There’s nothing much special about the number sixty-one.
That is the conclusion you could draw from many of today’s mainland newspapers. Unlike last year, when practically every newspaper in the country was decked out in red to hail the 60th anniversary of the birth of the People’s Republic, today’s 61st anniversary failed to make the front page of a sizable proportion of commercial papers.
Instead, those papers turned their attention to topics such as today’s lunar launch, Kim Jong Un, and housing policy.
Chang’e flies to the Moon today; passes over Qingdao tomorrow reads the locally-focused top headline of the Peninsula Metropolis Daily. Chang’e II, China’s second lunar satellite, is scheduled to lift-off this evening at 18:59:57 and will enter the range of Qingdao’s monitoring station nine hours later.
The main image is a rendering of a new astronomical discovery and carries the headline, America discovers habitable planet. The planet, orbiting the star Gliese 581, a distance of twenty light years from Earth, may support life.
Other top stories include a new bus line that counted the municipal party secretary among its first passengers, a shipwreck in Fujian Province that killed three and left nine missing, the release of three Japanese nationals who were detained for unauthorized entry into a military installation, and a clash between Chinese tourists and Japanese rightists.
- Earlier on Danwei: A birthday bash for the People’s Republic