How to 'have a nice day' in Beijing

Twenty-five years ago, when Beijing was called Peking by the English-speaking world and only a few thousand Westerners lived in what was then a city of 10 million people, it was hard for outsiders to pass unnoticed.

In fact, the authorities didn't want outsiders, particularly journalists, to pass unnoticed. Microphones in the walls, bugs in the phones, specially coloured licence plates for our cars — all were orchestrated to keep careful track of us and the people we met.

Why, I once asked a young man who knew how the system worked, does the regime take such pains? Why do they always follow us? But they don't, he laughed. They don't have to. Your face is your passport.

"Your face is your passport." This post-Maoist, pre-internet version of Facebook meant that, as a Westerner, you merely had to appear on a street to be identified as a foreign body among the socialist masses.

What's more, it wasn't just your face. Everything you wore separated you from the ranks of the green-clad citizenry.

The identifiers

The identifiers were members of the ubiquitous street committees. The most assiduous members of these committees were little old ladies given official sanction to snoop on everyone in their lane and to report the appearance there of any foreigner to the Public Security Bureau, otherwise known as the police.

The goal was to gain even more control over a society in which politics and political slogans dominated — including in the workplace, where during weekly meetings some official read aloud editorials from the People's Daily, the main organ of the Communist party, to learn the latest orders from above.

But times change. At first glance, your face is no longer your passport these days in downtown Beijing. It is, in fact, a matter of some indifference to locals strolling along Wang Fu Jing, one of the city's main shopping streets close to Tiananmen Square.

The Chinese are dressed in the same casual wear as the sprinkling of Western tourists who are also gawking at the goods in the stores.

That should not be surprising. Much of that casual wear is made in their country for export around the world.

Old China

Just off this large street is a passage that seems a throwback to a time before Mao and his revolution — a street of small shops with traditional wooden facades and sloping roofs reminiscent of Chinese temples and palaces.

Above the passage is a wall with a mural. It reproduces, many times magnified, an old English postcard. Even the writing from the postcard is replicated in English — "A Shopping Street in Old China."

The real street is, in fact, unreal — built to imitate the old postcard to which it renders homage. The shops sell fast food and trinkets to passing tourists.

This is the Disneyfication of the past, if you will, or the commodification as the Marxists would put it if there are any Marxists left in China.

It also makes for good pictures, and so Louis de Guise, our CBC cameraman, started shooting the crowds and the shops. Within a couple of minutes, he was stopped by a man in uniform, a security guard.

Did we have permission? We weren't aware we needed permission. Oh yes, he said, and now you must stop, and we shall go to meet the head of the street committee. Thus we discovered this Maoist institution still lives.

Meet the taxman

But now, the street committee pursues other purposes. The head of this one is a woman who quickly pulled out a form.

This, she said, was a contract we would have to sign. It entitled us to film for up to an hour in return for about $50. Otherwise, we would have to leave.

We left. Control, it seems, was no longer the goal; profit was.

The once-ubiquitous political slogans that dotted the country have also undergone a transformation. At a restaurant in the south, the official receipt had a detachable stub with a four-word slogan on it.

It translated as "To Pay Taxes Is Glorious." This was an earnest update on the famous slogan of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who launched his country on the road to economic power.

His slogan was "To Get Rich Is Glorious." The new variation is almost a plea for help from the government. In the race to get gloriously rich, many enterprises underreport their income, and so pay less in tax.

When slogans aren't enough

But slogans alone are not enough. The stub was also a scratch card. To encourage customers to demand a receipt, these cards promised lottery riches.

If when you scratched, you found underneath a sum in Chinese yuan, your meal more than paid for itself. We scratched but left the restaurant with nothing but the comfort of the slogan in our pockets.

Your face may no longer be your passport, but your profession, if you're a journalist with a camera, continues to be on display.

Having been told we needed no prior permission to shoot in Tiananmen Square in the weeks before the Olympics, we arrived with our cameras.

Within two minutes, a police car drove up, and a man in black asked for our documents.

He took down the information but told us in Chinese that we could keep on working while he did this. Then he listened as I did an on-camera stand-up, in French, for one of the pieces we were doing.

So you work in French, he said. Does that mean you work for both language networks of the CBC? The question was in fluent English.

That's right, I said, and then asked where he'd learned his English. Well, he'd spent a year in Britain. Very expensive, dubious food.

It turns out he had also visited Canada — Ottawa, Toronto, Kingston (the penitentiary), Vancouver — as part of a police delegation invited by the RCMP. What struck him the most? Niagara Falls, of course.

With that he was off. Our presence had been noted, officially, and we had been made to understand that the authorities were always close. Just before he left, he had one more message. Have a nice day. He really said it.