The build-up

National Day, October 1, is just a few weeks away. It will be the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, which is apparently a Big Deal--I guess until the centennial, every decade-anniversary will be.

On Friday the government shut down all the subway stops and traffic around Tiananmen Sq. for a practice march, which I'm pretty sure involves lots of tanks rolling down Chang'an Avenue and soldiers marching in perfect synchronization.

I watch CCTV sort of vacantly while at the gym, and see, in their 60th anniversary extravaganza coverage, what looks to be footage of soldier training. PLA officers line up and kick out one leg again and again, each one bringing his leg up to the exact height of a wire that would cut into his calf if he lifted any higher. They repeat this motion, one leg at a time, maybe hundreds or thousands of times.

I guess it's to train muscle memory--not just when to lift your leg when you're marching in time, but by exactly how much, so that all the soldiers' legs snap out like a single moving part and then snap back. I don't know much about soldier training, or about marching for that matter--maybe this is a very ordinary thing that all soldiers do. But it's quite striking when the camera pulls back and goes to another shot, this one of approximately a million soldiers marching, and their legs are all bending and extending and retracting exactly the same, like it was just one soldier on a green screen with duplicates of himself all around. I've heard Disney did that for the herd scenes in The Lion King. That's what I'm thinking of, jogging on the treadmill at my very swanky orange-fiberglass-and-artfully-cut-mirror underground gym.

In my office, everyone is suddenly running to line up their trashcans against the wall. One minute I'm just working like usual and then next, I look up to see this towering stack of personal trash cans looming by the doorway to the layout and design room. I ask my coworkers why everyone is bringing their trashcans over, and they say it's because of National Day. Apparently we can expect many Important Party Officials to come strolling through our office over the next few weeks, and everything has to be in ship-shape around the offices of China Daily. We've been told to clean up the clutter on our desks, and now the trashcans must be scrubbed. But if we stack them against the wall, the gloomy-faced cleaning lady will do it for us.

I am not really sure why Important Party Officials care about the cleanliness of the trashcans, which are a) designed to hold trash, after all, and b) stowed deep in the shadowy recesses under our desks, anyway.

Impending National Day is also why the office admin. girl came over to check out the serial number and IP address and whatever else it was on my computer the other day. At the time, she told me it was because the tech guy was complaining that someone keeps leaving their computer on overnight, so she was checking everyone's computers to see whose numbers matched and thereby locate the culprit. This made me very nervous, because I've left my computer on a few times overnight, not intentionally, but it has a tendency to freeze just as I'm mid-shut-down, and I don't want to wait around forever to see what will happen.

So here I am feeling nervous about being called out by the tech guy for my reckless waste of electricity, but it turns out that I can relax on that count, because that was all just dissembling on the part of the office admin. girl. She actually wants our computer serial numbers so that Important Party Officials can track all of our movement online and locate us if we post anything sensitive or seditious on any websites in the coming weeks.

Hmm, yes. Happy National Day!