Around 4pm on the first day of the Modern Sky Beijing Strawberry Festival, an unexpected ban on booze kicked in, leaving in its wake a ghost town of empty Absolut pavilions and confused rock fans. Similar problems recurred at the INTRO rave in 798. Do the authorities delight in spoiling everyone’s fun, or have they just been listening to too much Minor Threat?

Archie Hamilton of the concert promotion agency Split Works attributes the decision to the growing clout of the PSB: “They’ve got control of Beijing at the moment, and they’re incredibly reactionary and risk-averse,” he says. Uniformed and plainclothes cops were standing by to enforce the alcohol ban at the China Music Valley festival, where some of the “promotional” messages that flashed on the big screen in between acts could have doubled as straight edge battle cries: “We want to be high on music but not high on drugs,” said one.

Organizers of the INTRO Festival changed venues from Tongzhou Canal Park to 798, in part to allow the sale of alcohol. “We only set up a limited number of bars,” says Miao Wong, managing director of Acupuncture Records, which put on INTRO. Sales were so discreet that some concertgoers who had heard of the earlier bans just assumed that alcohol wasn’t available at INTRO either.

Where the rules were strictly enforced, a shadow economy emerged to supply booze. “We were quickly able to establish that the man running the Thai food stall had beer,” says Huw Pohlner, who attended Strawberry Festival. “¥50 later, the three of us were walking toward the stages with a big paper cup full of beer each.”

Location is key. El-Mar, who is planning a party on an aircraft outside of Tianjin on July 2, says that the ban doesn’t affect parties outside the city. “We’re going to serve alcohol,” he says. Wong says the bans happened because music festivals are still relatively new in China. “Even for the police ... sometimes they’re just as confused as we are ... Maybe sooner or later everything will be clearer.”