Flying the Red Flag: China’s Hongqi wheeled out as President Xi Jinping inspects troops at Beijing military parade

A mobile symbol of China’s revolutionary past roared back to life on Thursday when President Xi Jinping rode into downtown Beijing in a Chinese-built Red Flag luxury sedan to inspect troops.

The Red Flag, or Hongqi, line of limousines harks back to the late 1950s when the first one rolled off the production line of local carmaker First Automobile Works (FAW) with the help of Soviet expertise and technology.

The designers modelled the original vehicles on a Chrysler limousine, directly transferring many of the car’s key components like the gearbox.

The cars were designed to reflect the nation’s industrial progress and were largely reserved for the Communist Party elite and foreign dignitaries until about the 1980s.

It lost popularity in officialdom as cadres opted for foreign luxury cars over the heavy, unreliable and fuel-guzzling older-model Hongqis.