First the Olympics and now National Day — China is once more tightening the screws on foreigners living in Beijing, with random identity checks and restrictions on movement, because of worries about security ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party coming to power, on Oct. 1.

Of course for Chinese, the burden is far heavier when it comes to these controls. Foreigners are generally given much more leeway in China, possibly because many police are uncomfortable dealing with the hassle of language and cultural barriers.

But those who live in the alleyways close to Beijing’s main thoroughfare, Changan Avenue, are in the heightened security zone on either side of the military parade that will be the centerpiece of the day’s celebrations.

Instead, foreigners are being given an order that offers a humourous but sharp reminder of how authoritarian China’s government can still sometimes be.

The messages being relayed by the police can be summed up this way: Stock up on food, take your passport everywhere and no guests are allowed. 

Here is a copy, in the original English, of a notice being given out in one part of central Beijing, issued for “the pleasure” of residents’ “happy life”:

ANNOUNCEMENT

To the foreigners:

October 1, 2009 is the 60th anniversary of founding the People’s Republic of China, Celebrations and Eve Gala Evenings will be held according. The closedown and cordon off area will include the area that you live in curtain period. For the smooth going of your daily life, we take the pleasure in announcing the following issues:

1. Please reduce your going out as possibly as you can. While having to go out, please definitely take your passport and the <<temporary accommodation register form>>.

2. You had better refuse the visitors who possibly can not arrive at your abode.

3. Please save certain of living necessity, then the peripheral store won’t can provide convenience.

4. Please obey the policeman’s direction and control. Your co-operations are most appreciated.

5. Please pay attention to the government’s announcement about traffic control, and work well your route of travel arrangement in advance.

Dong Cheng District Public Security Bureau wish you having a happy life in our magistracy!

Dong Cheng District Public Security Bureau

September 4, 2009

Photo captions: Top: Participants stand in form in a boulevard leading to Tiananmen Square in Beijing during a rehearsal for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China August 29, 2009. REUTERS/Nir Elias

Bottom: Security forces march through a boulevard leading to Tiananmen Square in Beijing during a rehearsal for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China August 30, 2009. REUTERS/Nir Elias

China’s government may be fretting about the vast new potential for leaking information opened up by the internet (see this Xinhua piece on planned revisions to the state secrets law).
   
But that hasn’t stopped the many bureaucrats who police the nebulous world of Chinese state secrets from wanting to leap headfirst into the online world.

The web is awash with the sites of state secrets bureaux, I discovered after a colleague dug up a report posted on one of them about the commercially and diplomatically sensitive detention of executives from mining giant Rio Tinto.

It was on www.baomi.org (which roughly translates as www.protectsecrets.org), the succinctly named Website of the apparently not-as secretive-as-its-name-suggests National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets.

Someone in the Administration may be more old-fashioned than the technophiles who set up the site, as it stopped working soon after Reuters report was followed by dozens of other media outlets and spread around the world.

But it is now back online, although with several articles removed. And lower-level protectors of the nation’s many, many secrets (which in the past have been deemed to include newspaper clippings sent abroad in the conventional mail) are also offering up a flurry of non-classified information.

Vast modern cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Tianjin are teeming business and political hubs that might well have important government and commercial information to worry about.

But Puyang city? I had to do a quick map check to pin down where it is (northern Henan province, if you were curious). There are secrets to protect everywhere, it seems, and you can read about the efforts in Puyang at www.pybm.cn

Highlights include “Products that can protect secrets”, “The hidden danger of blogs and measures to counteract them” and “Build a firm line of defence to protect military secrets”.

Shanghai has taken a more light-hearted approach, featuring a series of cartoons about the lurking risks to national security.

In one, a cluster of giant eyes peer over the shoulder of an unwitting man, typing at a computer labelled “secret”.

And in another — my favourite by dint of my profession — dozens of people are avidly reading newspapers, under the warning caption, “When the media leaks secrets, the consequences are hard to predict”.

See the dangers for yourself here.

Security on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square is always tight.
 
But I knew that today it was going to be particularly so when, upon emerging from the subway station, I was faced with three police vans and literally hundreds of security personnel, all on guard against any kind of disturbance ahead of the 20th anniversary of 1989’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing.
 
Nervously I made my way to one of the square’s entrances, wondering if I would even be allowed to enter.
 
I put my bag on the X-ray machine, was briefly frisked by police with metal detectors, and cleared to go on my way.
 
The square was full of tourists, as usual. What was different was the hordes of uniformed police, military police and plainclothes security every few metres.
 
The plainclothes officers were painfully obvious, shuffling awkwardly in T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms, their crew cut hairstyles and poorly hidden walkie-talkies distinguishing them from ordinary visitors. They were also all carrying the same brand of bottled water.
 
Everytime I tried talking to someone, a police officer or one of the guards began hovering behind me. Finally I was able to chat with a trinket seller, who, talking in a low voice, complained
that the security was ruining her business.
 
“June 4 is tomorrow,” she said simply.
 
At that point one of the crew-cut men marched over and told the lady to stop talking to me.
 
By this stage. I had had enough and began heading back towards the subway station, passing on my way a foreign television crew. A policeman was telling them in no uncertain terms that they could not film in the square.
 
I felt lucky that nobody had stopped me. I’m sure the police knew I was there though, and why I had gone.

Photo caption: Chinese security personnel try to stop pictures from being taken as they check the documents of the photographer at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 3, 2009. Chinese security forces blanketed Tiananmen Square on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of the June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause

The normally dull routine of presidential arrivals at Beijing’s airport turned into a mini-scuffle when Hugo Chavez arrived in Beijing for a “working visit” that he sprung on the Chinese about a month ago. The Chinese Foreign Ministry wasn’t eager for Chavez to mar the ceremony with a long-winded speech to the press, even though the Venezuelan embassy had invited journalists to the airport.
 
