Asked whether China has shown its military power at the Sept. 3 parade, former Italian Gen. Fabio Mini (who had been a military attaché in Beijing and knows China well), answered: “I’ve seen dozens of these military parades, and every time they surprised me. They surprised me even when there weren’t long-range missiles. They surprised me because to put together a parade of that kind, well, it usually takes years, but these people, in the span of two months, managed to put it together, aligning one eyebrow behind the other. Every eyebrow is aligned in a precise pattern. There’s no imperfection.
“I see American parades, British parades—let’s not even talk about those. Everyone marches at their own pace. The uniforms aren’t all the same, they’re different. An English friend of mine once told me: ‘If you see two Englishmen wearing the same uniform, one of them is an impostor.’ That’s just how it is, because they dress how they want, you see? So, from that point of view, you can clearly see discipline. It’s a system of discipline that you can’t break apart with a few demonstrations. It wasn’t broken on June 4th, 1989, with the events in Tiananmen; it wasn’t even scratched.
“Now, in its most recent parade, China only showed a tenth of what it actually has—and above all, its technological advancement. But if we want to see their technological progress, we shouldn’t ask our soldiers, our military officers, or our attachés in China. We should ask our entrepreneurs. Our entrepreneurs who are going to China and visiting, our engineers who go to work for the Chinese—as soon as they arrive, they already feel like they’re in a completely different world. Then, when they start looking at the facilities, their jaws drop.
