SZE TSUNG LEONG
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
TO FOREIGNERS, TIANANMEN SQUARE HAS ONE MEANING. TO THE people of Beijing, it has many: the fall of an empire, the rise of a revolution, the pride of a country, and the event so painful that they still speak of it only in whispers. It was the latter that drew me to China.
In 1994 I was a freshman at Harvard, studying contemporary Chinese politics. I gravitated to the newest chapter: the democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square five years earlier. The movement had begun on April 15, 1989, when Chinese newscasters reported the death of Hu Yaobang, a popular, open-minded former Communist Party leader who had been driven from power by hardliners. The news of his death inspired fond memorials among students and liberal intellectuals. After four days, students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, China’s top art school, brought a portrait of Hu to Tiananmen Square. The mourners delivered impassioned speeches, and around six P.M., one of them climbed a plinth in the center of the square and declared that on this day they must do more than commemorate the dead; this, he said, was an occasion to consider China’s future.
It was a fitting location for the sentiment; Tiananmen Square had been conceived as the grand symbol of all that China aspired to become—and as a rebuke to the ancient civilization that had come before. For thousands of years, the city of Beijing had venerated the past; it was, in effect, a monument to tradition arrayed across twenty-four square miles. In the fifteenth century, the emperor Yongle had ordered his city planners to design a northern capital for his kingdom. They borrowed the shape of the god Nezha, who was understood to have defeated the Dragon King who lorded over China’s northern plains. Where Nezha’s heart would have been, the city planners placed the emperor’s most sacred dominion, the Forbidden City, protected and encircled by walls that were fifty feet thick. To the east and west, at the tips of Nezha’s outstretched arms, they built enormous stone gates. And to symbolize his brain, they called for a glorious passageway, topped with a pavilion, to separate the outer world from the inner sanctum. They called it “the gate of heavenly peace”—Tiananmen.
But by the mid-nineteenth century, many of China’s progressive thinkers had concluded that the devotion to tradition was a weakness. China had lost its lead in science and commerce and failed to keep pace with the West and Japan. China was invaded—“cut up like a melon,” as the local phrase put it—and though a generation of reformers tried to combine the best from abroad with the best of China’s traditions, they failed. Their failure cleared the way for the most radical reformers, the Communists, who called for ridding China of its past as embedded in philosophy, religion, dress, art, and architecture. When Chairman Mao took power in 1949, he climbed to the top of the Tiananmen gate, on the square’s northern border, and announced the founding of the Communist state. In his high voice, with the heavy accent of his native Hunan, he declared, “The Chinese people have stood up!”
Tiananmen Square became a symbol of unique political potency, and the students who flooded it on that spring day in 1989 felt an electrifying sense of potential. Another student climbed the plinth and, in his speech, compared the Chinese population to a stone monument that had stood “silently under wind and rain.” He called on the people to rise up: “You, my countrymen, have only been taught to submit meekly to oppression.”
In the days that followed, the commemorations became protests, and on April 22, the government declared its intention to clear the square. But people responded by turning up in even larger numbers. They erected a tent city, and city residents offered food and water and support. On May 20, the government declared martial law, but the protests grew. At its peak, more than a million people were in and around the square. They carried placards with sentiments from the world over; they put the words of Patrick Henry beside those of Lu Xun, the great modernist. They danced to the Beatles and sang the old Party hymn, “The Internationale.” Art students, straddling East and West, built a figure of a woman holding a torch with both hands, a cultural mash-up of the Statue of Liberty and Chinese revolutionary realism, and they called it the Goddess of Democracy. The Party, unnerved, reminded the public that the square was “the heart of the People’s Republic and focus of the world’s attention.”
CHARLIE COLE
Tank Man, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, June 5, 1989
The bureaucratic jargon contained an ominous message. On the night of June 3—as loudspeakers blared, “This is not the West; it is China”—soldiers and tanks began a deadly march across the capital, firing at protesters and onlookers. It was never clear how many were killed; in the years afterward, estimates ranged from several hundred to two thousand citywide.
