BEIJING – The first two police checkpoints are behind me, the last one is ahead. Tiananmen Square is not a tourist-friendly place. Waist-high barriers surround it on all sides, guarded by hordes of uniformed officers. Anyone who wants to enter has to register in advance, stand in line, walk through fenced-off corridors, show their ID three times, and have their luggage scanned. And now, it’s my turn.
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On Oct. 1, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 75th birthday. I want to go to Tiananmen Square because it’s the place that witnessed all the key moments in recent Chinese history. In 1949, the People’s Republic was proclaimed here by Mao Zedong, whose embalmed body lies in the mausoleum on the square. In 1966, the cultural revolution began here. And in 1989, hope for China’s democratization died here. To this day, Communist Party leadership receives its state guests and celebrates its anniversaries here. If the Middle Kingdom has a center, this is it.
The third guard, a policeman, takes my passport, scans it and pauses. “Journalist?”
I nod.
“What is your purpose here?”
A communist record
“I want to visit the place.”
My passport is examined by a second and a third policeman. “Welcome to Tiananmen Square,” says a fourth, higher-ranking officer. “As a journalist, you will need permission from the relevant district committee.”
It’s not my first time here, even though the last time was several years ago. And I remember I did not need a permit back then.
“I assume you’re here as a tourist,” says the uniformed officer. “But we as police officers can’t really judge that. Everyone has a phone these days. We don’t know whether you are planning to record or film interviews.”
“Would I need permission for that?”
“Yes, a work permit. But I don’t know if you will be allowed one. Contact the district committee.”
While we are talking, tourists are passing through the checkpoint without any problem, including visitors from abroad.
I, on the other hand, have to leave the police station in the opposite direction. In the distance, at the northern end of the square, I see China’s national flag flying high — a big gold star on a red background, flanked by four small ones. The small ones represent China’s four classes: peasants, workers, small bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The Communist Party is the great guiding star.
A communist record: the PRC made it to 75 years.
The other great one-party regime in history lasted for 74 years, from 1917 to 1991. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. When China celebrates its birthday next week in Tiananmen Square, with the sound of boots tapping and the singing of doves, it will also be celebrating a communist record: They have made it to 75 years.
When the red flag was raised for the first time on Oct. 1, 1949, the man who made it China’s new national symbol was standing at the balustrade of a historic building. Mao proclaimed the new state from Tiananmen Square, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Shortly before that, the Communists had won the Chinese Civil War under his leadership. Their opponents, the Nationalists, had just retreated to the island of Taiwan.
Hundreds of thousands had gathered there. “The people of the country are liberated,” Mao announces. “Long live the people!” Then, the military marches in and the new national anthem is played: “Stand up, all of you who no longer want to be slaves.”
The square’s symbolism
It is no coincidence that, of all places, Mao gave his founding speech here. The Gate of Heavenly Peace is the entrance to the Forbidden City. Anyone who passes through it enters the Imperial Palace, behind whose walls China’s emperors ruled for centuries, without ever being seen by commoners.
The square in front of the gate was just a profane forecourt of the sacred. Mao reverses this old axis of power with his speech. The Forbidden City is now behind him, his gaze is directed at the people in the square. Symbolically, he is transferring power to the 550 million citizens of the new People’s Republic.
There isn’t much to see: no restaurants, no fountains or playgrounds, no benches
Modernity is the age of the masses. And large urban squares are their stages. Popular anger and grief, national pride and patriotic rejoicing can be staged here. In Paris, during the French Revolution, people flocked to Place de la Concorde to watch the king go to the guillotine. In Moscow, the Soviet Union celebrated its victory parades on the Red Square, and in Kyiv, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) became a symbol.
Tiananmen Square experienced its first mass moment in May 1919, when thousands gathered to protest against the influence of a foreign colonial power, the Japanese. Thirty years later, Mao made the square a symbol of national independence.
After my first attempt to visit failed, I was walking up and down the barriers, so that I could at least see the square from the outside. To be honest, there isn’t much to be seen: no restaurants, no fountains or playgrounds, no benches, nothing that would make the square a place where one would want to hang out. A hole in the middle of China. I wonder what it is exactly that a journalist is not supposed to see.
A chance encounter
We call the district committee. A certain Mr. Li answers. He listens patiently to what the police have told me. “We can’t help you with that,” he says. “You may visit the place, but we don’t issue permits for that. I don’t know why the police referred you to us.”
