World leaders will arrive for the G20 summit in China on Saturday to a full ceremonial welcome.
Schools and construction sites have been shut down, and every detail meticulously choreographed to showcase the country's starring role as this year's host.
President Xi Jinping will want to use the weekend event to present himself as a global statesman and a powerful leader, reclaiming what he sees as China's rightful place on the world stage.
But there is another side of this country that the visiting prime ministers and presidents will not see.
Human rights groups accuse Mr Xi of presiding over the most chilling crackdown on civil society here in decades - of consolidating his control and silencing his critics.
Among them are men like Yang Weidong.
We meet in a quiet street on the outskirts of Beijing. He moves slowly with the help of a cane.
He welcomes us into his house, but there's a catch - he can't legally speak to us.
Mr Yang is currently on police bail after spending 114 days in detention accused of "picking quarrels" - a favourite charge for those who fall foul of the authorities.
He was an architect with a well-paid job and a comfortable life, but when his father died after a confrontation with officials in 2007, he started to question everything about this country he thought he knew.
He decided to start filming, to try to understand, and to put on record what is happening in China.
He calls it a "social survey" - asking 500 people from different parts of Chinese society including scholars, economists, artists and political analysts how they feel about life.
"I need to be able to live freely," one interviewee tells him.
Another man says: "I need freedom of speech."
In the early days they hired professional film crews, but now his wife operates the camera for him.
In the nine years since he embarked on this project he has lost his job and the couple has lost their business and their home.
They now live in a rented apartment with a baseball bat near the door. It is for "self defence" his wife, Du Xing, told me.
She points out the house across the road, where she says a police surveillance team has moved in.
"At the beginning, Yang Weidong still had a job," Mrs Du explains.
"He was an architect and worked for Tsinghua University. The police went to his workplace and demanded his bosses stop him from working."
"The cafe we opened was affected too. They didn't allow us to run the business. They asked us to shut it and leave. So we had no income. We sold our two houses in Beijing to support the interviews."
The pressure is not just financial.
After we had made contact to arrange this interview, the couple said two police officers came to their home to remind Mr Yang of his bail conditions.
He told them his wife was a free citizen and could receive whomever she chose.
She showed us the documents from his case and the paperwork detailing his bail.
He is specifically forbidden from entering foreign embassies, giving interviews to foreign journalists, and has had to surrender his passport to police.
"I never expected it to be this bad," Mrs Du said.
"I didn't think it would be such hard work."
I asked her what she would like to say to the visiting world leaders, to President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Theresa May.
"Help us. Help all these people who don't have freedom," she said.
"We have been married for ten years, but we don't dare to have children. We are terrified of the powerful government, so we don't dare."
"Obama has a family, Theresa May has a family, what if their families had problems like ours? What would they do?"
"We are only small ants, what can we do?
"I really want them to help us. We are so helpless, so powerless."
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