Greg Baker / AP

The Party's Over: Chinese music fans rocked out last year's Midi festival, but authorities have canceled the 2008 event

To Chinese authorities, the prospect of a cheeky European rocker yelling "Free Tibet!" must be frightening enough right now  -- and that of thousands of Chinese rock kids reacting emotionally to it, scarier still. No shocker, then, that Beijing police are scuttling the May installment of the Midi Fest, China's only legitimate annual Rock festival, out of concerns over "security". Police won't provide it, and without them the show can't go on.

Now nine years old, this year's Midi was supposed to be the biggest on record, comprising 100 local bands and 30 visiting acts. Just last week, all 30 got their performance permits from the local culture bureau. But on Tuesday, Midi came unraveled. Several of the headline acts from Europe, just having processed their visas, got word that the upcoming Midi is off for now, according to two Beijing-based promoters working with them.

Our phone calls to Zhang Fan, founder of the festival and the independent music school that organizes it, went unanswered. But on Monday, Zhang strongly indicated to a Chinese blogger associated with the festival, Qi Youyi, that it might have to be "postponed" from the appointed dates of May 1-4 due to the Tibet conflagration. Qi quoted Zhang as saying:

"Most recently, many aspects of the domestic and international situation have been exceedingly sensitive and complicated, and it's necessary for us all to safeguard the Olympic situation overall, so if the relevant departments require it, ultimately we may very well have to put the overall situation first."

In other words, Beijing's tuning out the rockers to help restore Olympic harmony.

Now the Midi will have to shoot for the National Day holiday, Oct. 1, after the tense period of the Olympics and Paralympics has passed. With the fest "postponed" indefinitely, it joins the pileup of performances to be derailed in the wake of clashes over Tibet -- particularly events involving foreigners. The list includes pre-game festivities before a Major League Baseball exhibition game in Beijing; an expat-produced play in Chengdu; and a concert in the Chinese capital by Celine Dion – the last reportedly due to the promoter's failure to land Culture Ministry approval before selling thousands of tickets.

But officials perennially give their final sign-off on approvals late in the game in China -- one reason so many shows end up undersold. More to the point, they've been feeling the heat since being burned by another major concert (organized by the same concert promoters, no less) the month before. In early March, Icelandic songstress Bjork ended on an unauthorized song entitled "Independence", and ad-libbed "Tibet! Tibet!" into it.
Foreign concert goers spread the word. Shamed by press reports, Chinese culture czars warned of harsher vetting of foreign performers thereafter. Chinese following the incident got their "feelings hurt", according to the state news agency Xinhua -- reserved choice words for Bjork online.

If Public Security was not prepared to allow Boy Scouts (part of the planned MLB pre-game) in front of a crowd dominated by expats such as their own dads, try 30 foreign Indie outfits in front of hordes of young Chinese high on patriotic pride (and maybe other substances). Already Shanghai had denied Midi’s application for a spin-off fest the same week in May. There, the culture aparatchiks (like the locals) have weaker stomachs for rock, and expats dominate the audiences at those prohibitively expensive concerts that are approved.

Perhaps the biggest difference now is the grim specter of foreign-Chinese confrontation that looms. Flag-bearing Chinese got in the faces of pro-Tibetan protesters out to upstage the Torch Relay in Canberra and Kuala Lampur, while angry demonstrators around China converged by the thousands on locations of the French hypermart Carrefour.

At one outlet in Changsha, a young American teacher mistaken for a Frenchman was snarled in the mob; he caught a few glancing blows, and nearly had his cab tipped over, before police whisked him to safety, reports the Shanghaiist blog.

In recent days, Party propaganda authorities have ordered up a new media campaign to cut the patriotic buzz with a dose of "rationality". But it's been slow to break the fever.

In the clubs of Beijing, where the Chinese rock scene has (rather quietly) proliferated for a decade and a half, punks and their ilk have on occasion injected nationalist adrenaline into the mosh-pit -- with a shot at Taiwan independence advocates, neo-nationalist Japanese right-wingers or U.S. fast-food chains. At one heavy-metal gig in the university quarter of Beijing this month, says a foreigner who observed it, a heavy metal band's front-man spouted Chinese indignation at international treatment of events in Tibet. Head-bangers in the crowd, overwhelmingly Chinese, roared in support.

Five years ago, a notorious spasm of jingoism did occur at the Midi Fest. Student rowdies greeted a group from Japan with a shower of bottles, debris and name-calling, the latest national "humiliation" at the hands of the Japanese apparently still fresh on their minds. Two weeks earlier, news had broken of a sex romp involving 400 Japanese male tourists and local prostitutes at a hotel down in Guangdong. The reaction at the Midi prompted the lead singer of Chinese headliners Thin Man (an ethnic Mongolian, incidentally) to bolt to the Japanese band's defense in a hapless effort to tame the crowd.

Two of the foreign bands who were scheduled to play this year's Midi happen to be French, while most of the others are from Western or Northern European countries where citizens are very much partial to the Dalai Lama.

Bands recruited to play the Midi, however, have always been schooled to rock clean of bratty antics or sensitive causes. And for the most part they've obliged. As a scene, Chinese rock is now often more politicized than it is political. Musicians still put up with the persistent headaches of censorship, piracy and popular and media biases, but they've truly capitalized on the alternative youth market for counterculture, i.e., anything not pop. Sticking to the music, and rebelling without too much of a cause, has helped the Midi grow and expand in its formative years: from a single-stage setup on the school grounds in the boondocks to a public park featuring six different stages, food stalls, and 75-cent cups of beer.

In between, officials have forced postponement from May to October twice before, both times ostensibly for reasons related to crowd-control: in 2003, due to the SARS contagion, and in 2004 following massively deadly accidents, including a stampede on a bridge and a gas leak. But Midi has made the necessary concessions, ushering in mag-and-bagging at the gates, a phalanx of police on the grounds, and lessons from Europe in walling off the stage. In return, Midi has gained a seemingly permanent home and in Myspace band circles, a budding global presence. And it's gone green. The entire 2007 festival was sponsored by Greenpeace, which was to sponsor its own eponymous stage in 2008. The "environmental protection policy" makes up a key part of the Midi code of conduct.

How much better have relations got? Well, Communist Party cadres sure don't view Rock as a Western agent of "bourgeois liberalization" anymore. Ideally, it's a Western agent of making money. The government of Haidian District, where the park is located, was even invested in Midi 2008. Despite speculation that clamps on non-Olympic events pre-Olympics would do in the rockfest, Haidian District was kicking in 500,000 yuan, according to Chinese reports.

But rock shows are still among the higher-risk investments in Beijing. It would take a lot more than money right now for Midi to enlist the commitment from the police, who are already required to provide relatively heavy security for the fest to get their go-ahead. No security means no permit, either.

The problem's not that the cops don't have the manpower to handle the crowds, of course. It's that they don't want to end up in that position. Even under routine circumstances, Chinese public security bureaus can make concert organizers sweat it out to the end before bestowing approvals. For the government, it’s a built-in (and technically, legal) contingency plan, should something like a Tibet crisis arise. Maven of the local music scene Jon Campbell, of YGTwo Productions, is one of the battle-weary concert promoters and musicians who has braved the bureaucracy of organizing a Midifest. "There are speed bumps in non-Olympic years," he says. "So it's not a surprise this year."