Compare
Vol. 37, No. 3, June 2007, pp. 365–382
Museums and nationalism in
contemporary China
Edward Vickers*
University of London, UK
This article examines the representation of Chinese identity in museums in the People’s Republic
of China, comparing this briefly with the portrayal of local and national identities in Hong Kong
and Taiwan. In particular, the article looks at the implications for museums of the shift in emphasis
within state ideology from socialism to patriotism—a shift that has been particularly marked since
the early 1990s. Museums in contemporary China are officially designated as ‘bases for patriotic
education’, but the content of the ‘patriotism’ that they are meant to promote remains in many
respects vague or problematic. One of the key tensions here is that between a deep-rooted
assumption of equivalence between ‘Chinese’ and ‘Han’ culture and history, and the multicultural
reality of the contemporary People’s Republic—including as it does a range of non-Han groups
such as Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols. The progressive abandonment of socialism has in some
ways exposed these contradictions more starkly in recent years. Meanwhile, the homogenous and
totalising official vision of Chinese identity in general, and Han identity in particular, is contested
either at the popular or the official level (or both) in the largely Han communities of Hong Kong
and Taiwan. In a rapidly commercialising and modernising China, the promotion of a statecentred patriotism has become a key instrument for the regime in its efforts to preserve its
legitimacy, and museums represent a key element in this strategy.
Keywords: China; Education; Ethnicity; History; Hong Kong; Identity; Minorities; Multiculturalism;
Museum; Nationalism; Patriotism
…[Museums] should promote scientific knowledge and the nation’ s long history while
resisting the decadence of feudalism and capitalism… [and they] should be more
attractive to people and contribute to the development of community culture. With
more than 5000 years of history, China has developed a unique culture which has
captured the interest of people from other countries. When facing much fiercer
competition in the cultural field worldwide, museums should intensify efforts to
popularize patriotism and socialism… [Primary] and high schools [should] bring their
students to visit museums to improve education. (Xinhua, 2000)
The displacement of socialism by nationalism as the ideological ballast of the
Communist regime has become a commonplace of scholarship on contemporary
China. When the internal Party struggles following the suppression of the 1989
* School of Lifelong Learning and International Development, Institute of Education, University
of London, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, UK. Email: e.vickers@ioe.ac.uk
ISSN 0305-7925 (print)/ISSN 1469-3623 (online)/07/030365-18
# 2007 British Association for International and Comparative Education
DOI: 10.1080/03057920701330255
366 E. Vickers
Student Movement eventually resulted in victory for the economic liberalisers led by
Deng Xiaoping, the intensified pursuit of capitalist growth was accompanied by a
new emphasis on ‘patriotic education’. Now socialist in name only, the Party bases
its claim to legitimacy on its trusteeship of the glorious legacy of China’s ancient
civilization, on its representation of ‘advanced forces’ bent on forging a strong and
united nation and on its record of steadfast resistance against foreign encroachments
of all kinds. As the propaganda message has changed, so the content of school
curricula and textbooks has been revised, and previous research (Jones, 2005;
Vickers, 2006) has analysed these revisions, and the nature of the ‘Chinese’ identity
that they attempt to transmit to students. One theme of this research, and of studies
of Chinese nationalism more generally, has been the tension between a highly
essentialised ethno-cultural conception of ‘Han’ Chinese identity, and the multicultural nature of the Chinese state as it exists today (Duara, 1995; Harrison, 1999).
The present article does not explore this tension in any great depth, but it does draw
attention to the ways in which it is reflected (or avoided) in museum displays.
The principal focus here is on the part played by museums—and particularly
history museums and memorials—in the ongoing patriotic education campaign on
the mainland. This is then briefly compared both with the efforts to repackage and
export ‘one China’ patriotism to the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,
and with the role of museums on Taiwan as key sites in the ongoing struggles over
national identity and the nature of the relationship with the Chinese mainland.
History museums, public monuments and theme parks are an increasingly
significant, but still relatively overlooked, vehicle for official, and sometimes also
popular, identity discourses throughout ‘Greater China’. To some extent museums
can be viewed as extra-curricular extensions of the patriotic education delivered
through history lessons in schools. The mainland government’s designation of many
museums as ‘bases for patriotic education’ (aiguozhuyi jiaoyu jidi) since the mid1990s, and the 2004 decision to make entry to state-run museums free for all
schoolchildren accompanied by their teachers, were intended to promote and
encourage school visits, but in Hong Kong and Taiwan too (as elsewhere),
schoolchildren are the targets of museum outreach programmes, and constitute an
important ‘captive’ audience for museum exhibitions.
