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‘Party Space’ and the Architecture of Obedience: 
Landscapes under Sovereign Will and the Voices that Return
 
George  J. Ge
Jun 2025





Introduction -  What is a Party-Space?

It was a summer morning in Beijing. I was six. My father held my hand as we stepped onto the vast, tiled expanse of Tiananmen Square for the national flag-raising ceremony. The sky was pale blue, sunless—flat like a theatre backdrop. The People’s Liberation Army marched toward the centre of the square, mighty and overwhelming. I remember the smell of concrete baking in the heat, the solemn air around the flagpole, and the giant portrait of Mao watching us like a relic cast in permanence. The national anthem began. People took photographs. Soldiers stood motionless. Pigeons flew in tight ellipses.

I was told this place was the “heart of the people.”

Back then, I believed. But gradually, I began to wonder: whose heart beats in unison with state drums?

To stand in a “party-space” is to enter a script already written. The ground beneath your feet is not neutral—it is charged, designed to choreograph feeling, compliance, reverence. You feel insignificant, small, and watched over. A party-space is not simply a square, an avenue, or a palace. It is a theatre built for ideology, scaled for intimidation, and staged for the myth of permanence. It is where architecture and nationhood collapse into spectacle.

Across time and geography, authoritarian regimes have mastered this spatial grammar. From the imperial axis of Speer’s Berlin to the haunting grid of Pyongyang, from Mussolini’s EUR to the spectral symmetry of Xiong’an—these are spaces that do not grow; they are imposed. They do not evolve; they declare. They are not homes for people, but monuments to power.

This essay is an atlas of such geographies—an attempt to map, critique, and deconstruct the architecture of political myth. We begin in Tiananmen, the archetype of Chinese party-space, where a socialist utopia was once paved over imperial form, only to witness its own rupture in the fires of 1989. We move to Xiong’an, a more recent city born not from urban life but from bureaucratic imagination—where the emperor has not died, yet the mausoleum is already under construction.

Then, we look outward: to Bucharest’s People’s Palace, Washington’s Capitol Hill, Paris’s Champs-Élysées, and the symbolic violence embedded in all these orchestrated forms. Spaces where power performs—and sometimes fails. Spaces that seem immovable, yet are always on the brink of being rewritten—not by architects, but by bodies, by memory, by revolt.

What, then, is the afterlife of a party-space? When the theatre crumbles, can the plaza return to the people?