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eight giant reliefs at the obelisk’s base embody the CCP’s official telling of modern Chinese history: starting from the Opium War of 1839, when China came under aggressive British imperialism, to the victorious conclusion of the Red Army’s April 1949 crossing of the Yangzi River to defeat the Nationalist forces in Nanjing, the capital of the Nationalist Party. The Communists here portray themselves as the worthy successors to these selfless men and women who perished while fighting for China’s independence, reaffirming one of the most popular propaganda songs of the 1950s, “Without the Chinese Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Immediately south of the monument and lying along the same central axial line is the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, constructed in 1977 to memorialize the late chairman who died a year earlier. In official media, although Mao is partially criticized for his leading role in the tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that left the country in ruin, his supreme position in the Party pantheon as leader of the revolution remains secure, at least for now. The current Party leadership, led by General Secretary Xi Jinping, realizes that an all-out campaign to discredit Mao would be tantamount to an attack on the ideological foundation of the entire Party, which would undermine the CCP’s legitimacy to rule. Mao’s mausoleum, coupled with the chairman’s giant portrait hanging on Tiananmen Gate and overlooking the square, speaks clearly that the chairman’s ghost is still hovering. That these two memorials are situated precisely at the center of the square reaffirms their supreme position, overshadowing neighboring structures and confirming the centrality of the CCP in the Chinese psyche. The Party’s decision to place not one but two memorials alongside the sacred central axial line is highly problematic and is considered by many Chinese as inauspicious. It also points to an irreconcilable contradiction: while the Communists rebuked China’s imperial legacy and traditions as feudal, obsolete, and repressive, they wasted no time in appropriating the ancient hallowed line for their own use.
Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) Forbidden City (1420)
Tiananmen Gate (1420, 1651) 20,000 people
Zhengyangmen Gate (1419)
Communist Rule (1949–1959)
400,000 people The Great Hall of the People (1959) National Museum of China (1959) Monument to the People’s Heroes (1958)
Communist Rule (since 1959)
600,000 people
History Tiananmen Square is an ideal venue for the Party to tell its own history. The eight reliefs of the Monument to the People’s Heroes were designed with that goal in mind. The Party’s history is even more systematically and meticulously reconstructed in the National Museum of China,
Chairman Mao Memorial Hall (1977)