ABSTRACT
A walking tour of Beijing's vast Tiananmen Square is a visually engaging introduction to the official history of the Revolution—a story long elevated to the status of holy narrative within the People's Republic of China. One key stop on such a tour is the Mao Mausoleum. Today, schoolchildren taken to Tiananmen to see the May 4th frieze know just where to place it on the official time line articulated in Communist textbooks, in which May 4th struggles stand proudly between the anti-dynastic agitations of 1911 and the progression toward Liberation in 1949. The May 4th movement, like the Boston Tea Party, has been infused with a complex mixture of both broadly democratic as well as patriotic meanings. It is also been viewed as an iconoclastic struggle for enlightenment and against the fetters of restrictive cultural traditions. The New Culture aspects of May 4th are often marginalized within official narratives and are hard to find in the frieze as well.
