Tiananmen Square
The vast Beijing plaza where modern China stages its power and where, repeatedly, Chinese citizens have gone to contest it.
Tiananmen Square is not an old public space. It is a deliberately built political stage, and almost everything about it, including its size, was designed to say something about who governs China.
The gate itself, the Tiananmen or Gate of Heavenly Peace, dates from 1415 and was the ceremonial southern entrance to the imperial palace complex. Under the Ming and Qing the ground in front of it was a walled, restricted corridor of government offices, not a place ordinary people gathered. Imperial edicts were lowered from the gate in a gilded box; the phrase for it was that the emperor's word descended from heaven. The square as a square only came later, and it came for a reason.
Building the stage
After the Communist victory, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic from the balcony of the gate on October 1, 1949, standing exactly where emperors had received the kowtow. Then his government rebuilt the space around it. Between 1958 and 1959 the old walls and offices were demolished and the plaza was expanded to roughly forty-four hectares, deliberately made the largest such square in the world and sized to assemble half a million people for parades. Around it went the Great Hall of the People, the national museum, and the Monument to the People's Heroes. Mao's mausoleum was added in 1977. The message was continuity with imperial grandeur and a break with imperial ownership: the same axis, opened to the masses, framed by the institutions of the party-state.
A stage built to display popular legitimacy, however, is also the obvious place to challenge it, and Chinese protesters worked that out immediately.
The place where China argues with itself
In May 1919 students gathered there to denounce the Versailles decision handing German concessions in Shandong to Japan, launching the May Fourth Movement that shaped a generation of Chinese intellectuals, including the founders of the Communist Party. In April 1976, mourners laid wreaths for the recently dead Zhou Enlai in what became a mass rebuke of the Gang of Four, and were cleared by force.
And in the spring of 1989, students occupied the square for seven weeks, joined by workers and Beijing residents, demanding an end to corruption and a freer political system, with a foam and plaster Goddess of Democracy raised facing Mao's portrait. Martial law was declared on May 20. On the night of June 3 and into June 4, the army moved in from the west with armor and live fire. The killing was heaviest on the approach avenues rather than in the square itself, and the death toll has never been credibly established; estimates run from several hundred into the thousands. The following morning an unidentified man stopped a column of tanks on Chang'an Avenue, and the photograph went around the world.
The most guarded emptiness in the world
In China, 1989 is not commemorated, taught, or searchable. The date is scrubbed from the internet, the anniversary brings extra security, and each year a fresh crop of numeric code words gets banned as citizens invent new ways to refer to it. The square is open to visitors under heavy surveillance, and it remains the backdrop for military parades marking the anniversaries of the republic.
That is the paradox the space now carries. A plaza built to show that the people had come into possession of the political center is the one piece of ground in China where the people are most carefully kept from assembling on their own initiative.