The Making of Tiananmen Square as a Realm of Contested Memories

Abstract

This chapter explores how Tiananmen Square has been constructed as a realm of contested memories in China’s evolving political modernity from the interdisciplinary perspectives of memory studies and urban planning. It demonstrates that a study of Tiananmen Square as a material-temporal container to render the Chinese cultural memory of national salvation and revolutionary tradition in the present can explain how that space constituted the symbolic centre of defining moments in the history of twentieth-century China. In this analysis, it begins with an overview of the genesis of the national salvation discourse following the Opium War in 1840 and its crystallisation in Mao Zedong’s canonised discourse on the Chinese revolution. It then examines how the cultural memory of national salvation and revolutionary tradition was written into Tiananmen Square by the state power of People’s Republic of China through materialising Mao’s revolutionary discourse in the monumental architecture installed at the space. As a consequence, Tiananmen Square was constituted as a state-sponsored space in which that cultural memory was appropriated by grassroots activists during the April Fifth Movement in 1976 and the June Fourth Movement in 1989 to create contested memories in and about the very the same place.