The Guardian-Rare glimpse inside Chinas halls of power as Beijing hosts major political event amid high security

Chinese paramilitary policemen in Tiananmen Square

Across Beijing, security guards stand shivering. Residents of the heavily monitored capital city are used to encountering security guards, members of an urban management force called chengguan, and police officers every few blocks. But this week, as China hosts its biggest political meetings of the year, even more muscle has turned up in Beijing.

Since Monday, Beijing has been hosting the Two Sessions, concurrent meetings of China’s top political consultative body and its rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC). The meetings, which are expected to finish on Monday, are China’s most high-profile annual political event, in which thousands of delegates gather inside the Great Hall of the People, an enormous Communist-era building that looms over the western edge of Tiananmen Square.

Extra uniformed officers have been deployed inside metro stations, on the streets leading up to Tiananmen Square and on bridges – where the icy winds feel especially sharp. On the footbridges that cross Beijing’s roaring highways, many are standing guard, armed with fire extinguishers for use on troublemakers, and vacuum flasks for themselves.

The guards are there both to maintain order in the capital and as a show of strength. Although the decisions made at the NPC are pre-determined by the ruling Chinese Communist party (CCP), the Two Sessions is the forum at which China’s government gives the outside world a limited glimpse into its halls of power. It is also where president Xi Jinping’s number two, premier Li Qiang, outlines plans for the year and announces key targets, such as GDP growth, which this year was set for an ambitious 5%.

With so many supposed decision-makers in one place, the Two Sessions is also traditionally the time when the disenfranchised come to Beijing to submit petitions to central government about their grievances, from the behaviour of local officials to forced evictions to domestic disputes. The centuries-old petitioning system operates all year round but is especially busy during the Two Sessions, when petitioners believe their complaints have a better chance of being heard (in reality, many petitioners are intercepted, often violently, on their way to the capital).

And whenever the world’s eyes are on Beijing, somebody might stage a protest. On 13 October 2022, days before the 20th National Congress of the CCP – a five-yearly party confab that outshines even the Two Sessions – a man called Peng Lifa unfurled two white banners from the parapet of Sitong Bridge in Beijing’s Haidian district, lighting a smokey fire for extra effect. The banners bore provocative statements in red paint, including, “We want to eat, not do coronavirus tests”, “We want freedom, not lockdowns”, and “Be citizens, not enslaved people.” Most controversially, they called for the removal of Xi, calling him a “national traitor”. Peng has since vanished into police custody.

There will be no such stunts this year. At Sitong Bridge, four guards are on standby with not much to do. Two are in padded camouflage coats; the others look less well insulated. With security also stationed at other bridges, the only sign that something significant happened at the bridge is the absence of the road sign that used to display its name.

Elsewhere in the city, extra Hikvision surveillance cameras have been erected on temporary tripods, and in at least one metro station uniformed officers do spot checks of identification cards, scanning them against an online database that flags troublemakers.

Some of this infrastructure is a hangover from the zero-Covid era, three years in which the trend towards the expansion of state surveillance was massively accelerated, much of it remaining even after Covid restrictions were abandoned in late 2022. “Compared with its pre-Covid self, the current Chinese party-state apparatus tracks and regulates individual movement and behaviour with vastly greater, likely unprecedented, precision,” note Yutian An and Taisu Zhang, researchers at Harvard and Yale universities respectively, in an academic paper.

Inside the Two Sessions, the mood is livelier. NPC delegates swarm in and out of the Great Hallof the People; some stop to talk to journalists. “This is a major event in the political life of our country,” says one delegate, Liu Daijun, on his way into the opening session.

In reality, the NPC has never voted down an item on the agenda. This year is the first time since the pandemic that the Two Sessions has been open to the media, with state media claiming more than 3,000 local and international journalists are registered, but the narrative is under as tight control as the city. At press conferences, the vast majority of questions are little more than a prompt for officials to read out prepared statements.

At foreign minister Wang Yi’s press conference, a journalist from China Arab TV asked him to elaborate on the “most fascinating and notable” stories about China. Elsewhere, a journalist from Pakistan told Chinese state media how “happy” and “friendly” people in Xinjiang are, thanks to the economic development of that region; a narrative favoured by Beijing but rejected by international human rights organisation.

But on Beijing’s streets, many people are as disillusioned as those in countries where people do have a vote. “I haven’t paid much attention to it,” says a woman outside a shopping mall, who declined to give her name.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin