leadership with the past.
Long lines of tanks rumbled by in formation, jet fighters screamed low overhead, and a colourful array of floats passed along Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace in a two-hour parade marking the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.
President Jiang Zemin (73), who leads the party and the military, greeted the troops standing in a Red Flag limousine as did China's great reformer Deng Xiaoping at the last such parade 15 years ago.
The President, who usually appears in business attire, then reviewed the triumphal event from the ramparts above the Gate of Heavenly Peace wearing revolutionary chic, the high-buttoned jacket made fashionable by Mao Zedong who proclaimed the People's Republic from the same spot on October 1st, 1949.
The three giant pictures carried in the parade were of Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping and President Jiang. The message could not have been more clear to the millions watching on television.
President Jiang has joined the pantheon of the greats, by virtue of his 10 years at the top in a time of fantastic economic growth. The most colourful, joyful and ethnically diverse group in the parade marched alongside the float carrying President Jiang's portrait, as if to emphasise his designated role as the popular father of all the Chinese.
Where democratic countries use the privacy of the ballot to establish their legitimacy, communist governments employ public parades, and the Chinese Communist Party yesterday staged its most extravagant pageant ever to display its continuing mastery of the destiny of a quarter of the world's population.
The choreographed event, which took a year of planning and billions of pounds to stage, involved half-a-million people, including 14,000 troops from the People's Liberation Army.
No fewer than 180 tanks led the parade, stretching for two miles along the grand avenue where hundreds were killed when tanks crushed the student-led pro-democracy protests in 1989.
Some 100 aircraft flew low overhead, including Russianmade Sukhoi-27 fighters, supersonic Flying Leopards, which can carry four missiles with a total weight of five tonnes, and, making their debut, Chinese-made aerial refuel tankers for jet fighters. They were followed by trucks bearing rockets and missiles.
Diplomats trained their binoculars especially on four giant green tubes, models of the intercontinental ballistic missile Dong Feng31 (East Wind-31), which when developed in two or three years will be capable of reaching Alaska.
The display of hardware gives substance to Beijing's recent threats of military action against China's lost province of Taiwan for moving too far along the road to independence.
However, in his address before the parade, President Jiang emphasised that China "will continue to pursue the policy of peaceful reunification and one country two systems and ultimately accomplish the national reunification of Taiwan with the mainland following the successful return of Hong Kong and Macau".
He hailed "earth-shaking changes to the erstwhile poor and weak old China", due entirely to the Communist Party.
"Practice has proved fully that socialism is the only way to save and develop China," he said. "It has also proved that building socialism with Chinese characteristics is a broad road to economic prosperity."