Passing by Tiananmen Square days after the 60th birthday extravaganza for the People's Republic of China in October, it was obvious something unusual was going on. The pavements were almost blocked by crowds and at the subway stop there was a 50-metre queue to enter the station. Tiananmen, the largest city square in the world, was packed.

The October 1 celebrations combined a military march-past and a civilian parade with each Chinese province providing floats. To many western eyes, the parade was a clumsy exercise in communist-nationalist kitsch, a false note after the striking modernity of last year's Olympic opening ceremony. But for the week these floats were in Tiananmen, more than 1m people visited the square every day to look.

In the absence of opinion polls or elections to gauge the public mood towards the authorities in China, anecdotes are sometimes the best guide. Twenty years after the army stormed the square to get rid of protesters, the Tiananmen crowd revealed the broad acquiescence that the Chinese Communist party enjoys.