He gives my Chinese colleague and me the telephone number of the police station responsible for the square. My colleague calls and is subsequently put through to a certain Commissioner Yin, who is responsible for “foreign affairs”. He seems dismissive, but says that I might be able to visit the square next week — under police supervision.
In the meantime, I explore the area around the square. The large-scale urban redevelopment of the past decades has turned it upside down. Monumental buildings and wide main roads dominate the picture, the traditional dense Beijing residential quarters have largely disappeared.
Only in the south are there a few older streets left. I see low courtyard houses with grey shingles, old men in undershirts crouching in front of pigeon coops, animal innards simmering in the kettles of the food stalls.
An old woman suddenly appears in front of me, tiny and white-haired. She asks if I’m thirsty; it’s a hot late summer day. I follow her into a narrow alley. Behind a wooden door is a small courtyard, at the other end a rickety little house.
Distant memories
Mrs. Yao pours me some water. She has lived here — 200 meters away from the current edge of Tiananmen Square — since she was born 91 years ago. Her husband died a long time ago, and she has been alone ever since. An ornamental fish swims lonely circles in her living room. A family photo hangs above the aquarium, showing Yao surrounded by children and grandchildren, with a great-grandchild sitting on her lap.
Yao has distant childhood memories of the time before the founding of the Republic, when Beijing was occupied by Japanese troops. In the 1930s, her father worked as a porter, carrying travelers’ suitcases to the train station. Japanese soldiers killed him when Yao was still a child. She and her mother, she says, almost died during the occupation: the rationed flour was contaminated with rat droppings.
A chance encounter took me deep into the past. I listen in amazement to what Ms Yao says about Tiananmen Square: back then, the square was an unused wasteland. The imperial palace behind the Gate of Heavenly Peace was empty, the Chinese government had fled from Beijing, and the Japanese were not interested in the square. It was not even paved.
In the early 1950s, Yao was asked to map the area around Tiananmen Square.
When she was eight or nine, in the early 1940s, a cousin took her to the square. He had an old, rickety bike, which Yao learned to ride. “Back then, many children from the neighborhood would gather there to play,” she says.
Later, after the war, when the Japanese had withdrawn and China’s nationalists had been expelled, when the people were liberated and their republic was only a few years old, Yao worked around the square as a surveyor.
In the early 1950s she was asked to map the area around Tiananmen Square, above and below ground, Yao crawled through the sewers under the square with her tape measures and bamboo folding sticks. No one told her what the measurements were for.
A great leap
Only later did she see how construction workers arrived and demolished entire residential areas. How the square was expanded, almost reaching her own street. How it was paved, with huge excavations that were dug along its edges. Only then, says Ms Yao, did she realize what her measurements were for.
Mao wanted to catapult his new republic into the future. The “Great Leap Forward” began: a country of small farmers was to become an industrial nation as quickly as possible. Agriculture was collectivized, many farmers had to leave their fields to make steel and build dams.
In the capital, the reconstruction of Tiananmen began with the aim of making it the largest fortified square in the world. They wanted it to be 750 meters long and almost 300 meters wide, so that it could host a million people — and it had to be surrounded by the most impressive buildings. Everything was to be finished by the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic in October 1959.
And everything was, indeed, finished on time. On the west side of the square: the Great Hall of the People, meeting place of the party and the National People’s Congress. On the east side: the colossal National Museum. In the center: the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a 38-metre-high obelisk dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution. And in the south, after Mao’s death, the mausoleum.
I ask old Mrs. Yao if she has ever been to the Great Hall of the People.
“No.”
In the National Museum?
“Never.”
At Mao’s coffin in the mausoleum?
“I have never been to any of these buildings.”
And on the redesigned square?
After she retired, she says, she sometimes took her grandchildren for walks there on summer evenings. But later the barriers appeared. And the police posts. One day, Ms. Yao was asked to show her ID when she wanted to enter the square. She didn’t have her papers with her. “After that, I never went there again.”
“Great disorder under heaven”
Some 10,000 kilometers from Beijing, in Chicago, I reach out to Wang Youqin — another woman who has been familiar with Tiananmen Square since her childhood. In the 1960s, Wang’s school bus drove along Changan Street every morning, the road that crosses the square on the north side. Her school was just a few stops away. The year was 1966 and Wang was 13 when she witnessed an act of brutality take place in the square, something she would never forget.
As a historian in the United States, Wang has spent most of her life documenting the traumatic experiences of that time. “I was too young to understand what I saw,” she says. “But I knew it couldn’t be right.”
