The People's Republic at 60

A harmonious and stable crackdown

Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

China celebrates a milestone with a new round of repression

IN THE West many people retire at 60. China’s Communist Party is still going strong. And strong is the word. Amid the global financial crisis, asserted one leading newspaper, a huge military parade due to take place in Beijing on October 1st to mark the 60th anniversary of the communist nation’s founding will be an “effective way of deterring hostile forces at home and abroad”. The event will certainly show that China is unafraid either to spend money or to risk spoiling celebrations with a massive clampdown.

Police in the capital, helped by hundreds of thousands of volunteers, are being mobilised in a security operation as stifling as that mounted for last year’s Olympic Games. Officials are under orders to stop people travelling to Beijing to complain about local injustices. Riot police have been put on heightened alert in restive Tibet and Xinjiang (though fresh protests involving hundreds of Han Chinese broke out in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi as The Economist went to press).

The first rehearsal for the event passed off without reported incident. It involved some 200,000 people, all of whom, even the providers of mobile lavatories for the event, had been vetted to make sure they are loyal party members.

This will be Hu Jintao’s first national day military parade as president. The event takes place only once every ten years (and the 1989 one was cancelled because of the Tiananmen Square retributions). There will be the usual display of military might, with everything from intercontinental ballistic missiles to tanks and fighter jets. With the help of annual double-digit budget increases for most of the past two decades, China has a lot of new kit to show off.

The festivities will culminate in an evening performance and fireworks display where, says the government’s website, Chinese leaders will “sing and dance with Beijing residents”. But just in case some killjoys fail to catch the joyous mood, on August 27th, the government ordered local administrations to “create a harmonious and stable price environment” for the national day by stepping up monitoring of prices of food, liquid gas, tickets to tourist spots, transport and other things.

The government has tried to reassure citizens that recent increases in the prices of pork and eggs—sometimes precursors to general inflation—are just normal seasonal fluctuations. There had been speculation that it would put off increasing petrol and diesel prices until after the holiday but on September 2nd pressed ahead with them anyway, though it imposed smaller rises (about 4-5%) than some analysts had predicted. The Shanghai Daily said this “moderation” was an effort to spare consumers “too much pain in the pocketbook” as the holiday approaches.

Citizens might lift their spirits with a list of 50 officially approved slogans issued to mark national day (soldiers have been ordered to post them up and shout them in their camps). “Uphold the basic economic system with public ownership playing a dominant role and diverse forms of economic ownership developing together, and with the practice of distribution according to work being carried out as the mainstay alongside other forms of distribution,” goes a particularly snappy one.

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