The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 2009 was marked with a massive parade in the heart of Beijing viewed on hundreds of millions of television screens across the nation. English‐language media coverage focused primarily on what it saw as the event's explicit message: the Communist Party's celebration of the nation's military might and continued economic growth, and its origins in a coherent and uniquely Chinese ideology. Such coverage largely reflected international fears of China and thus misread the parade's import and impact on its domestic audience. I argue that the National Day events are better understood as a form of visual poetry that relied on performance to emotionally conflate party, nation, and state. Both the speeches of party leaders and the scripted remarks of state media commentators relied on language and ideas that the Chinese public has heard numerous times. The visual elements of the parade, in contrast, were unprecedented in both scale and spectacle. Hundreds of thousands took part in displays of collective harmony, unified patriotic sentiment, and ethnic unity. The distinctive style and rhythm of the parade depicted a vision of nationhood without the ethnic fractures, labour unrest, and massive inequalities that constitute the greatest threat to the power of the party‐state as it embarks on its seventh decade of continuous rule.

In contemporary China, the site of endemic food scandals and persistent anxiety about the quality and safety of products, moral imaginings of the market implicate state actors and institutions. In articulating perceived injustices, Chinese consumer-citizens resort not to the "mutual rights and obligations" of buyers and sellers specified in the Consumer Law but to ideals of fairness that include the role of the state in regulating the market. The law defines the normative rights and obligations of consumers and sellers, but citizens largely reject this depoliticized formulation, instead expressing expectations of state action that mirror a moral economy framework. This understanding of the persistence of fake and dangerous goods as a manifestation of poor governance allows for a rereading of Marx's famous maxim. For Marx, the commodity disguises an exploitative relationship between buyers and sellers, but in societies characterized by industrial production, the state mediates interactions between producers and consumers through regulation and the law. Demands from Chinese consumer-citizens that the state curtail the production and sale of fake and dangerous goods and punish bad actors reveal an understanding of the modern state's role in the production of the commodity. They also illustrate the importance of the historical context of the state-citizen relationship in framing moral claims.

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