Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (review)

Tiananmen, the gate of heavenly peace, is featured on the official emblem of the People's Republic of China; from its balcony Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the new state in 1949. His portrait hanging there was defaced by activists forty years later, but still stared down the student-built Goddess of Democracy. To the north are the palaces of the Forbidden City; to the south is Tiananmen Square, the vast granite-paved heart of Beijing and its principal site of pomp and protest. Mao is entombed on its southern end, flanked by the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Chinese History, with the navel-like Monument to the People's Heroes directly in-between. Art historian Wu Hung grew up in Beijing and experienced Tiananmen Square from numerous emotional vantage points: as a young child marching in National Day parades, living in the Forbidden City as an employee of the Palace Museum, and slipping out through the gate to join the mourners for Zhou Enlai in 1976. Now on the faculty at the University of Chicago, the author offers us this multilayered work, at once a history of the square's construction and political importance, a reflection of the square's "centrality" to contemporary Chinese art, and a memoir of his own experiences growing up in Beijing, being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and beginning his academic career on the square's fringes.

The square and the mammoth state buildings that surround it testify to the value placed on enormous, rectilinear spaces by the PRC's leadership. They like grandeur and impersonality-save for Mao's enormous alter-egos, his portrait over Tiananmen gate, and, later, his entombed body on the square's southern edge. A series of stamps issued in 1949 displayed Mao's head and torso looming above Tiananmen, so closely were the two monuments paired from the beginning of the regime. In fact, the historical city already featured a walled-in square in front of Tiananmen, but after 1949 it was deemed inadequate. So immediately after the founding of the Republic, the square and adjacent Chang'an Avenue were enlarged, the latter from fifteen meters wide in 1949 to eighty meters ten years later. The square, meanwhile, was eventually increased to some fifty acres, a space that can hold over half a million people. Construction required the demolition of numerous old roads, buildings, and monuments. The square's location just south of the Imperial Palace centered the space appropriately-the empty expanse became a political "zero point" from which the rest of the city radiated. Around and within this space a number of structures were added, beginning with the Monument to the People's Heroes, completed in 1958. The monument, covered with a series of bas-relief panels that depict famous uprisings and movements in the revolution, shows not a single recognizable historical figure; instead, all the heroes, male and female, share the same smooth, determined, impersonal mask. On the monument is inscribed, in Mao's calligraphy, a series of epigraphs praising the martyrs to China's long revolution.

Above Tiananmen Gate itself, meanwhile, Mao's portrait was hoisted (replacing earlier images of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek). At least five different images have been used over the decades, some showing the leader gazing far above the crowd, some smiling, some emotionless. The most long-lasting images show the leader facing the square directly; "Mao's gaze acknowledges a 'revolutionary people' before him, even when he faces only an empty Tiananmen Square" (p. 78). With Mao's portrait opposite his own calligraphy on the monument to the south, the space is bounded north and south by his political will: "When he stood above Tiananmen he faced his own words in his own calligraphy, and when he was not there his...