As I am sure you know this is the largest square in the world occupying 100 acres and capable of holding 1.25m people – there must have been 250,000 on the square this morning! Today the square has a number of Olympic floral displays celebrating the Beijing Games o 2008 and long queues of Chinese tourists waiting to enter Chairman Mau’s Mausoleum. Although many Chinese resent the events of the Cultural Revolution – many of which were committed by the so called Red Guards – Chairman Mau is revered for uniting China and putting it on the road to its current status today.
Apart from the military parades the square is famous for the ‘man with the shopping bag defying the tanks’. Paul our tour escort tells us that he was in the square until about 3 days before this dramatic event. The students were in fact not protesting against the Government but about some of the inefficiencies that existed in parts of the administration. The man who defied the tanks was only out doing his shopping when he found himself defying the tanks!
But here are still the two huge LED screens that every so often show Government messages amongst the adverts!
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