The National Day military parade of 1957: Domestically-made fighters soar in the blue sky

At the National Day military parade of 1957, Peng Dehuai, accompanied by Yang Chengwu, reviewed divisions comprising 7,064 soldiers. A relatively small number of soldiers participated in this National Day military parade, but it was attended by a relatively large number of foreign guests. Foreign guests from over 50 countries including Kadar, Premier of the Hungarian workers’ and peasants’ revolutionary government, Anton Yugov, Chairman of Ministry Conference of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Mohammad Hatta, former Vice-President of Indonesia, Aristov, head of the Supreme Soviet delegation from the USSR, Z．Fierlirger, Chairman of the Czechoslovakian National Assembly, Petar Stambolic, President of the Federal Assembly of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, U Myint Thein, head of the Burmese goodwill mission, Cambodian Princess Norodom Bopha Devi and Prince Norodom Chakrapong, as well as diplomatic envoys and officials, and foreign experts in China stood on the review stand and watched the military parade.

The material basis for building up a modernized people’s army and consolidating national defense lies in modernized weapons and equipment. In the early days of New China, some of the army’s weapons and equipment were domestically made, while the majority of them had been seized from battlefields. Although there were some arms factories in China at that time, they were small with backward technologies and low production capacity, and therefore unable to satisfy the army’s demands. Under such circumstances, China imported large quantities of weapons and equipment from the Soviet Union. In 1953, the first 5-year Plan began implementation. China regarded the development of the national defense industries and defense science and technology as an important task, and successively built and expanded 79 relatively large ordnance factories. Meanwhile, weapons and equipment were produced in large numbers copying the technical data from the Soviet Union. In 1956, China successfully produced a Mig-17 jet plane (J-5). At the National Day military parade of 1957, domestically-made Il-28 jet bombers and J-5 fighters were reviewed for the first time. When they flew over Tiananmen Square, they attracted the attention of hundreds of millions of people.

Translated by LOTO