Gearing up for the big anniversary

The 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China will fall on October 1. Beijing correspondent Thomas Rippe tells us about the preparations being made for this grand event and about the feelings and thoughts it provokes in the minds of the Chinese.

Tell me about the preparations being made in Beijing ahead of the upcoming National Day.

The preparations are very extensive. Even out here at CRI, the street immediately in front of our main gate is currently shut down (Friday). Today, as people go home for the weekend, they can't go out the front door, they have to use a side door, because that street is closed to all traffic; car traffic, bike traffic, foot traffic. No one can get anywhere near it, because they're using it as a rehearsal area. They've been doing this every weekend, most of the month of September. It used to be closed only on Sundays, but now it's closed again tonight. Also, this week, they're doing a massive rehearsal down in Tiananmen Square, and so, some of the primary subway lines, and maybe even the entire subway, close down at three o'clock this afternoon and won't be coming back until, I think, late this evening. So the preparations are really intense.

Will the National Day parade reach as far as the CRI building?

No. We're a long ways away from Tiananmen. It takes about 45 minutes by subway to get there. The parade goes nowhere near us. But they shut down a lot of the transportation grid to make sure no one gets anywhere near it. They're keeping a lot of things secret... We actually had a bit of a briefing today to find out what sort of things we're expected to be doing on that day. So I'll be in the studio then, but nobody knows exactly what we're covering or when we're covering it, because so much of the schedule has been secret for security purposes. They don't necessarily want people to know where various high-ranking people are going to be at different times.

Have you been to Tiananmen Square lately? How has it been spruced up for the occasion?

There's a bunch of lighting, they've put up a bunch of decorative pillars, there's flowers all over the place. A couple of very large video screens have been set up. They've been working on that for a long time. As you drive down the main avenue, the Chang'an Avenue, you'll see various displays. It's not uncommon to see... A lot of buildings have added extra lighting displays. The building where a lot of the CRI staff live, where I live, has put up some red and yellow lights around. You'll see a lot of stuff like that going on, gearing up for the whole thing. What's interesting to me, is the extent of it. It's been building up for almost as long as I've been here, a couple of months. And this month the build-up has been especially intense. There's been lots of stories in the local media about the preparations. They've also got a whole group of patriotic films they're encouraging people to go see. You go see one of the films this month, and you get a 50 or 70 percent discount ticket to go back to the movie theater next month. They're trying hard to get people to go see these patriotic films. All kinds of stuff going on.

Have there been a lot of historical documentaries on TV lately?

I wish I could answer that question, my TV's broken. The one thing that I can answer is that – I think most cultures have their heroic age – in the US I think it's the Wild West, cowboys and Indians. There are a lot of Westerns – I can't think of any Western television shows right now, but there are a lot of Western films that still get made. Various cultures have different times that they look back to as their heroic age. For the communist party, of course, their heroic age is, both the civil war against the nationalists and the war against the Japanese, which occurred at the same time right around the time of World War II. So, a lot of the television shows have to do with that, and that's a constant – that's always there. But I do think they have some special episodes going on right now. The main thing is the film called the Founding of a Republic, which stars a hundred or so relatively well-known Chinese film stars, including the really major ones that are known around the world, like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Zhang Ziyi. So, a lot of these major people are in it. A lot of them only appear in short cameos, but they all appear in the film at some time or another. I think it's supposed to be the five years up to and including the founding of the People's Republic of China. And they're really pushing that one. There are lots of stories about that – it's in all the theaters, and you do get those vouchers if you go see that film. So, that's been a big deal.

What kinds of thoughts does this special occasion provoke in Chinese people?

Reaction is sort of mixed. They're definitely excited about it, but they're also, I think Beijingers in particular, are tired, because they depend on the public transport and various sections of it has been turned down on and off for the last few weeks. So, definitely people are excited about it. The girl who was my production assistant today, was about to go our and have dinner with her boyfriend and then go see this film, the Founding of a Republic, and it's a bit different, I think, in my office, where most of the Chinese people are working state media. And so, that affects their opinion

Have there been any safety concerns

Definitely, yeah... There's definitely a lot more security in the subways – you have to go through metal detectors to get on any of the subways, just like you would at the airport. It's much quicker than it is at the airport, but if you carry a bag and you have to run it through an X-ray machine. All that kind of thing. There have been some incidents. There's been on and off violence in Xinjiang, and there's sort of a fear that some of it might spill over – that some of the people who have been responsible for the outbreaks in Xinjiang might try to something here to disrupt the National Day. I don't know if you saw this in the news, but there was a guy just last night that, no one's talking about why he did what he did. But somebody apparently got really drunk and went on a stabbing spree and killed a couple of policemen and wounded about, I think, nine people, before he was subdued. No one's saying for sure if it was in any way connected to the National Day, but it did happen right down in the Tiananmen Square area. I can't say that there's any connection, but when something like that happens in that area, it raises concern, whether there's a connection or not. So, definitely a lot of extra security measures are in place - more policemen on the streets and definitely more security on public transport. And on the actual day of October 1st, when a lot of people are trying to get to the Tiananmen Square area, the subway won't be running. So, I know that, for example, CRI is having to find hotel rooms for a lot of its staff because a lot of people just won't be able to come to work that day. They won't be able to get through town cause everything's closed off. So, they're putting people up in hotels. It is a national holiday, but we have to work because the radio is still going to be on. But generally speaking, it's a public holiday.

Have there been any reports on how the preparations are going?

My favorite one so far has been been a story in the China Daily, about this will be the first time that the special forces will be marching. They're the military that would be doing whatever special forces normally do. So, they were talking about how they were going to march and do their whole thing and they had a little quote from the commandant, the commander of the special forces, and he said something about how they've been training really hard and it's been really difficult to get ready for the parade. I remember thinking, 'if you're the special forces, I cant' imagine a parade being that tough.' I've asked some people about it and apparently it's just sort of a thing that when you're preparing for the parade, you have to make it sound like it's a really big deal. So we had to issue this quote, but to me, as an outsider, it just sounded funny. 'The special forces were really struggling to get ready for the parade.' Then there have been other things like soldiers saying that it's a sacred mission to march in the parade, all this build-up, to me has been quite funny. I think that, as Americans, we do get really worked up on our National Day, the 4th of July is a big thing. But there's not the build-up. Everybody just goes to work, and the next day they go out and have a picnic and get drunk, and the next day they go back to work again. I can't imagine what it would have been like after the American Revolution, it must have been a bigger deal. At this point, maybe we've become jaded because it's been a couple hundred years and none of us remember the founding. But there are people here, who do remember it. And it is still kind of a big deal. I think the government here does enjoy having these events, like they had the Beijing Olympics last year, this thing this year, and next year they have the Shanghai Expo and they like to kind of keep the patriotic fervor going, and this helps to do that as well.