President Jiang Zemin spoke of modernisation but the celebrations seemed a throwback to the past.
Only the children dressed in capes who zoomed around on rollerblades would have been out of place in the 1950s, when China held such parades every year.
So many floats betrayed that era's earnest enthusiasm for science and progress by showing scientists in white coats splitting the atom, workers on oil rigs, peasants waving flowers alongside a hydro-power station and papier mache spaceships.
'Science and technology are the primary productive force,' declared the marching students.
Although the troops wore uniforms in bright primary colours, their goose-stepping marches could not help but evoke the 1930s of Germany or the Soviet Union.
The relentless message of patriotism expressed in every form and the vast Tiananmen Square blanketed by disciplined ranks of schoolchildren holding aloft giant cards and slogans spoke of the age of the masses.
The sentimental attachment to a disgraced era, which only now lingers on in North Korea, jarred with the sometimes ludicrous touches that had more in common with It's a Knockout, where Europeans dressed up in silly costumes compete to perform invented games.