In the final days of my time in China (July 2018), I was able to take a quick trip to Beijing. I only had a few days, which left me quite rushed, though I made the best of it. Here are some photos.
What Beijing trip wouldn’t be complete without visiting Tiananmen square? The square itself is big and empty; one feels small standing out in the open, the large buildings at it’s borders seem far away. Tiananmen’s significance, however, cannot be understated. At it’s borders are the Forbidden City, National Museum, Great Hall of the People, and Mao’s mausoleum–all central monoliths of Beijing and China. Each of those places has it’s own security to get in and out of them as is normal across China, but what stands out is the strict security even to enter Tiananmen Square’s vast empty space. Foreigners must present their passports, Chinese their national ID. One must pass through a metal detector and place any bags through scanners. The police looked at my ID much in the way any security would, and then waved me through. As I walked on, a policewoman was flipping through a notebook of a Chinese woman who stood next to her– to enter Tiananmen, Chinese nationals are given more scrutiny.
As I walked around, I imagined the thousands of students who filled the space in 1989 and the chaos and blood that filled the streets after the government soldiers and tanks rolled through. The 1989 student protest and subsequent massacre is a forbidden topic within China. Had I breached and publicly talked about it when I lived and worked there, I could have been expelled from the country.
Here is a photo from exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei from a series called Study of Perspective in which he photographs a middle finger in front of many of the world’s significant landmarks.
From Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective, Tiananmen