The impact that museum exhibitions have on schoolchildren brought there by
their teachers (or on any other visitors) cannot be taken for granted. It is not,
however, the subject of the present study. This is concerned with the nature of the
vision of national identity that museum exhibitions encapsulate, implicitly or
explicitly, through the way in which they interpret national and local history, by what
they choose to emphasise, and what they choose to omit. In mainland China
certainly, and to a lesser extent in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the parameters defining
acceptable interpretations of history for museums are largely set by the government.
Nevertheless, in the People’s Republic as elsewhere, museums are part of a
burgeoning tourism industry, and the growing numbers of affluent Han Chinese
with an itch to explore their country constitute a ready market for triumphalist
displays of the national past. In contemporary China, nationalism is not simply an
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 367
official tool with which public opinion can be moulded at the whim of the Party; as
the anti-Japanese demonstrations of 2005 showed, it is a potent popular force that
represents, for the regime, at once both an opportunity and a threat. With the
commercialization of labour in mainland China has come the commercialization of
leisure, and just as appeals to nationalism help sell newspapers and tickets for the
cinema or an international football match,1 so they attract paying visitors to
museums and theme parks as well.
Popular nationalism in post-socialist China
Relations between the various components of ‘Greater China’ have undergone a
seismic shift over the past thirty years. In the 1970s, a self-proclaimed ‘Free China’
on Taiwan still faced a resolutely ‘Red’ China on the mainland, while Hong Kong
remained a British-governed ‘territory’ predominantly inhabited by refugees from
China’s Guangdong Province. By the early twenty-first century, however, China was
no longer ‘Red’, Hong Kong’s citizens had come to see themselves as ‘Hongkongese’
first and Chinese second, and the very ‘Chineseness’ of Taiwan was hotly contested.
For the purposes of the present article, it will only be possible to touch on the range
of complex factors behind these shifts in political and cultural discourse and popular
identity. Both Taiwan and Hong Kong have witnessed struggles over the content of
school curricula, particularly relating to Chinese and local history, as part of the
attempt to define the nature and status of the ‘local’ in relation to the ‘national’. As I
have noted elsewhere (Liu, Hung & Vickers, 2005; Vickers, 2005a, 2005b and
2007), the outcomes of these struggles have been rather different in Hong Kong and
Taiwan—a difference in large part attributable to the greater political pressure on
curriculum developers in Hong Kong to toe Beijing’s ‘one China’ line. However,
significant challenges to the unity of the state and the legitimacy of the Party come
not only from these politically restive but culturally Han Chinese communities, but
also from several of the ‘minority nationalities’ of China’s north-west. Indeed, as we
shall see, the essentially ethno-cultural conceptualization of national identity
throughout the Chinese world creates tensions and contradictions on the one hand
with respect to efforts to incorporate non-Han groups within the Chinese political
order, and on the other for indisputably Han communities in their attempts to assert
a distinct political identity.
As Dru Gladney has argued, ‘Han’ nationalism is itself ‘a construct of twentiethcentury discourses of nationalism that had entered China via Japan in the late
nineteenth century’—a fiction concocted by modernising elites out of a blend of
indigenous traditions and practices, Neo-Darwinist racialism and Western political
theory (Gladney, 2004, xii). However, while Gladney and others (e.g. Dikotter,
1992) thus supply a valuable corrective to the highly essentialised vision of national
identity prevalent in China, the attempt to deconstruct Han identity (or any other
national identity) in this way should not allow us to underestimate its importance for
those who see themselves as sharing in it. Historians or anthropologists can take any
368 E. Vickers
nation—even China—and show how it is ultimately a historical construction, rather
than an eternally evolving organism, but in China as in other modern societies
nationalism fulfils a very real emotional need—for a sense of belonging, a sense that
one is a member of a larger community that commands respect and bestows dignity.
Just as Confucianism supplied this sense of community, of a corporate ethic, and
indeed of moral superiority to the traditional ruling elite, so a nationalism retaining
elements of this older ethos does the same for the immeasurably larger community of
the educated (and semi-educated) urban middle classes of contemporary China.
