Don't tell anyone

IN THE south-west corner of Tiananmen Square, a grandiose new building looms behind a shabby row of low-rise structures facing the plaza. These will be bulldozed in the coming months, unveiling in its full glory a monumental edifice that will be the first new structure in the square since Mao Zedong's mausoleum was plonked in the middle of it in 1977. The authorities, however, seem oddly sheepish about the new arrival.

Few but the most observant of Beijing residents are yet aware that the appearance of the city's most famous landmark is soon to change. The official press has largely kept quiet about the new building, which occupies what used to be a block of slum-like courtyard houses of pre-Communist vintage, together with a school and some offices and shops. The edifice is about half the size of the Great Hall of the People, to its north, a 1950s building which houses China's parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC). It shares its dour mien.

It took just 18 months from the laying of the foundation stone in February 2008 to its topping out ceremony last year. Yet the Chinese media have been coy about this feat, and the painstaking relocation further down a side road to make way for it of the historic 1920s' building that was once home to the All-China Journalists' Association. A government website briefly described the topping out ceremony, but did not say where the building-site was. It identified the project, however, as the “NPC Office Building”. It said workers had completed the outer structure (with a “high sense of political responsibility”) a month before schedule.

Back in 2004 the Chinese press was a little less reticent. Oriental Outlook, a magazine controlled by China's government-run news agency, Xinhua, said then that plans for such an NPC office building had been suspended as part of efforts to rein in a bubbling economy. But Chinese sources say blueprints were quietly dusted off again in 2005. In December the following year the building was officially designated a “project involving state secrets”, though its purpose was revealed in notices posted around the area in 2007 warning residents that their block would be flattened. The government ordered that the building be ready for use by the middle of this year. An NPC spokesman for the legislature refuses to give any details of the cost or confirm when the project would be finished. A budget of 1.3 billion yuan, or $190m, was submitted in 2003, sources say.

Since 2007 the Communist Party has been stepping up efforts to curb a rash of lavish office building by local governments. “We will strictly control the construction of office buildings for Party and government bodies”, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, cautioned again at this month's annual NPC session, which is likely still to be held in Great Hall of the People even after the new offices are ready. Mr Wen has reason to be furtive.