Party like it’s 1949: China’s National Day

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, celebrated with an enormous parade of military hardware. Our correspondent was in nearly the same spot today as 20 years ago, and the differences in the parades reveal much about China's trajectory. In Hong Kong, the anniversary is an occasion for yet more protests. Disquiet in the territory is stretching the mainland's idea of one country, two systems and is sparking a new wave of protest art and music. And if you've got your own desk at work, count yourself lucky. Hot desking is spreading through corporations like a rash. Sure, it saves the company money, but it costs workers time and a sense of belonging. The People's Republic of China began with a military parade. Since Mao Zedong inaugurated the republic 70 years ago. Today, resplendent columns of soldiers have marched through Tiananmen Square to mark important milestones. The spectacles showcase weapons that have become progressively bigger, more sophisticated and more numerous. This year's 70th anniversary comes as China contends with a slowing economy on the mainland and growing discontent in Hong Kong, where today protesters were reportedly fired on with live rounds. But in Beijing, today's parade was a glittering Projection of China's might.

So it's a very grand, very formal event that takes place at the top end of Tiananmen Square, just where the Forbidden City kind of touches the square.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau chief.

You have the entire leadership of China looking down from the Tiananmen Gate and then you have a gigantic military parade. It begins with a 70 gun salute from artillery pieces in the square. We then had a goose stepping honor guard whose kind of jackboots were kind of crashing down on the granite paving stones of the squares. They then raised the national flag. We then had a singing of the national anthem. And then we went into a speech by Xi Jinping which was, you know, actually it could have been more aggressive. It was very self confident. But he didn't say they were about to invade Taiwan or something. The thing that was designed to get everyone's attention was that the military parade, which happens every 10 years, was the largest we have ever seen. It had a really very large number, not just of tanks kind of grumbling past and helicopters and fighter jets, but we had some new missiles, particularly nuclear missiles, which are road launched, which makes them hard to kind of take out. And a big, big point was made by something called the Dongfeng 41, which is the largest mobile nuclear missile in the Chinese arsenal, which has a lot of different warheads and which is capable of hitting any part of the United States. That was the very last bunch of weaponry in the parade. And when the commentator announced it, you had this spontaneous cheer. And I have to say that as a foreign journalists, you know, we were treated very politely. But there is something fairly kind of scary, hairs on the back of your neck about hearing a crowd spontaneously cheering a weapon trundling past which is designed to annihilate the West.

You've been to these National Day parades before.

I was actually on almost exactly the same place 20 years ago for the 50th anniversary parade. We had a different leader. The big difference though was political, but back then it was a kind of good news story. Look at these big baskets of grain and fruit and how China is getting more prosperous and things are getting better. And this time what was really extraordinary, and it fits with the new leader of China. Since the last time I was at one of these parades, Xi Jinping, he has basically decided that the Communist Party is strongest when it simply doesn't admit to any mistakes in its past at all. Now that if you actually know your history, or if you lived through that history as someone Chinese, is at some level morally Repugnant, because at the height of the Cultural Revolution, you had millions killed in political violence. Just before that, you had a man made famine and absolutely catastrophic economic policies unleashed by Chairman Mao during the Great Leap Forward. During this parade, we had a kind of pantomime version of the Great Leap Forward, which made it all look rather kind of fun and stirring and exciting. And we had the period of the Cultural Revolution kind of alluded to, but in this kind of lighthearted way. So we had sort of dancing people in the parade who looked a lot like Red Guards, were sort of dressed more or less like Red Guards. And you basically would have watched this parade today if you knew nothing about Chinese history and thought for the last 70 years, the communist Party of China has never made a serious mistake. It's just one long procession of progress. And the only thing that really changes is the clothes get more modern and the technology gets more impressive.

And what about the reaction of the crowds compared with 20 years ago? I mean, what do the people make of this narrative? And what did they then I was.

Sitting at exactly the spot on Chang', Anjie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, where the youngsters in the parade, university students or other youngsters, where they suddenly realized that they could see Xi Jinping high up on the Tiananmen, and they were very, very, very excited. They were hopping up and down. They were chanting as they had been told, you know, long life to the motherland, Long live China. I love my country, China. But it was not the fanaticism of the Red Guards. But, you know, if you know your Chinese history, to have university students in Tiananmen Square with their university flags just after tanks have trundled through and the fumes from diesel of a tank engine are still hanging in the air, to have that kind of. With the memories of the massacre of 1989 or the memories of the Red Guards of 1969, you know, that is a haunted place. And these were haunted images. But today it could have been like a parade at Disneyland. It was all kind of the sunny Disney version of Communist glory.

It seems clear with the message is for the people of China. But what about for those outside China? How much of the pageantry you saw today you think is. Is China sort of sending a message about the challenges it's facing.