The Party had resolved to end the challenge to its rule, even if it meant deploying its army on its own people. As years passed, the Party never publicly questioned that decision—and it prevented others from doing so as well. The Party expunged the history of the Tiananmen Square movement from the Chinese Internet, and it forbade its teaching in school. To the world, the events of that spring were enshrined in the image of a lone young man in a white shirt, standing motionless before a column of tanks.
IN 1996 I CAME TO BEIJING FOR THE FIRST TIME, TO SPEND HALF A year studying Mandarin. I bought a bike, and at the first chance I had, I rode to Tiananmen. I arrived in time to watch the flag lowered at sunset. It was a weekday in autumn, and the other visitors were mostly Chinese tourists from the countryside. Many had traveled from China’s distant reaches. They were members of the fifty-five minorities often overlooked in the world’s image of China. There was a group of middle-aged Uighur men in small white skullcaps and leather coats, their heads swiveling to take in the sweep of the buildings around them; a gaggle of Hui Muslim women in brilliant headscarves; Tibetan teenagers with cheeks chapped red by the wind off the highlands. The visitors from Beijing were mostly families. I watched a prosperous-looking mother walking gingerly behind a toddler; she was trying to feed him ice cream and he was wandering, peering up at the passersby, his split-back pants gaping in the wind.
For all of the action on the square, the overwhelming impression was of blankness. It was a space so large and austere that nothing short of a vast occupying crowd could make it feel full. It was not a place for rest or reflection: After the crackdown in 1989, the Party had made sure of that. There were no benches or shade trees. In the summer, the high North China sun beat down, and in the winter, the gusts of wind off the Mongolian steppe swept across the tiles, carrying great swirling eddies of sand. The scale made every face a speck except one: the monumental portrait of Chairman Mao affixed to Tiananmen Gate—the Great Helmsman peering over us with a Mona Lisa smile.
For me, the emptiness of the square was jarring. I had devoured so much about the events of 1989—student diaries, Party diktats, eyewitness accounts of the demonstrations and the crackdown—that to me, the history felt near and vivid. Before visiting, I’d imagined that the drama of that spring had been so historic, such a powerful mix of exuberance and hope, militarism and suffering, that at least a trace of its energy would remain. But there was nothing.
I pedaled my bike back to the campus where I lived, in the northwest quarter of the city. My roommate, Xiao Si, had been born and raised in Beijing. He was twelve or thirteen years old in 1989, and after a few weeks, I asked him what he thought of the Tiananmen movement. “I really don’t know much about it,” he said. “And anyway, we shouldn’t talk about that.” I didn’t push; forcing him to discuss a forbidden subject would be selfish and opportunistic. (Foreign students had been advised to tread lightly on “the three T’s”: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen.) I never forgot the paradox that he offered: He didn’t know much, but he knew not to talk about it.
AS A SPACE AND AN IDEA, TIANANMEN SQUARE HAD EXISTED FOR five hundred years. For most of that time, it was a more modest expanse. When Mao peered down from the gate in 1949, he saw a space large enough for just seventy thousand people. But in the People’s Republic that he was creating, the public square, the guangchang, had acquired a sudden new power: Every city and village, regardless of size, needed a public square for the promotion of politics. It served as a stage for celebrations and announcements of the Party’s instructions and, when necessary, the revelation and punishment of the people’s enemies. Tiananmen was to be the grandest of them all. Mao ordered his planners to create a square that would be “big enough to hold an assembly of one billion.”
In a mild taunt to Soviet advisers who had been dispatched from Moscow, the Chinese designers decreed that the new Tiananmen plaza must be even larger and grander than Red Square. As the redevelopment gathered speed, a few brave architects such as Liang Sicheng urged Mao to preserve the ancient city wall and the heart of the old city by erecting a shining new government capital farther west. But Mao rejected that idea; he was a revolutionary, determined to transform Beijing into a secular shrine to Chinese communism. (Liang reacted glumly: “Fifty years from now, someone will regret this.”)
