Space, State, and Crowds: Urban Squares on Beijing’s Central Axis in the 1910s

Abstract

This paper focuses on urban squares on Beijing’s central axis in the 1910s, when the city, as the capital, was under the rule of the Beiyang government. The paper first analyses how the government transformed these physical urban spaces, and subsequently endowed them with new social meanings. It then explores the dual political position of these urban squares as sites of both state representation and protest movements, and analyzes the contest between spatial regularization by the state and the mass fight for living space. Two types of crowds, the political crowd and the politicized crowd, are examined. As an arena of conflict, Beijing’s central axis represented the process of nation-state building and incomplete urban modernity. Through study of the relationship between the Chinese state and crowds, and their spatial praxes enacted in urban squares, this paper suggests an alternative perspective on crowd theory.