Chinese strike back against party rule The senior leadership of the Chinese Communist party recently concluded an important meeting pledging allegiance to the "rule of law" in the country. Now, "law" tends to be a bit of a malleable concept on the mainland, but there is certainly no shortage of rules. Indeed, Beijing seems to have celebrated its new commitment to lawfulness by issuing a plethora of edicts, each one more entertaining than the last. One was particularly stimulating to the national satiric instincts: riders of the Beijing metro were banned from wearing Halloween costumes. Since that holiday is celebrated only sparsely in China anyway, and mostly by foreigners, banning pumpkin outfits and witch hats on public transport is hardly a Magna Carta kind of issue. But when the emperor issues risible rules, he should not be surprised if the serfs just laugh. Patti Waldmeir There are just so many of them: in honour of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that is taking place in Beijing, the city has banned cultural practices such as burning the clothes of dead relatives (though funeral wreaths and elegiac couplets may be torched at certain hours); factories in many surrounding provinces were told to shut, cars were ordered off the roads, schools were closed and local government workers sent on a week-long holiday. Residents were also discouraged from barbecuing outdoors. It's all in aid of presenting Beijing to the world as a city of blue skies, light traffic and "civilised" habits. On the eve of the summit, the capital's mandarins were complaining that hoi polloi were still not doing what they were told: what fun is it being an authoritarian if no one will do what you say? Even God didn't seem inclined to listen: the capital's weather conspired to trap pollutants above the capital, leaving smog at dangerous levels for most of the meeting. Of course, these are hardly the only rules citizens have had to contend with, even just in the past month. Government officials were told to waste less time playing mah-jong when they should be studying Communist ideology. Couples were told to "respect social morality" when naming their children to avoid jeopardising "social management" (though China is hardly the only country that has strict rules about baby names; and many countries ban names spelt in foreign alphabets, presumably because it makes the "social management" of the passport bureau more difficult). President Xi Jinping has issued directives on what kind of pictures artists should paint, buildings architects should design and television citizens should watch (preferably anti-Japanese wartime dramas). Many of these edicts will doubtless receive the same kind of reception as the "rule" that all bags must be X-rayed before anyone can board the Shanghai metro: most of the city's residents walk straight past the X-ray machines without missing a step. Passive resistance comes in many forms in China - and not all the resistors carry umbrellas (as they do in Hong Kong's current "umbrella" revolution). And it's not just resistance to political rules such as Hong Kong's disputed voting model that could ultimately challenge Beijing in a serious way. This year citizens have engaged in the most intimate form of passive resistance: refusing to have babies. Deciding whether to procreate may sound like the ultimate individual choice but not in China: the falling birth rate could seriously jeopardise economic growth, and with it the social compact that lets people grow rich under the Communist party. So now the country known worldwide for forcibly prohibiting births is in the business of trying to trigger a baby boom - but few couples are co-operating. Earlier this year Beijing relaxed the one-child policy to allow couples to have two children where one spouse was an only child (rather than both, as under the previous rule). But last week Beijing announced that, out of an estimated 11m couples who can now bear a second child because of the policy change, only 690,000 applied for a permit to do so (and they won't all get pregnant). Reproductive disobedience could be the worst kind of all: otherwise where will the next generation of serfs come from?