(This is the second post by Chunhua Chen, a Ph.D student of Political Science at GWU. This summer, she is
doing field research for her dissertation in China supported by a Sigur Center
Grant for Asian Field Research for summer 2014.)
My stay in Beijing this time is going to end next week. So yesterday, I
decided that I needed to go to the Tian’anmen Square to watch the daily
National Flag lowering ceremony before leaving the city. It had been several years since I was last in
the Square, and I had never watched the famous national flag-raising or
flag-lowering ceremonies—strange, as I had lived in Beijing for six long years.
I was sure they were scenes to marvel at. The national emblem and national flag
are the symbols of a country and everything it stands for for its people. Ernest
Renan says that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” that necessarily
entails “the possession in common of a rich heritage of memories” and “actual
agreement, the desire to live together, and the will to continue to make the
most of the joint inheritance.” It is in the same vein of Benedict Anderson’s
definition of the nation as an “imagined political community” in the sense that
the basis on which a nation is held together springs from its members’ minds.
National identities, which are primarily formed on the basis of factors such as
sharing the collective memories of history, awareness of oneself as belonging
to the same nation as other members, and the sharing of the same culture, are
all phenomena at the mental and spiritual level, based on the formation of
ideas. The lines between different nations lie in, or stem from, in large part,
people’s “imagination.” Ceremonies such as national flag raising and lowering
are an important part of creating, sustaining, and triggering that imagination,
which is essential for the very survival of any nation. Stephen Walt even calls
nationalism “the most powerful political force in the world.”
At about 6:30, following the stream
of tourists, I walked slowly along the narrow street leading to the Square. In
the souvenir stores were stuffed pandas, folding fans, cheong-sams, etc. At a
porcelain store, I saw several big decorative plates with the portraits of the
four generations of leaders of the People’s Republic of China painted on them.
President Xi Jinping’s portrait, of course, was on display at the most prominent place. What’s noteworthy
was that there was also a plate with the picture of both President Xi and his
wife, Ms. Peng Liyuan. A former popular folk singer and performing artist, Ms.
Peng charmed the whole country and the world with her glamour and fashion sense
when she accompanied her husband on his first official trip in 2013 to Russia,
Tanzania, the Republic of Congo and South Africa, and thus broke the tradition
of Chinese "first ladies" not entering the limelight.
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| Left and right: President Xi Jinping; middle: President Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan |
Two little girls, dressed by
their parents like Qing-dynasty princesses, were running and laughing on the
street. Every several hundred meters there was a patrol team of three helmeted
police officers and a white police car. I tried to take a picture of one of the
patrol teams but was called off.
I went through the security checkpoint and finally stood at the Tian’anmen
Square. Last time when I had been here, I, like many of my peers, had not known
much about the history of the Square, especially what happened here back in the
late 1980s. But now I had known better, and could not help recreating in my
mind the scenes on the Square in that eventful year. Many tired tourists were
sitting on the ground, waiting for the ceremony and playing with their handsets.
The Monument to the People’s Heroes was still solemn and quiet, and the sunset
was purple-orange-pink. Somehow it also looked like blood.
At about 7, someone shouted, “it started!” Then people quickly formed a
wall in front of the gate of Tian’anmen, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace. I could
vaguely heard the national anthem, but was too far away from the flag-raising
platform and too short to be able to catch a view. So what I ended up watching was
countless cellphone screens ---people were all video recording the ceremony
while watching it, or to be more exact, watching the ceremony through their
cellphone screens.
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| I was watching numerous cellphone screens |
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| More screens |
The ceremony lasted for only several minutes. Night started to slowly
fall upon the Square and police officers—both in uniforms and plain
cloches—started to ask people to leave the Square and not gather. I finally saw
the flagpole when the crowds were dispersed.
When I left the Square through another narrow gate, I saw many
disappointed tourists being turned away by the officers guarding the gate. “The
flag lowering ceremony has ended,” one officer said impatiently, “now the
Square is no longer open to the public.”
