ABSTRACT
The landscape of modern Beijing would the paradoxical salience of the past be more powerful or more obvious than in the case of Tiananmen Square. However, the ambiguities in the search for such salience can also be witnessed in continuing debates among architects, planners, policy makers and the general public over questions of design authenticity and historic preservation. Indeed, despite the iconoclastic rampage of the Cultural Revolution, what had already been in the 1920s and 1930s, and what had promised to become again in the early 1950s a "Chinese Renaissance" has, in fact, reemerged in the 1980s to once again challenge, question and derive strength from the heritage of the past. A full-scale, national preservationist movement has emerged in China since 1980. Virtually every county, city and province, along with the national government, has promulgated all manner of new laws and regulations aimed to protect the landscape endowment of Imperial China.