However, whereas the assumptions underlying earlier conceptions of a Confucian
World Order clearly justified suzerainty over various barbarian tribes (precisely
because Confucianism was a creed with universal rather than national pretensions)
(Fairbank, 1973), transferring the old imperial mandate to a Chinese nation defined
explicitly in ethno-cultural terms has involved some challenging intellectual and
ideological acrobatics.
The remainder of this paper examines the historical contortions that this effort has
involved for museums across Greater China. It looks at the repackaging of the Chinese
revolution for a post-socialist society, the emphasis on a patriotism that transcends
ideological divides, the appropriation by the Communist regime of traditional symbols
of China and Chinese values, the use of museums to display a vision of an advanced
and sophisticated brave new China, and their role in symbolising and reinforcing the
incorporation of minority nationalities into this vision. The analysis then turns briefly
to the role of museums in the complex cultural politics of Hong Kong and Taiwan, as
both societies attempt to articulate identities that are at once both Chinese and selfconsciously distinct from the China of the CCP.
Museums and patriotic education on the Chinese mainland
In June 1994, a new set of ‘Guidelines for Patriotic Education’ was adopted at a
national conference on education. This document gave the official stamp to the
displacement of Marxist ideology by ‘pragmatic nationalism’. No longer would all
students applying to universities be required to take the examination in Marxist
thought, but once admitted more and more would be subjected to patriotic
education courses such as the ‘I am Chinese’ programme, while patriotism also
became the major theme of ideological education in schools and colleges. September
of the same year witnessed the publication of an Outline for Conducting Patriotic
Education issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP). This set out the aims of the patriotic education campaign:
boosting the nation’s spirit, enhancing its cohesion, fostering its self-esteem and sense
of pride, consolidating and developing a patriotic united front to the broadest extent
possible, and directing and rallying the masses’ patriotic passions to the great cause of
building socialism with Chinese characteristics [and] helping the motherland become
unified, prosperous and strong. (quoted in Zhao, 2004, 219)
The campaign embraced (and continues to embrace) a wide range of media—from
film and television to school textbooks, and most recently the internet (China
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 369
Patriotic Education Net, 2006). Not only schools, colleges and universities, but all
work units were required to participate, for example by organising forums to discuss
patriotism. From the start, museums and monuments were assigned a central role—
Zhao traces the origins of the campaign back to a Circular on Fully Using Cultural
Relics to Conduct Education in Patriotism, issued by the CCP Central Propaganda
Department in 1991. The 1994 circulars ordered ‘all tourist spots, such as
museums, memorials, historical (especially revolutionary) sites, cultural relic
conservation areas, popular architectural sites and even local community centres’
to ‘highlight their patriotic identities’ (Zhao 2004, p. 221). The State Education
Commission named ‘One Hundred Patriotic Education Bases’, most of them
historic sites and museums. The number was later greatly increased, and a
distinction introduced between ordinary ‘bases for patriotic education’, and more
important ‘bases for training in patriotic education’—aiguozhuyi jiaoyu shifan jidi. A
series of pocket guidebooks to the original one hundred bases was subsequently
issued, and considerable state resources were assigned to the protection and
renovation of key sites. Zhao gives a figure of ten million yuan (approximately
US$1.3 million at current values—though this represents a more considerable sum
for mid-1990s China) for the amount invested between 1992 and 1996 in protection
of sites in North-east China related to the Sino-Japanese war.
Meanwhile, targets were set for an increase in the total number of museums. In
2002, the People’s Daily reported that the State Administration of Cultural Heritage
had officially called for China to have 3000 museums by the year 2015, including ‘at
least one fully-functional museum for every large or medium-sized city’ (People’s
Daily, 2002).2 Key national holidays—particularly the Lunar New Year, Labour
Day (May 1) and National Day (October 1)—have also become occasions for mass
displays of patriotic sentiment, as did the return to the motherland of Hong Kong on
1 July 1997 and of Macau on 1 January 1999. The expansion of museums and of
tourist attractions more generally was related to a decision to increase the number of
public holidays, in particular by extending the three major holiday periods. This gave
a boost to the domestic tourism industry, and hence the wider economy, by
affording the new middle classes more opportunities to spend their earnings, while
the development of new museums and tourist attractions ensured, or so the
authorities hoped, that tourism and patriotic education would frequently go hand in
hand.
