Chapter I – Tiananmen and the Spatial Politics of China’s Party-State
Its geometry is surgical: a rectangle too vast for conversation, too open for comfort. The scale is not human but imperial, resurrected in socialist costume. Yet this theatre was not always so. The site once belonged to a different order—a civic parade ground in the Ming and Qing dynasties, tethered to the Forbidden City. There, ritual and imperial authority played out in seasonal festivals and bureaucratic ceremonies. After 1949, however, the Communist Party inherited this sacred axis and repurposed it. What once symbolised dynastic continuity became a tableau of proletarian glory. Temples gave way to auditoriums. Drums of war turned into speakers of propaganda.
But the square never truly belonged to the people.
Its architectural grammar reveals the truth it tries to conceal. The square itself stretches over 440,000 square metres—vast enough to swallow thought. The central axis, inherited from imperial planning, extends in an almost cosmic line, calibrated not for urban life but for processions, for inspections, for sovereignty in motion.
At its heart stands the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a monolith of marble and granite over 37 metres tall. To the west rises the Great Hall of the People, with its endless forest of columns—each over 25 metres high—dwarfing the human figure, demanding reverence through proportion alone. The symmetry is punishing. The void is absolute.
Even the naming is an instrument of illusion. The “Great Hall of the People” is not a place one may casually enter. It is shielded by guards, barricades, and protocol. The “People’s” square is patrolled by armed police. The “Heroic” monument is fenced and watched. CCTV cameras perch on poles like ravens, scanning for dissent. Every element proclaims inclusion, while architecturally enforcing exclusion.
It is a city of facades—an empire of signs. There is no dialogue in stone, only declaration. Every building speaks in capitals.
In 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, I was sixteen. As a high school student in Beijing’s Dongcheng District, I was selected to participate in the National Day parade. Or rather, we were not part of the parade that marched past Tiananmen to be inspected by the leaders—we were the backdrop. Each of us received a set of fordable plastic colour swatches. We were human pixels.
All summer, we rehearsed. Not the kind of rehearsal that cultivates passion or pride, but a mechanical, sleep-depriving, monotonous drill. Each session began before dawn and ended after sunrise. On the first of October, we were summoned at four in the morning. The square, grand and glowing, was already filled with tens of thousands of people. We stood shoulder to shoulder, aligned in perfect horizontal and vertical grids. When the screen lit up, we flipped red, yellow, or green in synchrony. The leader spoke, the crowd applauded, and that was it.
I didn’t feel the square belonged to me. I was not celebrating the nation—I was swallowed by it. Dominated by the stage. Rendered insignificant by the scale.
Even in its most “public” moments—mass parades, National Day rallies, or school trips like mine—it served to reinforce a single truth: the state was eternal, and the individual was a pixel in its mural. The uniformity of space mirrored the uniformity of ideology. There were no corners, no shelters, no subversions—only surveillance made spatial.
No matter how diligently the Chinese government tries to erase the past, as the saying goes, paper cannot wrap fire. I first learned about the summer of 1989 during my university years. It was not a glorious page in China’s history.
For the first time in its modern history, Tiananmen became something else: a site of disorder, hope, grief, resistance. Students camped where parades once marched. Loudspeakers no longer broadcast commands, but demands. Hunger strikes replaced slogans. A papier-mâché Goddess of Democracy stood facing Mao—not in reverence, but in rebuttal.
In retrospect, what was wrong with the students’ demands? They only wished for a nation a little more democratic, a little more free—a modest dream of a gentler future.
But what came after the students was not dialogue, but tanks - glitch in the choreography has to be purged.
What followed was not just a massacre, but a spatial reset. Blood washed the stone clean. Bodies were removed. The square returned to silence, more haunted than before. Cameras multiplied. Monuments hardened.
And yet, for those who remember, Tiananmen will never be just a square again. It is a palimpsest. A wound hidden in plain sight. A monument not to permanence, but to what slipped through it.