In the summer of 1966, Mao, ruler of almost 750 million Chinese, is no longer unchallenged as the head of state and party. His “Great Leap Forward” has caused catastrophic crop failures, and at least 30 million people have fallen victim to famine. The party is seething, and many hope to replace the aging head of the state with someone else.
But Mao, 72 years old at the time, has no intention of giving up power.
But Mao, 72 years old at the time, has no intention of giving up power. He will unleash “great disorder under heaven” in order to achieve “great order under heaven,” as he writes in a letter to his wife.
And that’s why Mao begins to foment the country’s youth. He deliberately triggers a generation that has never experienced any other form of government than the People’s Republic and no other head of state than himself. China’s youth, he states, should rebel against “the old evils”, against alleged reactionaries among the elite who are sabotaging the people.
The completed first revolution, the reversal of material conditions, should now be followed by a second: a revolution of thought and consciousness. The Cultural Revolution.
Red Guards begin forming in schools and universities — fanatical Mao followers, many of them still in their teens. Old books and musical instruments, chess boards and stamp albums, historical paintings and Buddha temples: whatever Mao and his guards consider a relic of the old world has to be destroyed.
The spiral of violence
Youqin, then 13, witnesses how the Cultural Revolution escalates at her girls’ high school. The school is still one of the most exclusive in the People’s Republic, and many party bigwigs send their daughters there. Wang herself has no prominent parents; she was accepted the previous year as a gifted student after skipping three grades in elementary school.
A classmate, five years older than Wang and the daughter of an influential general, leads the school’s Red Guards. One day, she puts up a poster. The hand-painted characters proclaim: we will “defend Chairman Mao to death.” There are also accusations against the vice-principal, a woman named Bian Zhongyun.
Her alleged main offense: she had just taught one of her classes how to behave in the event of an earthquake. Get to safety, she said, drop everything. A student asked whether they should take the Mao portrait with them, the one that hangs on the wall in every classroom. The vice-principal did not answer the question. Get to safety, she just repeated. For the fanatical Red Guards in the school, it sounded like a message: I don’t care about Mao.
There was a hospital right across the street, but no one dared to take her there.
Red Guards insult her, humiliate her and beat her. Schoolgirls stuff rubbish into her mouth, pour boiling water on her, and make her chant self-accusations: “I am a demon! I deserve to die!” Desperate, the mother of four children writes to the party leadership. No answer. And it’s just the beginning.
On Aug. 5, 1966, Youqin was there when several of her classmates beat the vice-principal with nail-studded chair legs. She witnessed as they went on for four hours, even after the victim had stopped moving. At the end, they hoisted the limp body onto a garbage cart and left it at the school gate.
“There was a hospital right across the street,” Wang remembers. “But no one dared to take her there.” Not even Wang herself. It was not until the evening that the woman was noticed by a doctor, who confirmed her death.
An iconic image
On Aug. 18, less than two weeks after the murder, nearly 1 million young Red Guards, sent from across the country to Beijing with free tickets, gathered on Tiananmen Square. Mao again stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace and watched as his disciples ecstatically waved the “Little Red Book,” Mao’s bible with his most important sayings. “Long live Mao!” they shouted. “The East is red!”
The 18-year-old general’s daughter, the head of the girls’ school’s guards, is allowed to climb up to Mao. He ceremoniously lets her put the Red Guard movement’s armband around his arm — the photo of this scene is one of the iconic images of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao asks her what her name is. “Song Binbin,” answers the young woman who incited her classmates against the vice-principal. Mao asks whether her first name, Binbin, means “cultured and polite.” When Song nods, Mao replies: “Yaowu would be better,” meaning militant and violent.
From that moment on, Song Binbin calls herself Song Yaowu – as the violence that Mao was talking about in Tiananmen Square spreads across the entire country.
Telling victims’ stories
The number of people who fell victim to the Cultural Revolution is disputed. Some say hundreds of thousands of deaths, others say millions. Many victims took their own lives because they could not bear the humiliation. Many perpetrators later became victims themselves, as the Red Guards split into ever new, mutually feuding sub-factions. When Mao had consolidated his power, he banished millions of Red Guards from the cities to the far reaches of the country.
There they were to “learn from the people”: while classes were suspended at the country’s universities, China’s young educated class shoveled manure and tended pigs. Among them was today’s head of state, Xi Jinping.