Repackaging the revolution
Passing through Shanghai for the first time in 1993, I paid a visit to the ‘Site of the
First Conference of the Chinese Communist Party’ (known in brief as the Yi Da Hui
Zhi). This then stood in a somewhat run-down district of early twentieth-century
houses (in the Shikumen style) once inhabited by the Shanghainese bourgeoisie, but
since 1949 appropriated by the state and reassigned for communal use. Ten years
later, most of these houses had been bulldozed, while the area immediately
surrounding the Yi Da Hui Zhi had been transformed by a Hong Kong developer
370 E. Vickers
into Xintiandi (‘New Heaven and Earth’), one of Shanghai’s most fashionable
nightspots, featuring a highly exclusive club, a variety of more or less expensive
restaurants and bars, and a large multi-screen cinema operating under a US
franchise. Around the corner from the Yi Da Hui Zhi stood a new Shikumen
museum, replete with nostalgia for the vanished world of the inter-war middle
classes. Thus a key monument to the origins of China’s proletarian revolution had
been incorporated into a playground for the capitalist rich of twenty-first-century
Shanghai, and one that evoked an idealised vision of pre-revolutionary bourgeois life
(see Denton, 2005).
Insofar as the revolution is still celebrated, therefore, class struggle is no longer a
central theme in the revolutionary drama. To a large extent, the Communist
Revolution is no longer seen as the definitive break with a ‘semi-feudal, semicolonial’ past, but as the culmination of a longer revolutionary process traceable
back to those elements that sought to defend, strengthen and modernise China in
the face of foreign aggression from the nineteenth century onwards. The search in
Communist historiography for early shoots of socialism is in itself nothing new—
older textbooks were replete with rousing narratives of peasant rebellions, while the
Taiping rebels of the mid-nineteenth century and the Boxers of 1899–1900 in
particular were depicted as prototypes of later peasant revolutionaries, antiimperialist Korean War ‘volunteers’ or Red Guards (Cohen, 1998). However, in
contemporary narratives the socialist teleology, if it is retained at all, is essentially a
rhetorical gloss overlaying an account that depicts a prosperous, modern and united
Chinese state as the ultimate objective. The drive for a more equitable distribution of
prosperity is no longer a defining theme of the official narrative. Instead, the
uniqueness of China’s ‘national situation’ (guoqing) is emphasised—justifying
continuing one-party CCP rule with reference to the paramount need for social
and political stability if the nation is to continue its progress towards renewed
greatness (Zhao, 2004).
The period of the foundation of the CCP in the 1920s was also the period of what
became known as the ‘May Fourth Movement’ (Wusi yundong). This was sparked off
initially by patriotic outrage at China’s treatment in the post-Great War peace
settlement of 1919, but soon developed into a broader campaign for the
modernization of Chinese society, characterised by an impassioned embrace of
ideals of ‘science’ and ‘democracy’. Marxism was just one ingredient in a heady and
eclectic mix of ‘modern’ foreign ideas that inspired many of the leading
contemporary intellectuals, including Mao (who, like many others, was attracted
to elements of Deweyan progressivism as well as Marxism and Leninism) (Mitter,
2004; Gray, 2006). The CCP has always invoked memories of ‘May 4th’, but
traditionally maintained a distinction between the ‘correct’ Communist line to which
the movement gave birth, and the various bourgeois ‘deviations’ associated with
intellectuals who went on to support the Kuomintang against the Communists in the
Chinese Civil War. However, as patriotism and national unity have increasingly
overshadowed socialism in CCP ideology, this distinction has assumed decreasing
significance.
