Dissertation 20110415 Tsung-Yi
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Constructing Tiananmen Square as a Realm of Memory: National Salvation, Revolutionary Tradition, and Political Modernity in Twentieth-Century China A DISSERTATION SUMBITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Tsung-Yi Pan IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Professor Ann Waltner May 2011 © Tsung-Yi Pan 2011 Acknowledgements This dissertation would have not been possible without the support and help from many individuals in many different ways over the past seven years. My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to my advisor, Professor Ann Waltner, for her relentless support and instruction. She has advised me through all the stages in my pursuit of doctoral degree at the University of Minnesota. Without her considerate guidance and consistent encouragement, this dissertation could not have reached its present form. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Edward Farmer, who has always given me intelligent and enlightening advice on my research and writing and the difficulties I encountered at the defining moments in my life. K-wok, Lucky Dragon, and Chai’s Thai became places that have stored all the lovely memory about the discussions and debates between us during many lunch times. I am also greatly indebted to Professor M. J. Maynes, who has witnessed the birth and completion of my dissertation project, from its embryonic form as a term paper to its final product as a 400-page dissertation. In this process, she has given me her generous support for my grant and fellowship applications and job search, in addition to her thoughtful comments on my dissertation. I would also like to thank Professors Liping Wang and Jason McGrath for their instructive comments and warmest help through the years. I also owe my sincere gratitude to my colleagues at the University of Minnesota who gave me their friendship and helped me walked through the course of doctoral study. Qin Fang, Tony Jiang, Lisong Liu, and Zhiguo Ye offered me their unselfish support for my research and life at the UMN. I am also grateful to Xiangyu Hu for his accompany and i assistance in my scholarly and daily life since 2004. A special thank to my colleague and friend, Fang Qin, who has always been there when I need advice and help over the past six years. This dissertation project would have not been completed without the support and help from many academic institutions. Thanks to the Doctoral Fellowship for International Research (2008-2009) from the Office of International Program, UMN, I was able to conduct on-site research and material collecting in the United States, Taiwan, and China for my dissertation project. The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2009-2010) from the Graduate School, UMN, allowed me to concentrate on my dissertation writing and to finish it in a timely manner. I also want to express my gratitude to the librarians and staffs at the Wilson Library, UMN, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, the Municipal Beijing Archives, and the National Library of China, who helped me locate material sources I needed for my dissertation writing. Without the administrative support from the staffs of the Department of History, I would not have successfully completed my doctoral study at the UMN in seven years. Finally, and most importantly, I must express my deepest appreciation to my mother and younger brother for their understanding and support. Especially, without my mother’s sacrifice and hardworking, I would not have possibly finished all the stages of my study and gone to Twin Cities for my doctoral degree in history. I therefore dedicate this dissertation to her. ii Dedication To My Mother Ssu-Chen Hsieh iii Abstract To study the history of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) Square is to study the history of Chinese political modernity from the late nineteenth century to the present. While exploring the on-going process through which Tiananmen Square has been constructed as the symbolic center of twentieth-century China, this dissertation offers alternative theoretical discourses on the materiality and spatiality of Chinese modernity and the political uses of memory and history at the place. This dissertation is a study on how Tiananmen Square has been constructed as the symbolic center of national events in twentieth-century China from the perspective of the politics of historical memory. Applying insights from scholarship on the materiality and spatiality of memory, it analyzes the on-going process through which Tiananmen Square has been constructed as a memorial site to store, recall, and manipulate the past in the present and thus became the symbolic center of national events in China’s evolving political modernity in the twentieth century. It argues that state-sponsored commemorative architecture and practices at Tiananmen Square after the founding of the PRC have materialized Chinese cultural memory of national salvation and revolutionary tradition. As a consequence, Tiananmen Square has constituted the material and spatial framework by which both state power and grassroots activists used to manipulate that cultural memory to justify their different political agendas of modernity. iv Table of Contents List of Figures....................................................................................................................vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...1 PART ONE……………………………………………………………………………...36 Chapter 1: Making and Use of the National Salvation Discourse in Modern China…...40 Chapter 2: Making and Canonization of Mao Zedong’s Revolutionary Discourse…….79 PART TWO……………………………………………………………………………134 Chapter 3: Making of A Chinese Capital of New Democracy: The Spatial and Symbolic Centrality of Tiananmen Square in Beijing’s Urban Planning……………138 Chapter 4: Materialization of Chinese Revolutionary Memory at Tiananmen Square..176 PART THREE…………………………………………………………………………221 Chapter 5: From ‘May Fourth’ to ‘April Fifth’: Poeticizing the Voice of Protest and Dynamics of Memory Making at Tiananmen Square……………………..228 Chapter 6: Projecting Prospective Vision at Tiananmen Square: Popular and Official Uses of the April Fifth Movement in China without Mao………………...268 PART FOUR…………………………………………………………………………..305 Chapter 7: Recalling Traumatic Past around Tiananmen Square: The Four Cardinal Principles, the Cultural Revolution, and the June Fourth Movement……..311 Chapter 8: From ‘May Fourth’ and ‘April Fifth’ to ‘June Fourth’: Playing the Variations of Communist Revolutionary Memory at Tiananmen Square……………353 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..401 Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………….431 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...434 v List of Figures Illustration 1: Layout of Tiananmen Square……………………………………………431 Illustration 2: General Program on the Urban Planning of Beijing in 1982……………431 Illustration 3: T-shaped Palace Square of the Forbidden City A……………………….431 Illustration 4: T-shaped Palace Square of the Forbidden City B……………………….432 Illustration 5: Sun Yat-sen’s Portrait on Tiananmen…………………………………...432 Illustration 6: Jiang Jieshi’s Portrait on Tiananmen……………………………………432 Illustration 7: Mourning Zhou Enlai alongside Chang’an Avenue…………………….433 Illustration 8: Memorial Wreath and Poem on the relief “May Fourth Movement”…...433 vi Introduction In the age of the modern nation-state, one visible way for each “imagined community” to forge its national identity is to create national memorial spaces in its capital city. The “modern cult of monuments” has been closely related to the growth of nationalism. A part of the invention of nation-states since the late eighteenth century, commemorative monuments and institutions have been constructed as the material manifestation of the sense of a common past around which national identities are forged.1 As demonstrated by the Lincoln and Washington Memorials in Washington, D. C. and Red Square and Victory Park in Moscow, commemorative monuments and institutions erected at the state-sponsored memorial spaces in capitals constitute concrete forms to strengthen national identities by using memory and history.2 Even in the epoch of globalization, making national spaces of monumentality for constructing national identities does not lose its validity. Instead, it has become a significant practice to consolidate local identities. As recently as in 2004, the National World War II Memorial was unveiled to the public between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials at the political heart of the United States.3 While serving as the material foundation of national memory and identity, 1 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51; Miles Glendinning, “Beyond the Cult of the Monument,” Context (70): 15–18; Andreas W. Daum and Christof Mauch, ed., Berlin-Washington, 1800-2000: Capital Cities, Cultural Representations, and National Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 3-30.; François Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. chapters 4-6; Dan Ben-Amos and Lillane Weissberg, ed., Cultural Memory and the Construction of National Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 2 Christopher A. Thomas, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Caroline Brooke, Moscow: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006); Nurit Schleifman, “Moscow’s Victory Park,” History and Memory 13: 2 (2001):