squaring off with history

Tiananmen Square.

The words are freighted with Chinese history.  For westerners, it is where students, favoring the heady dream of political freedom, were crushed in 1989.  For the Chinese Communists, it is a constant reminder that all governments fall.

And it was a perfect spot to orient tourists to the political center of China and the physical and psychological center of China’s capital city.  This was the square that Mao built.

After the Communist victory in 1949, Mao Zedong needed a symbol for his “heaven on earth.”  Tiananmen was his choice.

His original dream was to build the world’s largest square.  But he settled for second. He then sprinkled the perimeter of the square with the party’s major government buildings.

Including, the Great Hall of the People, where the Congress meets every five years to ratify the party’s choice for president.

And the National Museum of China, housing many of China’s treasures.

In the center, like a lonely groom on a wedding cake, Mao erected the Monument to the People's Heroes to commemorate China’s revolutionary struggle that culminated in the Communist victory.  Including the war against the the Japanese.  All honored with calligraphy in Mao’s hand: “Eternal glory to the people's heroes!”

Many of those struggles.were acted out in the square. The May Fourth uprising in 1919 that led to the eventual victory of the Chinese Communist Party.  The declaration of the Communist victory in 1949.  Protests following the mysterious death of Zhou Enlai in 1976.  And, of course, the Cultural Revolution -- the revolutionary lashing out of the Red Guard at the growing bourgeoisie.

Ironically, one of the men humiliated during the Cultural Revolution was Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, who brought market reforms to China in the 1970s, and launched China on its path to becoming the second largest economy in the world.

In the heady days of 1989 when communism was collapsing in the Soviet Union and its captive nations, Chinese reformers began criticizing corruption amongst the Chinese ruling class -- believing that economic freedom would lead to political freedom, as it had in Chile.

They were wrong.  Deng Xiaoping, like the fearful emperors before him, turned on the reformers, called out the army, and crushed the protesters in Tiananmen Square.  And inadvertently created an icon of the bravery of freedom for the rest of the world.

The communist leadership knew that governments fall when protests spread from Tiananmen Square.  Our guide warned us that our conversations in the square would be monitored by the police and undercover agents.  The leadership still lives in fear.

Mao has left a mixed legacy.  His portrait is ubiquitous.  On buildings.  In some homes.  On the currency.

But he is little more than a hollow icon for the party to trot out now and then in their quest for legitimacy.  Mao’s mausoleum in the square is an apt symbol.  Heroic.  Cold.  And dead.

What is not dead is the party’s attempt to control the flow of political information to its citizens -- including these giant LED screens in the square.

George Orwell would have immediately grasped their purpose.



With the mood set, let’s start our tour through this odd mixture of socialism, capitalism, and political suppression.