The new square was to be studded and surrounded by monuments, museums, and government offices. They set to work under the slogan “faster, better, cheaper,” with the ambition to build ten “monumental buildings” in time for the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic. They succeeded, after a fashion. To the east of the square, they built a vast complex housing two museums—one for the revolution, the other for ancient history—completed in just ten months. To the west, they erected the Great Hall of the People, 170,000 square meters of stone and concrete. For all of its revolutionary spirit, some traditions could not be ignored: The front entrance of the Great Hall was situated slightly off-center, a nod to a feng shui prohibition against building a door that faces a shrine to the dead. The shrine, in this case, was the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a granite obelisk rising over a hundred feet from the middle of square “like a needle on an enormous sundial,” as Wu Hung, a Beijing-born art critic, put it. Around the base, the Party added white marble reliefs depicting 170 life-size figures: farmers, workers, soldiers, and other revolutionaries. None of them had an identifiable face. Their power, the designers explained, resided in their collective anonymity.
Mao died in 1976, and the square received one more monument—a more literal monument to the dead: Mao’s mausoleum, a colossal tomb where the chairman’s embalmed remains are on view in a crystal sarcophagus. Each morning tourists line up in a long, slender queue to pass in silence beside the coffin. Wu Hung, the art critic, once observed of the square’s eclectic elements, “One rarely finds such a strange assemblage of monuments of contradictory styles in such orderly formation.” Tiananmen was, he said, a “war of monuments.”
WHEN I RETURNED TO BEIJING IN 2005 TO SETTLE DOWN, I ventured back to Tiananmen and found it virtually unchanged from my first visit nearly a decade earlier: more wide-eyed pilgrims from the countryside; another crop of nervous young parents; the same flag-lowering ceremony each evening by soldiers as unflappable as the guards at Buckingham Palace. The only difference was on the horizon, where the smog created by China’s economic spring now cast an ash-colored haze across the rising skyline. The country’s transformation was continuing with ever greater speed. Across the country, China was building more square feet of real estate every two weeks than the entire city of Rome.
Since my first stint in the capital, the national narrative around the Tiananmen crackdown had changed in ways that surprised me. Some, especially those whose family members had been killed, seethed in private; but for most people, it was an abstraction fading into the distance. Many people had effectively adopted the Party’s view that the crackdown was a necessary step to ensure China’s continued rise. This view was especially popular among the rising generation—the linear descendants of the men and women who had been in the square that spring. One afternoon I asked a young entrepreneur named Rao Jin, who had graduated from Tsinghua University with degrees in engineering and physics, what he thought of the Tiananmen protests. “I was too young to participate in June fourth,” he said, using the Chinese shorthand for the movement and the crackdown. “But from what I have heard, many Chinese people at that time joined the demonstrations simply because they felt lost. The economy was in trouble, there were divisions in society, and people at the time would even ask foreign tourists: ‘What direction should China take?’” Rao laughed at the image of it. He had come of age in an ascendant China, increasingly sure of itself. Like others his age, Rao had a bumptious sense of national pride. He said, “After all of these years of development, we realize the Western road may not fit China. The efforts of the government and the people in building the economy, improving the standard of living—that is the best way to improve human rights. History has made us more mature.”
Year by year, Tiananmen was becoming, once again, a symbol of the Party. In the fall of 2009, I watched as Tiananmen became the stage for China’s latest depiction of the future. Every ten years, on October 1—the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic—the Party held a National Day parade along the northern edge of the square. Under Mao, the parades had celebrated industrial and political might, with great tides of workers and soldiers and students carrying banners with messages like “Down with American Imperialists and Their Running Dogs.” But now, on the sixtieth anniversary, it had a subtler message to project: an image of China as a place of order, perfection, and cohesion.