It was basically a very domestic event. So certainly all the civilian stuff was very much for domestic consumption. But the extraordinary display of hardware and particularly these very long range missiles, I think it fits into a story that China wants the world to hear, which is that China is very close to being and certainly intends to become, a country so large and so powerful that no one else in the world gets to tell them no ever.

But one big challenge that it's facing is in Hong Kong, where there have been months of protests, more demonstrations today. What's going on there?

So it's really interesting. I mean, Hong Kong had its own float in the parade, which it always must. It was a pretty lackluster float. It didn't really have much going for it. They had, you know, people marching, waving Hong Kong flags, and the crowd kind of cheered. But everyone sort of knows now that there's real trouble down there. So National Day in Hong Kong, they had a flag raising, but it had to be held kind of essentially without any members of the public there at all, under very tight security. There is normally a giant fireworks display on the magnificent Hong Kong harbor that's been cancelled because the authorities there just basically don't want that many people gathering spontaneously. And just a couple of days ago, over the weekend, we had some really very violent, nasty protests with, it should be said, violence on both sides.

Well, you say that everybody on the mainland more or less knows that there's trouble in Hong Kong, and that certainly wasn't the case at the start of the protests. Why is it that none of that protest mood has spread into China even a little bit?

Basically, the mainland has done a pretty good job of only showing the worst of the protests in Hong Kong. So they only show violence by protesters. They show protesters sort of trampling on the Chinese national flag, which offends people's sense of patriotism here. There's also a fairly effective operation on the way to say that the people of Hong Kong are being manipulated by foreign black hands. The CIA is supposedly paying people to protest, and that argument is somewhat believed. And the final thing that's kind of tragic is that the very argument that the Hong Kongers are making, which is, you know, if you make us into just another mainland city, we will have lives with no dignity and meaning, is in some sense profoundly insulting to a lot of mainlanders because it's Hong Kong saying that they can't imagine accepting the grand bargain that works so well. But in the mainland, which was essentially celebrated with a two and a half hour parade today.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

No, thank you.

While in Beijing, the National Day has been marked with control and organization. In Hong Kong, the chaos of democracy protests has dominated. There are reports of protesters being shot with live rounds. Demonstrators tore down a National Day banner and set it alight. It's not the first time Hong Kongers have treated Chinese nationalism with hostility. Flags have been stomped on, government buildings defaced. At football matches, locals boo or turn their backs on China's national anthem. Hong Kong doesn't have its own anthem, or at least it didn't until recently.

All of a sudden, in the middle of September, somebody wrote one.

Fiametta Rocco is the Economist's culture editor. She's been reporting in Hong Kong recently.

They posted it on Telegram, which is the activists favorite app, and crowdsourced the words.

It has the romantic lyrics typical of national anthems, asking that may people reign proud and free now and evermore.

It's a little bit corny, it's very emotional. Called Glory to Thee, Hong Kong and it's immensely powerful.

In a slickly produced video, a choir and orchestra perform in the uniform of the territory's protests. Black clothing, gas masks and goggles.

It was put up on a Sunday. The following Tuesday there was a World cup football match against Iran and at 8 o' clock exactly, the entire stadium stood up and sang this anthem that they had just learned about online.

So the mood in Hong Kong and the weeks and weeks and weeks of protests are inspiring new art.

Well, Hong Kong's an interesting place. You know, it's the center of the Asian film industry. There've always been a lot of cartoonists, a lot of designers, a lot of graphic artists. They tend to be not just creative, but they're very independent minded. So it's not at all surprising that they are a real backbone of the pro democracy movement in Hong Kong. And, and through Telegram, they have been creating new art every day. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of new images being put up all the time. At first it was quite light hearted. Casey Wong is an artist and activist. He had quite a funny piece in the early part of the spring. He'd made a sort of mock prison. It looked actually like a British telephone box with red bars. And he and a friend of his dressed up as mainland policemen with aviator sunglasses and their little white gloves and their truncheons, which they used to quote, unquote, arrest some of the crowd. Crowd, of course, thought it was hilarious. The whole thing, it was magnificent for selfies and so they really greatly enjoyed it. But the mood is getting darker, not just in the street, but also in the art.

How do you mean?

There've been a number of exhibitions and a number of works that really are a far cry from the levity of the early days. There have been A number of performances over the summer that have taken a much darker turn, particularly a performance artist called Cao Lu, who actually comes from the mainland. Now, Tsao Lu is very, very famous because in 1989, just before the Tiananmen Square protest happened, she fired an air gun at one of her works of art, and her exhibition was immediately closed down. She's always known now as the person who fired the first shot of Tiananmen. Fast forward to 2019. She comes to Hong Kong. She puts on a new show called Skew, in which she appears in what looks like a sort of great pyramid shaped prism made of Perspex. She's inside it, she's up to her ankles in red liquid made to represent blood. She's dressed all in black, and she's writhing around screaming in anguish. It was a very creepy, strange thing to watch in the city in which these protests are taking place. And in fact, the man who was standing next to me suddenly piped up, oh, my God, I hope she's not going to prove to be Hong Kong's Cassandra. Cassandra, of course, Princess of Troy, who was a prophetess who always issued warnings and nobody would ever believe them.

