China’s Golden Week holiday will be extended to celebrate six decades of the People’s Republic, but the party preparations are having a big impact on Beijing’s residents
THE WIDENING AND resurfacing of Chang’an Avenue, Beijing’s car-thronged main traffic artery – and a sclerotic blood-vessel at that – is complete, a month before the country’s brightest, reddest stars gather in the capital to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.
Tanks, missiles and rocket launchers will rumble along this expanded thoroughfare, which translates into English as the Avenue of Eternal Peace, on October 1st to mark six decades since Mao Zedong and his war-weary band of Communist revolutionaries proclaimed the republic.
Across the Strait of Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek’s beaten nationalists licked their wounds.
Security is tight, surprisingly so as China doesn’t have any significant external enemies and the chances of any group organising dissent effectively from within the capital are slim. As one blogger quipped: “They are marking the 60th anniversary of our foundation as if China was being invaded.” However, the government has been taken by surprise by ethnic tensions in China, and the atmosphere remains charged since last month’s unrest in China’s far western Xinjiang region, which left nearly 200 people dead.
Our apartment, in a compound largely peopled by diplomats, looks down over Chang’an Avenue and we’ve already been ordered not to open our windows during the parade. We don’t open our windows much at this time of year, largely because of smog and the noise from the traffic, but it’s nice to have the option. But unopened our windows will stay.
One morning this week was spent acquiring a special security badge to gain access to our apartment compound. Getting into the compound has become more difficult anyway since the installation of an enormous sliding stainless-steel gate, which makes living in the compound feel a little like living in a zoo. And now we are expected to wear these badges around our necks for an entire month while playing in the playground, or going grocery shopping. And we now have no excuse for forgetting our neighbours’ names.
The precise details of the parade are a secret, but it’s safe to expect it will be the kind of parade that we know from the newsreel footage from Moscow and East Berlin in the Cold War era, with goose-stepping troops gazing with reverence as they pass the huge portrait of Chairman Mao as he stares down from the Forbidden City on to Tiananmen Square, which will be a sea of red flags waved frantically by devout cadres.
The presence of film director Zhang Yimou, who choreographed the amazing Olympic opening ceremony, might add a certain frisson of something new. We shall have to wait and see.
President Hu Jintao has commissioned an extra-long stretch limousine, six metres long, for the event, and the city has been rehearsing with tall young women to take part in the parade.
As we saw with the spectacular staging of the Olympics last year, and the equally muscular clampdown on any form of dissent in the run-up to and during the games, no one organises these kind of public events with quite the same attention to detail as the Chinese government. Even the weather is not being left to chance, and the authorities are ready to deploy cloud-seeding jets and artillery with silver iodine rockets to banish any clouds that threaten to rain on the parade.
IT HAS BEEN an amazing six decades, one of the great stories of social transformation the planet has ever seen. During those years, China has been transformed from a closed, poor society, where famine was common and Mao’s megalomania led to disastrous social experiments such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
There is also a lot to celebrate, as China comes close to resuming its status as a true world power, its people fed, increasingly prosperous and mostly happy, even if democracy is still not on the agenda.
President Hu will give a keynote speech on Tiananmen Square, where Mao declared the People’s Republic of China, and the military parade, a spokesman assures us, “will showcase the achievements China has made in its defence sector during the past six decades and its resolution to safeguard world and regional peace and stability.” Hot on the heels of the military hardware will be a mass pageant, themed “Motherland and I Marching Together”, which will feature 200,000 citizens and 60 floats.
And the evening will feature a “splendid fireworks display”, with senior Communist Party and government leaders present.
The Great Hall of the People, built during the 1950s as one of the first great edifices of proletarian rule in China, and latterly home to Riverdance, will have a grand musical, with a cast of 3,200, called Road to Revival depicting the past 169 years of Chinese history from the Opium War to the present.
“We will try our best to create a festive environment at an economical cost,” a city spokesperson said, unconvincingly.
Underground, the first arrests of people refusing security checks in the subway stations took place this week, as the monitoring intensifies.
Above ground, police forces across China have been mobilised to ensure the celebrations proceed safely and smoothly. The counter-terrorism forces that made the city so difficult to get around during the Olympics will be back, and more than 7,000 police officers and militia members are on patrol in the capital.
The checkpoints are already opening, the police are recruiting hundreds of thousands of volunteers to keep an eye on suspicious activity, and thousands of drink-drivers have been the first casualties of an early security clampdown. The pirate DVD sellers have disappeared from the streets.
The government is encouraging local governments to stop petitioners travelling to Beijing to air their grievances, and has even introduced a mobile group that will travel to deal with some specific cases. And most other dissidents are quiet since the tough crackdown ahead of the June 4th anniversary of 20 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre.
THE NATIONAL Day celebration and the Mid-Autumn Festival will be combined to create an eight-day holiday, from October 1st to 8th, which will be the longest “Golden Week” holiday yet in China. That should help keep the tills ringing in Hong Kong.
As Shanghaiist.com pointed out, this will be a "pageant big enough to make North Korea's Mass Games seem like a junior high talent show . . . Jingoism aside, we're sure the production will be just like High School Musical 3. . . with less teenage angst and more revolutionary zeal!" ran the blog.
One of the highlights of the event will be the release, on September 17th, of the blockbuster film Jian guo da ye, or "The Great Cause of China's Foundation".
The 30 million yuan (€3 million) movie is produced by the state-owned China Film Group and directed by its chairman Han Sanping. The movie is going to be a big hit and more than 170 Chinese actors take part, free of charge.
However, some webizens are angry that a number of ethnic Chinese actors who hold foreign passports are appearing in the film.
They include Jet Li, who recently bought a luxury house in Singapore and become a Singaporean; director Chen Kaige; the Shanghai-born actor Wu Junmei, who plays Madame Chiang Kai-shek in the movie; and Ning Jing, who are all US passport holders.
One Beijing webizen said: “We don’t need unpatriotic stars. Do not elevate traitors with a lot of money. Boycott them!” Another said: “How ironic to allow those traitors to play this foundation movie. They are already foreigners.” China Film has dismissed the nay-sayers, saying it doesn’t matter where the actors come from when you’re making a movie, but whether or not they can act.
For me, the highlight of the preparations has been the end to the road widening, as work began usually just before midnight and ended in the early hours so as to cause minimum disruption to pedestrian traffic, and presumably, maximum disruption to local residents trying to sleep.
So, let the parade begin. And then, next stop Expo 2010 in Shanghai.