Chapter 35 Beijing

A seemingly simple thing had an unexpected effect in 1949. It not only inspired millions of people in this city, let people experience the new atmosphere of being the master of the city, but also fully reflected the new regime. s efficiency. In February 1949, a few days after Shen Bo, a member of the Beiping underground party of the Communist Party of China, welcomed the People's Liberation Army into the city, he was appointed as the head of the seventh district of Beiping and began to accept the local government of the Kuomintang.At that time, the scope of the Seventh District started from Dongdan and Chongwenmen in the east, Xidan and Xuanwumen in the west, Zhengyangmen in the south, and Chang'an Street in the north. Tiananmen Square was just in the center of the Seventh District.

Kang Pengshou, the captain of the first unit of the picket team in the Pingjin Garrison who went to Dongdan for inspection, had a deep memory of the mess at the time, one of the four major commercial centers in old Beiping City. ) is full of garbage and sewage. There are few people on the street, and the street lights are dangling. You can see rickshaw pullers and dilapidated trams.” “The garbage in Beiping City has been relying on It was piled up along the city wall and finally reached Tiananmen Square. Some people estimate that the garbage in the city at that time was no less than 600,000 tons.”

On the third day after taking office, Shen Bo went to Tiananmen Square, and what he saw was exactly the same as Kang Pengshou’s recollection, “The square he saw at that time was a pitted land with overgrown weeds and garbage, and some places in the middle The grass grew taller than a person. In the area around Shuncheng Street in Zhengyangmen, the garbage was piled up as high as the city wall. At that time, the Tiananmen area was an unmanaged place, and many trucks carrying garbage outside the city walked to Here it falls." It took them 3 months to clear the trash.At that time, no one knew that the founding ceremony would be held here, and there was no resolution to establish Beijing as the capital.In May, even before the founding of the People's Republic of China, a "Urban Planning Committee" was established in Beiping, and Ye Jianying served as the director of this committee. From August 9th to 14th, 1949, at the first meeting of representatives from all walks of life in Beiping, a plan was made to renovate Tiananmen Square and Tiananmen Square, and the project was required to be completed in September.

Under the Urban Planning Committee, there is a Clearing and Removal Committee, which is composed of representatives from the party, government, military, civilian, academic and business circles. The first task is to clean up the square. "It's not difficult to remove rubbish from the city, but the previous regimes didn't do it. What's more, the various classes in the newly liberated city had a very effective exchange and communication through this movement. ’” said Ma Ju. In Shen Bo's impression, tens of thousands of people participated in the project at that time, and the participants came from the surrounding residents, cadres from various agencies, and students from various schools.At that time, there were already rumors that the founding ceremony would be held in the square. Although the official document had not been received yet, the large banner of "Building the People's Capital" had already been hung on the north side of the square.

As another important part of the resolution to "welcome the founding ceremony and renovate Tiananmen Square", the Municipal Planning Bureau was tasked with selecting the location for the first national flag pole.The municipal government ordered the Construction Bureau to come up with a plan to repair Tiananmen Square, and Zhao Pengfei, the director of the Construction Bureau, served as the commander-in-chief.One of the specific tasks of the renovation project is to build a national flag pole on the central axis between the Tiananmen Gate Tower and Zhengyangmen at the northern end of Tiananmen Square.Dong Guangqi, director of the China Urban Planning Society, said: "The person in charge at the time was Chen Gan. He fixed the flagpole at the junction of the north-south central axis and the east-west connection of the south wall of the T-shaped square. Because of the rush of time, there were not many plans to compare. The flagpole is also welded with four water pipes of different diameters. The flagpole was originally designed to be 35 meters high, which is the same height as Tiananmen Square, but the welded water pipe is only 22.5 meters high. After he reported, the headquarters decided to It was so high that there was no time to change it. After erecting the flagpole, he found that the width of the parade between the flagpole and Tiananmen Square would not be enough in the future, and the positions of the Chinese Biao and the stone lions needed to be moved. Liang Sicheng wanted to protect every brick and tile of the Forbidden City intact. He consulted "Natural Dialectics" to solve the relationship between the flagpole and the surrounding buildings based on Engels' point of view on the position of the origin in analytic geometric coordinates."

"The structural design of the flagpole was completed by Lin Zhiyuan, the technical director of the Construction Bureau and the design and construction director of the Tiananmen Square renovation project." Dong Guangqi recalled, "One month later, the flagpole base and white marble railings were completed, and the flagpole was also erected. In order for Chairman Mao Zedong to control the flag-raising switch on the Tiananmen Gate Tower, Lin Zhiyuan designed a wire to be drawn from the flagpole, and the wire was passed through the steel pipes buried in the East and West Chang'an Street Road Project to cross Chang'an Street, cross the Jinshui River, and then run along the southeast of the Tiananmen Gate Tower. The corner rises to the center of the tower and connects with the switch installed on the Tiananmen tower. In order to prevent mistakes in raising the flag, the staff meticulously checked all parts of the flag raising. They tried repeatedly under the flagpole and on the Tiananmen tower. I don’t know how many times. The scaffolding around the flagpole was removed in late September when it was determined that the automatic lifting facilities were operating normally and there were no problems."

On September 27, 1949, the first Political Consultative Conference passed a resolution to change the name of Peking to Beijing from now on, and decided to hold the founding ceremony in Tiananmen Square on October 1.