IT is designed to be a military spectacle to awe the Chinese people on the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic and to show the world a well equipped, modern force that is a far cry from the peasant army that swept the Communist party to power.

Nothing has been left to chance for the grandest martial parade in the history of modern China, which is due to roll across central Beijing on Thursday.

Chinese military websites say the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will unveil six weapons systems, including new generation Jian-10 fighters and JL-2 ballistic missiles. Some 200,000 soldiers will march in 56 formations, one for each of the officially recognised ethnic “nationalities” in China.

Some of the soldiers will shoulder the latest sleek assault rifles, codenamed QBZ-95. The army’s new battle tank, model ZTZ99, which is said to incorporate design lessons learnt from the performance of American armour in Iraq, will rumble across Tiananmen Square.

Overhead, Zhi-10 helicopter gunships, powered by Canadian-built engines, are to fly in formation above Beijing’s ancient palaces and gleaming new skyscrapers. They will share the skies with the ultra-secret KJ-series jet, a warning and control aircraft.

The parade is meant to consummate the transformation of the PLA from a revolutionary guerrilla movement into a sophisticated military using smart weapons and space-based surveillance systems.

“It is an extraordinary achievement,” said Liang Guanglie, the defence minister, in an interview published on his ministry’s website.

Extraordinary measures to repress any opposition to the party at the end of its sixth decade in power suggest that despite having 2.3m men under arms, the leadership still fears foes at home.

Black-clad Swat teams of police will be deployed at key intersections and thousands of agents will stage a security clampdown exceeding anything seen for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Dissidents have been shut up at home or arrested. Police have banned peasants from coming to the capital to present their grievances as petitions, a tradition that dates back thousands of years.

Counter-terrorist squads, backed up by informers, are prowling the districts where Muslims from China’s restive far west live. Peaceful Tibetan Buddhists are also under surveillance in their incense-filled temples. Internet users say censorship has never been so restrictive. Facebook and Twitter are among the sites that have been blocked.

At the last parade 10 years ago, diplomats were able to watch from balconies in their compound. This time residents have been warned that if they step out they may be shot.

“We must abide by Deng Xiaoping’s instruction that China must be under the leadership of the Communist party,” declared the People’s Daily on Friday. “If this fundamental principle is altered, China will go backwards, split and fall into chaos.”

A lone anonymous citizen responded on the website of Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV, which is read by millions on the mainland: “Since you are so great, glorious and correct, why don’t you dare give the people the vote?”

Questions like that will not be on the agenda for President Hu Jintao when he returns, garlanded in state media praise, from the United Nations and the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Inside China the 60th anniversary parade is seen as the crowning glory to a sequence of events that has fascinated the outside world, from the 2008 Olympics to the acknowledgment of China as a leading player in the world economic crisis.

While Britain and America struggle out of recession, Beijing’s “state capitalism” looks likely to achieve its target of 8% economic growth this year. Independent economists say its “growth model” of cheap exports and low wages cannot last in the long run; but in the short run Chinese leaders have survived a 25% drop in exports and the loss of 20m jobs.

After 1949 China closed itself off to the world in Mao Tse-tung’s experiment with utopian socialism — a period of purges and famine that cost at least 30m lives and which the party would prefer to forget.

“Chinese people were the slaves of Mao,” commented a “netizen” named Xinling in his blog last week.

The fact that he could make such a statement shows how the internet, despite its 30,000 online censors, continues to liberate Chinese public opinion.

Since reform began in 1979, foreign trade has allowed China to pile up £1.25 trillion in foreign exchange reserves while raising 200m people out of poverty. Now strategists speak with confidence of a day when the dollar no longer rules and the West declines.

Nervous other powers are encouraging the Chinese to become “responsible stakeholders” in the international system that Mao once sought to overturn. “Nobody wants to repeat what happened when imperial Germany and Japan emerged on the world stage a century ago,” said a British diplomat with long experience of negotiating with the Chinese.

On that score there are grounds for optimism. Speaking last week at the UN, the president pledged China for the first time to a significant reduction in carbon emissions, saying it would clean up its ruined environment and promising to fight global warming.

He also committed China to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, saying “all countries should strictly comply with non-proliferation obligations, refrain from double standards and tighten and improve export controls”.

Western diplomats find the new tone encouraging, coming from a country that gave the designs for its own atomic bomb to Pakistan in a cold-blooded move to weaken their joint rival, India.

However, China continues to protect North Korea, a treaty ally, and to argue against sanctions on Iran, a vital oil supplier. Its friends in Africa include President Omar Bashir of Sudan and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

Not everyone in Beijing speaks in the silky language of the foreign ministry. Thursday’s parade is certain to provoke an outpouring of virulent nationalism. Curiously, the enemy most often spoken of is India. The censors permit alarmingly frank discussion on the internet of the merits of a war against India to secure the Tibetan plateau.

“Help the Maoists take over power in India to pay them back for hosting the Dalai Lama,” said one contributor.

Veterans who know the PLA from the inside say that despite all its shiny new kit, such grandiose ideas mask the reality of a force that has no recent battle experience and is riddled with corruption. They describe a system of bribes ranging from 10,000 yuan (£909) to get a good post for a private soldier to 30,000 yuan for a place at military college.

“Compared with our last war against India in 1962, our equipment is much better but the devotion to country and people of our officers and men is much worse,” said a retired officer, who cannot be named.

Or, as General Zhang Shutian, a political commissar, put it in a recent speech: “If corruption in the army continues, ideology will decay and open the way for religion, while the promotion system risks causing a mutiny.”

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