“Thrown Down the Memory Hole”

By Anne-Marie Brady

It was a crisp, wintry day in Beijing when I set out to pay my respects to the San jiao di notice boards, the historic signage at Peking University that had recently been demolished by the university authorities. San jiao di, or “the Triangle,” had been the favored spot for student protest meetings since the late 1970s—especially in 1989—and its notice boards were the conduit for information on the latest in student thinking and activism.

Unusually, given the sensitivity of the topic, the tearing down of the boards had been front-page news in the print version of Beijing Youth Daily a few days before. It was this factual, though extremely brief, report that had first alerted me to the destruction of this historically significant structure. According to the article, university representatives had stated that San jiao di was demolished because nowadays all “important” information was available online so the notice boards were no longer necessary for the spread of information. They also claimed that the billboards were being used for commercial messages and were thus not suitable for maintaining a tidy environment at Peking University.

Although I used to be very familiar with the campus, I had to ask my way; everything had changed so much. The university is currently a mass of construction sites and ugly new high-rises. I avoided asking the younger students, not sure if they would know the significance of the boards or their destruction. I finally found a man in his late thirties, who would have been about twenty in 1989. When I told him what I was looking for, a faint smile of understanding crossed his face. He gave me very precise directions to the spot, then instantly rushed off before I could ask him more.

Yet when I finally got to San jiao di, I felt bewildered and overwhelmed. It was as if the notice boards had never existed. The area was ringed by trees as before; there was still a bookshop and a convenience store on one side, dormitories on another. But something was missing. I searched my memory; trying to remember the scene from my many other visits. In the past, I’d often come to look at the boards, trying to keep up with student activities. The place looked much the same, yet somehow, something had altered.

It was only when I looked very carefully at the triangular spot of ground that is the heart of the San jiao di area that I noticed what had changed. A thin line of recently dug dirt ran around the inside of a concrete-lined grassy triangle. This was the only trace to show where the San jiao di notice boards had once stood.

I’d never noticed before that the boards were grouped around a number of ancient pine trees. Now these trees were revealed, and someone (surely ironically) had recently pasted a large notice for rental accommodation at the very top of one of these trees, well out of arms’ reach.

I glanced around the area and noted that there was a long row of display cases to the side of where the old San jiao di boards had been. These were pristine and glass covered, full of glossy government propaganda photos. They were very different from the informality and democratic nature of the rusty old signage, where anyone was free to post and anyone was free to come and read.

The San jiao di notice boards were a historic site with an important role in the story of dissent from authoritarian rule in modern China. It didn’t matter what was pasted on them in recent years, just having them there was enough to give a glimmer of hope that this tradition was preserved, however faintly. When I was a visiting fellow at Beijing University in the late 1990s, people would still gather there to meet.

San jiao di is certainly much tidier now than it was before. I took some photos of the scene, though there was little to focus my camera on. I was studiously ignored by the throngs of people passing by, though they all carefully got out of my way. A young stringer for a foreign newspaper came up and asked me for a comment, she said no Chinese person was willing to talk to her on the subject of the demolition of the boards.

Knocking down San jiao di and saying that the Internet has now replaced it is an example of why the Internet in China is regarded by the party-state as an effective tool of both control and propaganda. San jiao di was once a symbol of Peking University’s proud intellectual independence; it looks as if that independence is very weak indeed these days.

Anne-Marie Brady lectures on Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury. She is the author of Marketing Democracy: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).