2008 Summer Olympics Parade of Nations was part of the opening ceremony that originating with the 1896 Olympic Games. The national team from each nation participating in the Olympic Games paraded behind their national flag into the Olympic Stadium. The flag bearer was an athlete of each national delegation chosen, to represent the athletes, either by the National Olympic Committee or by the national team. Announcers in the stadium read off the names of the marching nations in French, English, (the official languages of the Olympics) and Mandarin Chinese with music accompanying the athletes as they marched into the stadium. The Marshall Islands, Montenegro, and Tuvalu debuted at these Games, and Serbia competed under its name for the first time after the 1912 Summer Olympics. Montenegro and Serbia were previously one country as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro.

Parade order

Per tradition, Greece entered first as the spiritual home of the Olympic Games, and the host country, China, entered last. All nations in between marched in the order of the host country language,the Simplified Chinese. As Chinese characters do not have an alphabetical order, the National Olympic Committees were sorted based on stroke count. Specifically: Two nations were ordered based on a different name: Three nations marched out of order: Brunei was excluded from the Games by the IOC shortly before the Opening Ceremony as no athletes had been registered. One of the published lists of flag bearers was later edited to note this. Brunei athletes would have originally marched 36th between Uzbekistan and Barbados.

List

The following is a list of each country's flag bearer. The list is sorted by the sequence that each nation appeared in the parade of nations. The names are given in their official designations by the IOC, and the Chinese names follow their official designations by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.