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A Political Park: The Working People’s Cultural Palace in Beijing

The Working People’s Cultural Palace (WPCP), formerly the Imperial Ancestral Temple, is a celebrated public park near Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing. A closer look at the park, which was created by the government in 1950 to provide recreational activities for the local residents, reveals that it was not primarily used as a conventional urban amenity but rather as an arena for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to launch political campaigns and stage propaganda exhibitions. The park, therefore, under the guise of a recreation area, was used to promote labor policies, international diplomacy and Party politics, thus extending the CCP’s control of people’s lives. Based on recently available archival sources and by comparing the CCP’s use of urban parks to how they were used in the former Soviet Union and in the United States, this article argues that the WPCP reflects the conflict between the state and society, resulting in the domination of the former over the latter and rapid loss of citizens’ private space in China.