Beijing feels like a city bracing itself for a season of utterly cheerless celebration and paranoid control freakery. Police are going door to door in housing compounds checking that foreign residents have registered their address with the police. This is because the authorities are terrified of foreigners disrupting the Games with – God forbid – a Free Tibet T shirt, or a banner. They aren't trying to catch the long-term residents, but the short-term visitors who they suspect might have come here to dig in for a few months before the Olympics.
These checks give the authorities a sense that they know where everyone is, and indeed they do. Every registration in modest neighbourhood police stations, is entered into a city-level database which is accessible (and frighteningly accurate) from any other police station.
Usually the Olympics are the occasion for a bit of spontaneous good cheer. But things aren't looking good for Beijing. The city has cancelled the hugely popular Midi rock festival, which was due to take part in a park next week. It has cancelled another culture fair in another park which was to promote the countries of the European Union. Nationalist protests may take place next week outside Carrefour, the hapless target of much anti-French protest. It's increasingly difficult to get visas even to set foot on Chinese soil.
This morning, I went to get my driving licence renewed. First I had to go to a clinic a stamp put on a form to confirm that my eyes, ears and general skeletal shape were satisfactory. Then I headed off to the offices of the Traffic Police. There, in the car park, a smashed up car was displayed on a raised dais. On one side of the dais was a banner warning that this was what happened if you drove badly. On the other, pragmatically, was the telephone number of a scrap yard – presumably it was they who'd paid for the display.
At the doorway to the Foreigner's Section, was a big poster declaring that the slogan for the Olympics was "Harmonious Traffic for the Olympic Games, Friendly Traffic Police." Inside, an electronic countdown board showed that there were only 105 days left until the Olympic Games, and a screen showed a continuous loop of traffic accident footage, complete with mutilated bodies. I filled in endless forms, and while I was waiting made use of the free shoe-polishing machine that graces the waiting room. The police wanted more pieces of paper than usual, including that precious piece of paper showing I'd registered with the neighbourhood police. The forms had to be filled in in blank ink, and the slightest mistake meant starting all over again.
After all that, they got my date of birth wrong on my licence, making it a year later than it really was. Did it matter? I asked. The officer screwed up his face. He was a career bureaucrat in one of the world's greatest bureaucracies, but it was lunchtime. I could foresee another tedious wait while they corrected my date of birth. He could see himself going hungry and having to put up with a bored foreigner endlessly polishing her shoes in his waiting room. Still, he had to admit that the wrong date of birth on the licence would cause difficulties for me when I turned sixty, because at that stage I'd have to start having health checks every year. It would mean bureaucratic confusion, and a great deal of time spent correcting it. He looked greatly relieved when I said I'd worry about that when I turned sixty. We both headed off to our respective lunches, and I was pleased to realise that I was a whole year younger than when I'd entered the building. Very harmonious, very friendly.