As we gathered on bleachers set up about 30 yards from the waiting staircases, the television crews decided to call Chavez over for an inpromptu question-and-answer session. Immediately, the staircases were wheeled away to another spot, more than double the distance from the journalists and certainly well out of earshot.

As the plane slowly approached, the large Chinese and Venezuelan welcoming delegation began walking towards the red carpet, far, far away from us. But then a Venezuelan doubled back and gestered to the press. A break! Journalists sprinted towards the plane, dodging the airport security guards.
 
A furious argument ensued, as security guards tried to shove reporters back while maintaining some decorum with the embassy representatives. Chavez descended the stairs, grinning amidst the chaos. At the end of the carpet, he turned and began to talk to reporters, while the Chinese guards tried to edge him towards the cars. A few minutes of talking, with no end in sight, made them more impatient. Amid a new round of pushing, Chavez himself got bumped.

“Please,” he said in English as he turned to the guards. “Soft, soft.”

Photo caption: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez speaks to the media upon his arrival at Beijing airport for his two-day visit to China, April 7, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Lee

By Mike Fiala

The biggest international sporting event Beijing and China hosted prior to the Olympics was the 1990 Asian Games. China dominated the medal count, winning almost twice as many as their nearest rival.

And Pan Pan, the game’s Panda mascot, was everywhere. One of the official sponsors distributed Pan Pan decals to the media showing the official mascot in various XI Asiad sporting poses such as boxing, archery, wrestling, etc. With a little imagination, and a pair of scissors, people would remove Pan Pan’s head and apply the mascot’s sporting themes to their credential photo.

I took it one step further and placed Pan Pan’s head right over my mugshot. I was fully expecting someone to ask me to remove it but to my surprise, officials found it rather amusing and I passed through security checkpoints without problem. In all fairness though, security did recognize me. Even Xinhua news agency asked me to pose for a picture and I was dubbed the “Panda Reporter” in the press. I’ll be on the lookout for some Olympic Fuwa mascot stickers this August but something tells me that we won’t be allowed to do the same.

First the Chinese authorities provided foreigners with a list of dos and don’ts for when they visit the games. Now Human Rights Watch has got into the act, providing foreign journalists with its own booklet giving advice on how to report out of China.

The Reporters’ Guide gives useful information on what do if police detain you (don’t hit them), what to do if your reporting rights are not respected (complain) and what to do to prevent anyone snooping on your stories or emails (one suggestion — use gmail and add an ’s’ at the end of http in the URL).

When China was awarded the Games it promised media the same freedom to report as they had enjoyed at previous Olympics. Perhaps Beijing thought only statistics-obsessed sports hacks would turn up, but if so they are likely to be disappointed with journalists from around the world preparing to descend on China in the coming weeks, many of them planning to follow everything but the athletes.

Human Rights Watch believes the “freedom to report” message has not filtered down to zealous security staff, who are unused to the nosey habits of foreign media. To help convince local officialdom that visitors can indeed talk to just about anyone they want to during the games, the booklet even prints out in Chinese the temporary regulations that give the 21,600 accredited reporters the right to rove.

That said, the main message for visitors is not to get the locals into trouble and even recommends that correspondents change the names of any Chinese dissidents they might interview to prevent unwelcome attention from the police once the media circus has moved on.

“One thing is certain, all the foreigners will be able to leave China after the games, but the locals who help them won’t be able to go anywhere,” said Human Rights Watch media director, Minky Worden.

The HRW booklet can be downloaded on its website http://www.hrw.org/.

 Pix from top: Journalists and visitors stand outside the Beijing Olympics Main Press Centre (MPC) during its opening in Beijing July 8, 2008. The building, including the International Broadcast Centre, on the Olympic Green will house the 21,600 media accredited to the Games with up to 10,000 more unaccredited reporters being catered for at the Beijing International Media Centre. A journalist works at the Main Press Workroom of Beijing Olympics Main Press Centre (MPC) during its opening in Beijing July 8, 2008. (Snaps by Claro Cortes IV). Picture of media at a Yao Ming news conference in Beijing on June 26 by David Gray.

That security would be ramped up in China before the Beijing Olympics was to be expected and is entirely normal.

My abiding memory of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City – just a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. — is of removing and putting back on my heavy winter boots several times a day at security checkpoints.

The experience of my wife and son at Qingdao airport yesterday, however, suggests that even security precautions can sometimes go a little too far.

After spending a couple of days at the seaside in the city that will host the sailing for the Beijing Games next month, three-year-old Max had packed his bucket and spade along with other favourite toys in a little plastic suitcase for the journey back to the Chinese capital.

Having successfully negotiated the metal detector, he was with his mother waiting for the bags to reappear from the X-ray machine.

“You have a weapon,” the female security guard said to my wife.

Sal, I must stress, is largely a law-abiding citizen of the People’s Republic and has no previous record of involvement with gun-running or hijacking. She adopted the internationally-understood facial expression for confusion.

“You have a weapon,” the security guard repeated and, as if to clarify, pointed at a poster on the wall that pictured an array of hand guns and an AK-47. “We have seen it.”

Still confused, Sal opened Max’s suitcase for inspection. 

Casting aside the Woody and Buzz Lightyear action figures, the Kung Fu Panda DVD and several Disney-themed colouring books, the guard seized upon Max’s bright red and orange plastic water pistol, raising it triumphantly into the air.

“You cannot have this,” she said with a certainty that brooked no argument.

Not wanting to upset Max before the flight, Sal gestured for the guard to quickly put the 10 yuan toy out of sight, which she did. 

The skies above China were safe once again. 

Picture of an unorthodox police drill in Taiyuan this week by REUTERS/stringer