Goddess of democracy
The goddess of democracy ( Chinese 民主 女神 , pinyin mínzhǔ nǚshén ), also known as the goddess of freedom ( 自由女神 , zìyóu nǚshén ), was a 10-meter-high statue that was erected during the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989 .
The statue was erected in just four days from paper mache and polystyrene foam on a metal rod. The builders decided to make the statue as tall as possible so that the government couldn't easily destroy it or make it disappear.
construction
The statue was erected by students from the Beijing Art Academy. Work began on May 27, 1989 at her university. It was supposed to be built in support of the protests, which by then were beginning to decline in intensity. The large statue was built on the basis of a clay sculpture about half a meter high of a man who is leaning against a pole with both hands. This was created as part of an exercise in which the effects of the weight distribution of a work were to be examined. The bottom of the pole was removed, a flame was attached to the top, and the sculpture was placed in an upright position. Then the man's face was changed into that of a woman and the proportions and measurements transferred to the foam, which, when carved, would give the statue its final appearance.
Despite some similarities with the Statue of Liberty , Tsao Tsing-yuan, one of the builders of the "Goddess of Democracy", noted that the students had deliberately decided against a copy of the Statue of Liberty, as it would have been too unoriginal and too openly pro-American. Instead, he records the influence of the works of the Russian sculptor Vera Muchina . Her famous work, Workers and Collective Farmers, was particularly important for the head and facial features.
When the time came to move the parts of the statue to Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Ministry of State Security announced that truck drivers helping the students would lose their license, and the students then took the parts to the square without a truck. They had also let a wrong route to the outside to keep the state organs at bay. Students from other academies who had helped with the construction surrounded the wagons along the way, holding hands in case the police or the military showed up.
On the evening of May 29, with fewer than ten thousand demonstrators remaining in the square, the art students began building a bamboo scaffold and erecting the statue there. Troops trying to prevent the statue from being erected were stopped on the way by Beijing citizens. At dawn on May 30, the statue was completely erected and now stood exactly on the axis between the Monument to the People's Heroes and the Gate of Heavenly Peace , on which the Great Image of Mao Zedong hangs, so that the goddess of democracy and the former party chairman and president of China were now facing each other and looking at each other. At the official unveiling on May 30, 1989, the crowd burst into cheers and chanted slogans such as "Long live democracy". The statue was able to rekindle the will of the students to occupy the square and the number of people on the square rose from just 10,000 to 300,000 demonstrators within a day.
Announcement by the builder
The art students who built the statue wrote the following statement, abbreviated here:
“In this gloomy moment, the most important thing for us is to stay calm and united on one goal. We need a strong, binding force to strengthen our resolve: this is the goddess of democracy. Democracy ... You are the symbol of every student in the square, the heart of millions of people. ... Today the goddess stands here on People's Square and proclaims to the whole world: An awareness of democracy has awakened among the Chinese people! A new era has begun! ... The statue of the goddess of democracy is made of plaster and will of course not be able to stand here forever. But as a symbol of people's hearts, it is sacred and untouchable. May those who want to defile them be warned: the people will not allow this to happen! ... On the day that real democracy and freedom come to China, we must erect another goddess of democracy here in the square, monumental, towering and permanent. We have a strong belief that that day will finally come. We have one more hope: Chinese people, arise! Erect the statue of the goddess of democracy in your millions of hearts! Long live the people! Long live the freedom! Long live democracy! "
The entire announcement was placed on a long banner near the statue and read out loud by a student at the Broadcasting Academy.
Destruction of the statue
After just five days, the statue was destroyed by soldiers from the People's Liberation Army during the violent crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Millions of people around the world watched the statue overturned on television. Hit by a tank, she fell forward to the right, accompanied by angry shouts from the protesters.
Replicas
After the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the original statue has become a symbol of freedom and democracy. Since then, a number of replicas have been made around the world to commemorate the events of 1989. The following is a selection:
- In Victoria Park in Hong Kong a replica of the statue was June 4, 1996 during a vigil, attended by tens of thousands of people built.
- Work on a bronze sculpture began in 1989 by a group of volunteers led by Thomas Marsh. It was inaugurated in 1994, weighs around 270 kg and is located in Portsmouth Square in San Francisco's Chinatown .
- Another statue, modeled on Tiananmen Square, stands at the University of British Columbia .
- A gold-plated replica can be found in the foyer of the Student Center at York University in Toronto, Canada.
- The "Democracy Award" presented annually by the National Endowment for Democracy is a scaled-down replica of the original statue.
- Two replicas were built in Hong Kong in 2010 for the June 4th anniversary protests, but were confiscated by police after being displayed in Hong Kong's Times Square. Due to public pressure, the statues were finally returned and could still be shown at the commemoration in Victoria Park.
- A three-meter bronze replica of the "goddess of democracy" was inaugurated on June 12, 2007 as a central element of the memorial to the victims of communism in Washington, DC .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Tsao Tsing-yuan: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds.): Essay "The Birth of the Goddess of Democracy" from Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China . Westview Press, Boulder, Col. 1994, pp. 140-7.
- ^ A b c Minzhu Han: Cries For Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement . Princeton University Press, Oxford, England 1990.
- ↑ a b Roderick MacFarquhar: The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng . University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 1993.
- ^ Robert Benwick: China in the 1990s . Macmillan Press Ltd., Vancouver, Canada 1995.
- ^ Charlton M. Lewis, W. Scott Morton: China: Its History and Culture . McGraw-Hill, New York, NY 1995.
- ↑ Leora Falk: New DC memorial dedicated to communism's victims , Chicago Tribune . June 12, 2007.
