Abstract

A national day parade is a memory project. A memory project manages the content of collective memory by demonstrating to those at present – both domestic and international audiences – how the past has evolved. Such a project can involve people who reconstruct events from the past, such as people’s memory of September 11 (Clark 2002) or a nation’s recollection of a past war (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). In this chapter we study key national day parades from 1949 to 2009 to see how circle of alliance changes in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC). The chapter focuses on domestic leadership alliance as shown through portraits paraded but also examines international alliances through portraits and slogans displayed at Chinese national day parades.