Youqin was not a Red Guard, and she did not experience the mass riots on Tiananmen Square. After witnessing the brutal murder of her vice-principal, she hid in her books. Ten years later, in 1976, Mao died. The Cultural Revolution ended, universities reopened, and Wang, now a young woman, achieved the best results in all of China in the nationwide university entrance exam.
A decade later, she emigrated to the United States and began to document the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of the victims. She collected the life stories of those murdered and interviewed more than a thousand eyewitnesses during visits to China. Wang has already published a volume of victims’ biographies in the United States, and another is in the works.
Wang’s books have never been published in China, though. There is no formal law prohibiting research into the Cultural Revolution, but the chaos and violence it brought to the country have never been properly addressed. Such attempts have been increasingly suppressed in recent years. Wang often hears from academic friends in China that they cannot write anything about the Cultural Revolution without jeopardizing their careers.
Wang says she has been attacked for her research all her life. Not only by guilty accomplices of the Red Guards in China, but also by left-wing academics in the West, stubborn Maoists who never had to live under Mao and did not want their romanticized image of the Cultural Revolution to be disparaged.
Wang has been retired for a year, but the horror does not let her rest. “If I don’t tell these stories” she says, “nobody will.”
Her last visit to Beijing was five years ago. She visited Tiananmen Square then. But Wang says she has never set foot in Mao’s mausoleum. “Dead or alive, I don’t want to see him.”
This used to be joyous
While I wait for my police-escorted tour, I search through my personal memories of Tiananmen Square. I visited it for the first time in 2005, on a backpacking trip through China. Three years later, I returned as a journalist, in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. I remember the huge digital clock at the edge of the square, counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the start of the games. The whole of China was in a state of joyful excitement. The People’s Republic presented itself as open as never before, and Tiananmen Square was freely accessible.
I remember the mausoleum. Mao’s waxen corpse, his glass coffin, the piles of carnations that visitors laid at his feet. The carnations looked artificial, and I wondered if they went back to the vending stalls at the entrance to the mausoleum in the evening, part of a capitalist cycle at the center of which rested the father of Chinese communism.
The China I got to know in 2008 did not seem to have much in common with the communist era.
It had been three decades since Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping had ended China’s international isolation and geared the country towards economic growth. The results were visible everywhere: Beijing was booming, the city’s elite wore Western luxury brands, and young people were partying in newly opened clubs.
The China I got to know in 2008 did not seem to have much in common with the communist era. I perceived the marble pomp and symbolic cult of the mausoleum as outdated folklore.
And wasn’t Tiananmen Square also alive in its own way? I remember bridal couples having their photos taken in front of the huge portrait of Mao at the Gate of Heavenly Peace. People flying kites over the square with their eyes turned to the sky. Families with children playing. In my memory, urban life reigned here. Where has it gone?
The day nothing happened
In the history of Tiananmen Square, there is one date that changed everything. The day the square forever lost its innocence.
It doesn’t take many more words for European readers to understand what I am referring to. In China, however, the events of 1989 have been banished from national memory: many younger Chinese no longer know anything about it. Even AI chatbots in China are trained to avoid questions about that date.
Even in my negotiations with the authorities, June 4, 1989 is never mentioned — although it seems to resonate in every sentence. Like in the episode of The Simpsons in which the cartoon family walks past a memorial plaque during a visit to Beijing: “Nothing happened on this square in 1989.”
On the day nothing happened in China, Ma Jian, a painter and writer, was sitting a good 500 kilometers from Tiananmen Square at the bedside of his brother, who had recently had an accident and was in a coma. There was a small television in the hospital room. The state broadcasters showed photos of student leaders and called them criminals. Soldiers of the People’s Army were said to have died in the unrest.
“When I heard that,” says Ma today, “I understood what must have really happened, and how bloody it must have been.” He realized that he had narrowly escaped the massacre: a few days earlier, he was sitting in the square along with protesters.
Ma, who is now 71 years old and lives in London, has not been able to travel to his home country for a long time: he has an entry ban. It’s mid-August when I visit him in the old terraced house where he lives with his British wife and their four children. Ma has built himself a studio in the garden, hardly bigger than a tree house, where he can write and paint. Bees buzz into the room through the open door, circling Ma’s silvery beard. He does not chase them away as he speaks.
We wanted more
Ma was in his mid-20s when he moved to Beijing hoping to make a living as an artist. The year was 1979, a time of “reform and opening” had begun, and artists and intellectuals would gather in his tiny studio in Beijing. They debated freshly translated books from abroad that had long been taboo: Allen Ginsberg, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges.
