Every first day of October is a special day for the Chinese people to paint the town red, as the proclamation of the People’s Republic being commemorated nation-wide. This year the National Day is being celebrated in a special fashion since the sixtieth anniversary sees a completion of sexagenarian cycle on Chinese calendar, thus seen as a full lifespan of a revolution in the traditional sense.

At the eve of such a meaningful event, Shanghai Daily Online decides to release the web edition of National Day Special. We focus on the milestones and achievements in the past six decades as well as the highlights of present day celebration events.

Special reports on the National Day celebration such as parade and official fireworks have been streaming in and related stories are produced in a fashion that fully utilizes Shanghai Daily’s multi-media channels. Exclusive photo coverage is displayed as slideshow on the front page of the website, granting viewers the freedom to go to the associated stories at will.

Celebration events hosted by the government and major businesses are shown in chronological orders. We designed it to float over most of the web entries on the right hand side to serve as a constant reminder of today’s events. Viewers can also check a list of them to sort by different criteria to help better plan their schedules during the Golden Week.

The special features of our National Day website are the unique retrospective presentations of the Republic’s achievements and milestones.

We have acquired the data collected by National Bureau of Statistics of China in yearly basis for the past six decades and created interactive charts in Flash animations. By using FusionCharts’s open source API, we generated XML files from the data tables in the yearbook—China Compendium of Statistics 1949-2004 as well as the figures we found from other sources on the web, and nested them under the UI level Flash presentations.


We chose as many as 8 aspects of the achievements and presented up to 26 different fields of data to juxtapose their counterparts or relevant fields. The only problem was that when rendered for the entire six-decade period, many of the figures from early years (especially before the 1980s) became insignificant in term of scales compared with the late 1990s and 21st century figures. In many cases, it was so severe that the quantified graphical nodes were even close to ground zero so it became difficult to visualize an interpretation of the development in the early few decades, while it was actually quite fascinating. So we also separated several sets of data to scale the chart down to display data for every two decades.

Thanks to this process, many of the interesting facts are visible now, that after the government’s encouragement of innovation during the “a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend” campaign in the 1950s, which causes the numbers of both titles and copies of publications rose rapidly, the Culture Revolution wiped out most of these new-comers to the publishing business and repressed the figured back close to ground zero; that when millions of people starved and both the population and growth rate decreased during the Great Leap Forward, bogus numbers of economic growth reported by the local governments kept rising skyscraper high. After thirty; that after 37 years of falling way behind government revenue, the total outstanding amount of saving deposit of Chinese people finally surpass it and eventually accumulated to the point we see today (more than 3 times the government revenue).

To demonstrate the milestones in both geo-political and economic means set in the 60 years, we also produced an animated P.R.C. timeline presentation. It is, too, made in Flash. On the single X-axis of the Republic’s lifespan, we marked the memorable moments and slide-show them as if the viewers have get on a subway train of time travel. Images flash in front of their eyes as if the history is being reconstructed. We intended to design this presentation as a reminder to viewers of the long path behind us since the founding of the nation.


Finally, the 2009 National Day celebration’s biggest highlight will undoubtedly be the October 1st Parade. As the tradition, the head of the state will represent the people to inspect the troops on Tian’an Men Square. The scope and scale of the troops involved and the variety of military equipment appearing in the parade are kept confidential to bring the element of surprise. However, some details have been announced. Therefore, we determined to draw comparisons of this year’s parade with the major ones in the past. From the record, we acquired the past numbers of parade participants, the models and makes of the weaponaries. Based on these facts, we constructed the images to symbolize the scale of each parade by breaking them down to several groups: paraders, missiles, personnel transport, armed vehicles, aircraft and artillery. Participating aircraft models are also illustrated in side view sketches. In this way, the advancement of the strength of P.L.A. became clear.


The National Day Special website will stay active during the Golden week and the week after. Please stay tuned by checking it out at: .

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