And is there any sign that the authorities are trying to clamp down on this kind of protest art as it gets louder, as it gets more provocative?

There doesn't seem to be, and that's an interesting question, because, of course, it is an extremely important outlet when emotions are running very high. And I think it would be smart to. For the Chinese to allow that to continue, because it's clearly something that Hong Kongers feel very strongly about. It's an outlet for their creativity, and they are very attached to it.

Do you think that the change in the art represents the fact that the art is reflecting the protest mood or propelling it?

I think it's probably reflecting it rather more. I mean, there's so many things propelling the mood, it's difficult to single them all out. But I think it's reflective. I think a lot of protest art often is reflective. I mean, all uprisings have their iconographies, whether we're talking about posters of the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War, soldier being shot in chest, famously photographed with his arms outstretched, or the photograph of Tankman in Tiananmen Square. I mean, these come to embody the revolutions themselves. So that kind of imagery is very, very important. And when you're seeing it being produced at such speed, it can reflect a.

Mood very fast and even conjure up.

New national anthems and even conjure up New national anthems.

Thank you very much for your time, Fimeta. Thank you.

Jason.

How was your journey into work this morning? Did you wake up a bit late, get crammed into an overcrowded train and trudge through the rain, only to find that when you got to work, you had nowhere to sit?

Hot desking is where you're not assigned a particular place to sit in any given day, but at the start of each day you must go and find a new place along with your laptop. It's a fast growing trend because a lot of employees no longer work full time, so companies don't provide a full time desk.

Philip Coggin writes Bartleby, our column covering management and work.

The downside is when it applies to people who work quite frequently at a place when you know you're going to be coming in day after day and then you have to take away everything you've put on your desk. Put in a locker, perhaps. But at one financial institution, if you've had happen to leave something behind, it ends up in lost property. So then you spend the last few minutes of the day, like you're leaving for the airport, frantically putting everything away. And then in the morning, of course, when you come in, you've got to find somewhere to sit. Maybe it's a bit like, you know, searching for the last seat in waiting room or something. You end up with the one by the loos or, you know, where there isn't a plug socket or something. And it's been estimated that it takes 18 minutes per day for the average hot desking employee to find somewhere to sit. That adds up to 66 hours a year.

So why are businesses doing this then? What's the plus?

The main plus for businesses is it saves on costs. So each person in an office costs a lot. You've got the rent on the space, you've got the desk, you've got any equipment. In the UK, the estimate is about 4,800 pounds, $6,000 a year per person. And if you've got all these freelancers, obviously for you to have empty space sitting there waiting for them to turn up, that's too expensive. The second thing they hope is it leads to people collaborating because they're not shut up in the little sort of rabbit hutches away from everybody else.

Pretty much the same rationale that's behind the idea of open plan offices.

Yes, the two things tend to go pretty much together. You wouldn't have a sort of hot desking in private offices. The problem is that when you're all Crammed together. It's quite noisy and it's quite distracting. So you tend to put on headphones to listen to some music and shut out your near neighbour. And also, if you want to talk to someone, you. You know that everybody else around you is going to hear. So they did a study of a couple of offices that switched from traditional design to open plan and they found that the number of face to face conversations went down and the number of emails went up. Because rather than have everybody else overhear you, you'd rather just send somebody an.

Email and you might not end up sitting next to those same people the next day anyway.

Exactly. You don't know where you're going to go. And it starts to be like when you're on holiday and you're desperately trying to put the towel down on the chair nearest the pool. Right. So it's. It adds a kind of unpersonalised approach to work. You can't feel as comfortable if you don't know where you're going to sit. You just might like a few things. A picture of the kids, your own coffee mug. I've been working a long time at the Economist. I've got hundreds of books stored over time and I do refer to them from time to time. What am I supposed to do with all those if I'm on a hot desk?

But not everybody at the Economist has their own office.

I am a little bit envious of.

People with destination because of their permanency. Depending on the day, it's pretty easy to find a desk. But if it's a Thursday, we have a meeting at 10am, so usually have to scrap the idea of finding a desk, then go to the meeting. Then it's even harder to find a desk. So you just plonk yourself down somewhere and hope for another desk to become free.

I actually think for me, having my.

Own desk desk would be what dreams are made of.

I had an idea of maybe doing something. Technically, we're hot desking. I could maybe put like a family picture on the desk or a plant. And technically, yeah, it's hot desking.

I mean, I'd move away.

Someone might feel weird. Hot desking where I usually sit, if, like, my family's staring at them or if, like, I have a ficus that.

I have over here in solidarity with colleagues who have to move every day, perhaps against their will. Why don't we swap chairs?

Okay.

Seated comfortably.

Yes. Thank you for coming in. Jason.

Phillip, thank you. Thanks for having me. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us. Give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.