Rehearsals for last Friday's parade marking the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China were so time-consuming that the 6,000 crack troops who led the parade wore out three pairs of boots practising in army camps for six months. During actual trials, tens of thousands of teenagers were issued with nappies to cope with the call of nature as they marched up and down the Avenue of Heavenly Peace.
This type of organisation and people control evokes an image of China as North Korea, an authoritarian communist country where choreography takes precedence over people. And indeed as with its Stalinist neighbour, dissent, free speech and support for democracy are suppressed. But China is today a much more complex and free-wheeling nation than it was five or 10 or 20 years ago.
The definition of what is permissible in everyday life has expanded steadily each year, as old-style communist authority has been eroded by information and wealth. Local party committees, the adhesive which held Maoist China together, no longer dictate to everyone where they shall live and work. People are becoming richer and more self-confident, and the extent of government intrusion into their lives is steadily declining.
This is borne out by a Chinawide poll of consumer attitudes and lifestyles conducted in June by the US-based Gallup Organisation, its third since 1994, and published in the current edition of Fortune Magazine.
Chinese people of all ages say their lives have improved over the last five years and they are confident that things will get better in the next five. More than a quarter of people surveyed said they would like to start their own business, signifying a degree of entrepreneurship higher than in most capitalist countries, though 40 per cent would still like the security of a government job. Typically of developing countries, food is the single biggest expense, accounting for 40 per cent of personal income.
City folk are doing much better these days than their country cousins. The average income of a city-dweller is the equivalent of £2,000 a year, and that of a rural inhabitant a mere £650. In the top 10 Chinese cities, 96 per cent of homes have colour television, three out of four have telephones, two-thirds have pagers, more than half have their own video, CD players and portable stereos, and 28 per cent have mobile telephones.
A gap is also growing between younger and older Chinese. A third of Beijing people under the age of 30 have used the Internet, four times the rate of those over 30. Nationwide, the number of Internet users is estimated at about seven million and growing fast.
But there are some staggering areas of ignorance of the outside world in China 20 years after it began opening up. More than half of city-dwellers have never seen a Western film, 56 per cent have never heard of the Internet and an even higher proportion have no idea what stocks and shares are. In rural areas, where the majority of China's 1.2 billion people live, 94 per cent of people know nothing about the Internet and 97 per cent have never used a computer.
Images of Shanghai and Beijing youths hanging out at McDonalds do not in fact represent modern China; two-thirds of all Chinese have never heard of McDonalds. And outside the cities only one in a hundred Chinese have ever tried Western fast food. Almost one in five of all Chinese have also never heard of Coca-Cola, the world's best-known brand name, though the soft drink conglomerate can take comfort from the fact that 40 per cent of Chinese have never heard of its global rival, PepsiCola.
Paradoxically, as it presides over the lifting of social controls, the leadership is still trying to command the flow of information, especially to the Coca-Cola-drinking, computer-using, urban elite. Since the last Gallup poll was conducted, the government has clamped down on what Gallup and other research organisations can ask and what they can release in future.
Last week Beijing banned a special commemorative edition of Time Magazine, presumably because its survey of China included articles by dissidents and the Dalai Lama. The ban was imposed at the very time that executives of Time Inc, which owns Fortune Magazine, was hosting a Fortune conference in Shanghai about China's future attended by President Jiang Zemin.
But such petty prohibitions will become increasingly irrelevant as the teenagers who marched in Friday's big parade tune in to the Internet and learn for themselves what is going on in the world.