Christina Patterson: Why the Chinese have reason to feel pride

Last week in Tiananmen Square, I was moved to tears. It was not, I'm afraid, the thought of the thousand or so protesters massacred there 19 years ago that had me wiping away the tiny droplet of salt water unexpectedly trickling down my nose. It was the sight of thousands of people standing in silence to watch the lowering of their national flag.

I had expected tourists and tourist tat. Tourists there were, in abundance – groups of giggling teenagers, young couples, families on a day out and coach parties in red baseball caps, some waving little red flags. But if China's vast manufacturing industry extends to Tiananmen Square snowstorms or T- shirts, there was no sign of it here. You couldn't even get a postcard. You couldn't even get a bottle of water.

Instead, in this vast space, where Mao held rallies and where people come to do t'ai chi and fly kites, tourists, nearly all Chinese, took photos of each other, and of me, and lined up to watch skinny young soldiers with wasp waists march around a flagpole and take a flag away. Many were smiling. If they weren't on holiday, they were out for an evening stroll. And watching them, and watching them watch me, I saw something I'd rarely seen in my life – a relaxed expression of national pride.

The pride is evident from the moment you arrive at Beijing airport's new international terminal. Like Tiananmen Square, like the Forbidden City, like the Great Wall, and like China itself, it is gargantuan, a glittering symbol of the new China, teeming with elegantly uniformed staff, all eager to please. Even the immigration desk had a sign saying "You are welcome to comment on my performance" above a buzzer that you could press for the options, from smiley face to frown.

In Wangfujing Road, Beijing's Oxford Street, among the traditional tea shops and the pharmacies selling dried sea horses and knobbly roots, and the McDonald's and KFCs and Morgans, there are numerous shops bearing the proud slogan,"Beijing 2008 Official Licensed Product Centre" and, everywhere, the mantra "One World, One Dream". And in front of the vast Wangfujing Bookshop, boasting entire sections devoted to "application for job", "how to be an eloquent speaker" and "succeed psychology", as well, of course, as "Party history and party building", there are display boards with pictures of the Olympic torch, including carefully cropped photos of Konnie Huq and Gordon Brown.

On CNN in my hotel bedroom, I saw reports of the tortuous progress of the torch, from Kuala Lumpur to Jakarta, as closely guarded as residents of Guantanamo, but in the China Daily I got with my breakfast the headlines were "Torchbearer invited to visit again" and "Olympic flame burns bright in the rain". So when the main editorial declared that "the hysterical protests" of the "anti-China agitators" was unleashing a tidal wave of patriotism, I dismissed it as evil propaganda from a newspaper – like all newspapers in China – in hock to the party machine.

That, however, was before I went to Tiananmen Square, before I went to the galleries in Beijing's hip arts quarters, 798 and Caochangdi, and before I talked to some of Beijing's educated elite. "We're quite supportive of the government right now," said Sun Ning, director of Platform China, a gallery that opened last year. "We can see people starting to have a good life. When I was a child in the 1970s," she added, "to eat a banana was the most exciting thing I could imagine."

It's hard to imagine now. Today in China you can eat anything. You can buy Nike and Rolex and Chanel. (The Chanel concession at my hotel, when it opened, was the highest grossing in the world.) You can watch skylines spring out of paddy fields. You can watch a giant bird's nest grow before your eyes.

And you are damned if you're going to let countries whose economies are collapsing, countries whose poor people are getting poorer, countries that plundered and doped you in the past, and which are now gagging for your trade, spoil the party. "We tried Communism to equalise," says an email now circulating among Chinese worldwide. "You hated us for being Communists./ Now we embrace free trade and privatize,/ You berate us for being Mercantilist,/ HALT! You demanded: a billion-three who eat well will destroy the planet!/ So we tried birth control, then You blasted us for human rights abuse."

Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has lifted 350 million people out of poverty. It has overseen the mass metamorphosis of peasants into the world's biggest middle class. It has performed the world's biggest economic miracle. You can sort of see the reason for the pride.

Of course it's wrong to oppress the people of Tibet. Of course it's wrong to imprison people who speak out. Of course it's wrong to control the press (wrong in Italy, and wrong in China). And of course it's right to say so.

But sometimes if you want to wag your finger, you have to take it out of the pie.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk

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