In preparation, the Party had taken no chances. The Beijing Weather Modification Office had launched what it described as the nation’s largest campaign to ensure perfect skies: It had fired silver iodide and dry ice into the skies the night before to induce a light rain that cleansed the city overnight, and by dawn, the skies were crystalline blue. Morning light shone on the Fragrant Hills, which were usually bathed in haze. It was a fine day for a parade. The local papers reported that, in addition to deploying ten thousand police officers and security guards, the government had taken measures to prevent terrorism and violent crime: It ordered stores to stop selling kitchen knives as well as model airplanes (in case someone tried to launch an airborne explosive). The ceremony began at ten A.M. President Hu Jintao stood in the sunroof of a Chinese-made Red Flag limousine as it whizzed along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. He passed tens of thousands of troops standing at attention. The papers said they had been arranged by height, with no more than three inches of variation between them. They had trained for months, by putting needles in their shirt collars, to ensure the perfect posture. To guarantee a flawless television tracking shot, they had learned not to blink for forty seconds at a time. As he passed in his limousine, Hu declared into a bank of microphones: “Greetings, comrades!” The soldiers called back: “Serve the people!”
On came the parade, soldiers and sailors and airmen in full dress, eight thousand in all, as well as a militia formed specially for the parade, composed of young women carrying submachine guns and wearing pink minidresses and white go-go boots. There were massive floats depicting not only the old Mao-era sheaves of wheat and the hammer and sickle but also symbols of the future: wind turbines, bullet trains, nuclear power plants, and a space capsule to signify China’s intention to put a man on the moon. When Hu finally climbed atop Tiananmen Gate, he said that for China, the future held “infinitely bright prospects.”
Tiananmen was supposed to be the stage where China presented itself to the world, but the longer I lived in China, the less it felt like a part of the nation I knew. The crackdown at Tiananmen was an unhealed wound on the public consciousness. It was impossible to talk about political history without reference to it, but in a café, liberal Chinese friends would reflexively drop their voices to a whisper if they wanted to say anything critical. As a physical space, the right angles and formality and emptiness felt at odds with the throbbing, slightly off-kilter country around it. Often, after a visit to Tiananmen, I walked home by avoiding the city’s vast arteries and heading through the few remaining capillaries, the old alleys (the hutong) that lay like a fossilized skeleton of Nezha’s form. In the alleys, the buildings were still made of old materials—brick and timber and straw insulation. There were few right angles and there was no open space. Just dense, off-kilter reality.
Away from Tiananmen, off the stage and removed from the officialdom it represented, the Chinese people were negotiating their own encounters with the outside world, on their own terms. I lived in a one-story brick house, and I came to know a local muckety-muck named Liu Yuanchuan, who lived on the next alley north. In his late fifties, he was tall and handsome, with hooded eyes and a Long Feng cigarette drooping from his lip. He owned several small houses and ran the businessmen’s association for several blocks around. Though Liu had been born and raised in Beijing, his world consisted of a narrow patch of the capital, and his bearing reminded me of a village mayor’s. He had never been abroad, and for him, the outside world carried an abstract mystique. When I arrived, his alley—Wudaoying Hutong—was a slender dirt path lined with old gray-brick homes.
In the years that followed, I watched Liu make jarring changes to his street. He got it paved, and then he installed rows of upward-facing lights that made the alley look like a boardwalk. He invited in restaurateurs with the kind of international cuisine he wanted to promote—first a Spanish restaurant and then a Greek place. Elderly locals rented their front rooms to shops selling vintage clothing, ironic T-shirts, and stylish fixed-gear bicycles. The hutong even welcomed the first tanning salon I’d seen in China, a country where most people avoid appearing as if they work outside. When I had arrived in the neighborhood, Liu’s alley contained only one business, a café. Two years later, it had seventy-eight businesses, according to the local paper, which had sent a reporter to assess what it called “the city’s newest trendy hangout.” Liu was the unlikely kingpin presiding over Beijing’s newest trendy hangout. “I don’t understand what they sell,” he told me. “But it sells.”
In Liu’s world, as in so much of China in the throes of a furious sprint toward the future, nothing stayed the same for long. There was no plan, no official blessing, no decree—just a vast, unpredictable energy. Between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the United States used in all of the twentieth century. And yet Tiananmen Square, like the Party that designed it, remained timeless and unchanged. The apparatchiks had decreed that, after the construction of Mao’s mausoleum in 1977, nothing more could be built on the square, and so it remained, as frozen as the chairman’s body on view in his tomb. At the dawn of the People’s Republic, the square had been a portrait of the future, but year by year, it was becoming a monument to the past.
J. B. RUSSELL