“We enjoyed the new freedoms,” says Ma. “But we wanted more.”
The government was not prepared to do more. The party had ended China’s isolation, it allowed foreign companies, people and products into the country — but anything that could endanger its power was to stay out. Ma’s paintings, deserted street scenes, were judged to be “intellectually poisonous,” and his books were later accused of “bourgeois liberalism.” After intimidating police interrogations, he fled to Hong Kong in 1987. But he stayed in touch with friends in Beijing.
Nobody would have imagined that the party would open fire.
In the spring of 1989, he learned that students were gathering in Tiananmen Square to demonstrate: for freedom of expression and political reform, against corruption and state arbitrariness. “I packed my camera and I went back to Beijing,” says Ma. “I wanted to be a witness.”
He camped among the students on the square for five weeks. On the faces of the demonstrators, Ma remembers, there was a kind of smile “that Tiananmen Square had never seen.”
Ma speaks of the thirst for freedom that he sensed in every conversation with the protesters. He also speaks of the very narrow limits of their knowledge, their political inexperience, which often made it impossible for them to agree on common goals, slogans and demands. And he remembers the great deal of help they received from the population of Beijing, who brought them water and food. “Nobody,” says Ma, “I swear, nobody would have imagined that the party would open fire.”
Don’t be fooled
Ma also remembers that the occupied square was shockingly dirty — no one showered, there was rubbish everywhere, and it stank of urine. “But the square was alive. It was suddenly a real, living square.”
That was until Deng Xiaoping, ruler of what was then 1.1 billion Chinese, declared martial law at the end of May 1989. That same week, all of a sudden, Ma received the news that his brother was in a coma at home – and left in a hurry.
From the beginning, the party refused to discuss what exactly happened while Ma waited at his brother’s bedside. To this day, many details remain a mystery. Columns of tanks rolled towards the square from the outskirts of the city. Several hundred people, according to other estimates more than 2,000, were shot or crushed when they stood in the way of the tanks. People’s Army soldiers also died, dragged out of the tanks by demonstrators and beaten to death.
“When I returned to Beijing the following January,” Ma recalls, “it was as if people had completely forgotten.” The whole of China sank into a state of forced unconsciousness. Once, when Ma was sitting in a taxi, he asked the driver to take him past the square. The man, frightened, refused.
Many years later, living in London, Jian completed his novel Beijing Coma, an analysis of the Tiananmen protests. When he traveled to China again, in 2008, authorities let him know that it would be his last visit.
The conversation in London comes to an end when I tell Ma about my own Olympic memories. About the bridal couples, the flying kites, the children playing. “Don’t be fooled,” he says with a smile. The communist party recruited extras for Tiananmen Square at the time: “Their job was to play happy tourists. To impress the foreigners.”
Waiting in line
Ten o’clock in the evening. I drove from Shanghai, where I live, to Beijing.
I was trying to visit the square, again. This time I joined the line of people waiting in the night: They wanted to witness the sunrise raising of the national flag. The line begins in front of the first of the three police stations that I already know. Whole families camp out on the sidewalk in the dark. Small children hang asleep in their parents’ arms, teenagers watch TikTok videos. Street vendors sell seat mats, folding stools, and small Chinese flags.
The family in front of me comes from Guangdong, southern China. Together we crack sunflower seeds, peel water chestnuts, and share a beer. The father runs a cigarette shop back home, the mother is a nurse in a maternity clinic. Their 9-year-old son searches the sidewalk at night, he likes to collect cigarette pack lids, and here in Beijing you can find brands that you don’t have at home. The three have traveled to the capital to pick up their older son, whose army service in Beijing ends in a few days.
“While we’re here,” says the father, “we want to see the flag being raised.” The mother read online that you have to queue up in the evening to get a good standing spot. “Otherwise you’ll only see heads instead of the flag.”
The night hours drag on. The 9-year-old has fallen asleep when a few people waiting are discussing Mao’s body. Everyone thinks it is a jia de, a fake. Most believe that the real Mao has long since rotted away. The mother in front of me, on the other hand, is certain that the fake Mao is being exhibited to protect the real one. “He is far too valuable to be shown in public.”
He explains the rules to me: no interviews, no photos, no videos.
When the police station opens at 4 a.m., the line pushes forward. After the first checkpoint, many people start running. They want to be at the front when the flag goes up. At the third checkpoint, I explain to the police that my visit has already been registered. A uniformed officer says he will be happy to accompany me to the square.
