The July 14 issue of the Times Literary Supplement carried a review by Jonathan Mirsky of four books about Asian cities. Two of the books concerned Beijing and included Wu Hung’s Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.
Wu Hung’s book on Tiananmen Square, wrote Mirsky, “is a well-informed history of the transformation of the rather small, crowded, asymmetrical space, partly flanked by timber houses, in front of the Forbidden City, into a vast 50-acre ‘guangchang,’ a square, the biggest man-made space in the world.” Wu Hung, continues Mirsky, explains “why Tiananmen was the focus of the 1989 demonstration, why it attacted Chinese from all over the country—and why the leadership took the uprising especially seriously, because of where it took place.”