Then he explains the rules to me: no interviews, no photos, no videos. I can take selfies for private use, but he just has to take a photo of the pictures on my phone with his own phone “to avoid misunderstandings.” I nod as if that made sense to me.
The police officer calls a superior. The call takes an unexpectedly long time. While I wait, I watch the officers scanning bags and backpacks at the baggage check. In the handbag of an elderly Chinese woman, they find a small red banner with Che Guevara’s face. They turn the object over and over for a while, discussing it. In the end, Che is confiscated. It is a consolation to me that foreign revolutionaries don’t have it any easier here than foreign journalists.
Under the radar
When the policeman returns, I can see from his expression that something is wrong. Unfortunately, he says, the police do not have permission from the district committee. They cannot let me enter the square.
I call Commissioner Yin, the “foreign affairs secretary” of the police station, who had assured my colleague a week earlier that I would be allowed to enter. Even though it is five in the morning, I manage to reach him; he is obviously on night shift.
On the phone, he blames everything on my colleague, who allegedly did not inform the authorities correctly, which is why he does not have a permit. The district committee, I object, does not issue such permits. “You can wait until one arrives,” Yin repeats stubbornly. “We are not restricting your freedom. It is all in your hands.”
It doesn’t feel like I have any control over anything here. When a contrite-looking policeman escorts me out of the square at 5:30 a.m., the first light of dawn brightens the sky over Beijing.
Over the next few days, I will be talking to other foreign correspondents in Beijing. None of them have managed to visit Tiananmen Square in the past two years, and many share stories that are similar to mine: authorities who blame each other for everything, officials who keep it vague hoping they won’t have to answer for mistakes.
Memories cannot be suppressed forever
Jet fighters plow through the sky as China’s current head of state, Xi Jinping, ruler of more than 1.4 billion Chinese, climbs the Gate of Heavenly Peace. At his feet, in the square, stood symmetrically arranged rows of people. It’s July 2021, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. The country has risen to become a world power. But on Tiananmen Square, many things remind us of the past.
Xi is wearing the classic Mao suit with a buttoned round collar, just like Mao himself did when he spoke to the masses from the gate in 1949. Mao’s vision, Xi explains, has finally been achieved. China will never again be humiliated by foreign powers. The party’s leadership role is unshakable.
One turned his back on the Forbidden City, and the other created a forbidden square.
China is a state that celebrates 19th century Marxism — and controls its population using 21st century digital technology. Surveillance cameras are a familiar sight across the country, but nowhere are they as ubiquitous as they are in Tiananmen Square.
The square has become the state’s main stage, and popular sentiments are unlikely to be expressed here in the foreseeable future. With Xi, a trend that began with Mao has come full circle: One turned his back on the Forbidden City, and the other created a forbidden square.
“But memories cannot be suppressed forever,” Jian writes in the afterword to Beijing Coma. “For all their boasting, the tyrants tremble with fear inside, and one day they will fall. Mao’s portrait and corpse will be removed, the wavering crowds will return, and the square will once again be the beating heart of the nation, filled with cries for freedom and truth. This is not a naive, frivolous hope. It is the only end of the story that I can bear to imagine.”
Larger than life
Changan Street, where 13-year-old Wang Youqin once rode to her girls’ school, still crosses Tiananmen Square on the north side, between the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the national flag. Access from outside the square is blocked for pedestrians. But you can drive along the street, or cycle.
So, a few days after my second failed attempt, I unlock a rental bike on a side street using an app, and I cycle into Changan Street. It is only when I reach the intersection at the corner of the square that I see that even the bike path here leads past a police station.
The usual game begins. “Journalist?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
“To my hotel.” Suspicious looks. Phone calls. My gut feeling tells me that my bike tour will end here.
And then, surprisingly, a supervisor tells me that I can ride through the square to my hotel. As a journalist, I just have to follow a few rules: no interviews, no photos, no videos. The police will be watching me while I ride. I should not stop and, for safety’s sake, keep both hands on the handlebars at all times. “Of course,” I hear myself saying, “of course.”
I set off. Seldom have I felt so many eyes on me. Police officers examine me from the side of the road, cameras pan in my direction. To my left, the surreal vastity of the square opens up, the other end can only be guessed at. And to my right, very close to me: the Gate of Heavenly Peace with the famous portrait of the founder of the Republic. For a moment, Mao himself stares at me, larger than life.