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 371
In 2004, a new ‘May 4th’ Museum opened on ‘May 4th Street’ (Wusi Dajie) in
central Beijing. This was housed just north of the Forbidden City in the ‘Red House’
(Honglou), the main building on the original campus of Peking University
(previously occupied by part of the Culture Ministry). The opening of the museum
was preceded and accompanied by a remodelling of the surrounding public space, of
the kind witnessed in Shanghai’s Xintiandi and in many other sites throughout the
country. A ‘May 4th’ Memorial was erected in a new park (Huang Cheng Gen
Gongyuan) adjacent to the museum, while commemorative murals were installed in
a side street. The museum exhibition and nearby memorials celebrated not only the
usual CCP patriarchs (Mao himself had worked in the university library), but also
leading intellectuals such as Cai Yuanpei (Vice Chancellor of Peking University at
the time of the ‘May 4th’ Movement) who had previously been branded as
‘bourgeois’, and who had no connection at all with the Party. Moreover, the
Movement is depicted in the museum as an essentially patriotic struggle aimed at
national renewal, strengthening and modernization, while the contemporary
emphasis on ‘democracy’ is downplayed. The Party is keen to appropriate the
memory of ‘May 4th’ for the cause of pragmatic nationalism, perhaps particularly
since this was modern China’s prototypical ‘student movement’, and an inspiration
for the student demonstrators of 1989 in nearby Tiananmen Square.
The ‘May 4th’ Movement is just one part of what might be termed China’s Long
Revolution, encompassing not just the Communist Revolution of 1949, but the
whole period leading up to and following the Xinhai, or Republican, Revolution of
1911. As socialism becomes less and less central to the official narrative of modern
Chinese history, so the regime becomes more eager to associate itself with the legacy
of earlier, non-socialist revolutionary patriots—effectively seeking to construct a
retrospective ‘patriotic united front to the broadest extent possible’ (see above,
quoted in Zhao, 2004, p. 219). Sun Yatsen, the leading Nationalist revolutionary
and (briefly) first President of the Republic of China, was always revered by
Communists, and his widow, Song Ching-ling, was a prominent party supporter.
Sun’s grandiose mausoleum in Nanjing has been scrupulously preserved and
maintained, as have sites associated with him in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Since the
1990s, it has been Sun’s portrait, rather than those of Marx and other Communist
luminaries, that has been hung on Tiananmen in Beijing during the Chinese
National Day celebrations. Meanwhile, Sun’s birthplace in Cuiheng village, near
Zhongshan in Guangdong, has also been renovated and a museum opened there.
However, in recent years the pantheon of national heroes has opened its gates to
figures previously vilified as class enemies—such as Zeng Guofan, the nineteenthcentury self-strengthener and defender of the Qing dynasty against the Taiping
rebels of the 1850s and 1860s. In 2003, Chinese Central Television screened an epic
historical costume drama entitled Zou xiang Gonghe (‘Towards the Republic’) which
depicted not only Sun Yatsen, but also figures ranging from the Guangxu Emperor,
the Qing loyalist reformer Kang Youwei, Li Hongzhang (the Qing official who
signed the treaty ceding Taiwan to Japan), Yuan Shikai (the Imperial general who
became President of the Chinese Republic in 1912) and even the traditionally reviled
372 E. Vickers
Dowager Empress, Cixi, as noble (if sometimes ill-advised) patriots struggling to
preserve the integrity of the Chinese state. This was rather too much for some
influential Party ideologues, who insisted that several of the more contentious
episodes be withheld from broadcast.
Nevertheless, if the ‘seller-outer’ (mai guo zei) Li Hongzhang remains (just)
outside the pale, the same is no longer true of Mao’s old enemy, Chiang Kai-shek.
The former presidential palace in Nanjing was transformed in 2004 into a huge
museum, with Chiang’s offices restored to their original appearance. Later that year,
I visited Huaqing Pool near Xi’an, site of the famous ‘incident’ of 1936 when Chiang
was kidnapped by the warlord general Zhang Xueliang and released on condition
that he abandon his war against the Communists and instead join with them in
fighting the Japanese. There I was told by a guide that Chiang’s Kuomintang regime
deserved at least as much credit for defeating the Japanese as did the Communists—
a far cry from the old official line that accorded most if not all of the credit to the
People’s Liberation Army. For this guide, the patriotism of the Kuomintang was
what mattered—ideological divisions with the CCP were of little interest. For the
CCP regime, meanwhile, this reappraisal of the historical role of the KMT is related
to attempts to forge more friendly ties with the KMT on Taiwan, thus furthering the
cause of re-unification. Coverage of the 2005 visit to the Chinese mainland by
‘Chinese Kuomintang Party Chairman Lien Chan’ (as he was described in the
official mainland media) emphasised the ‘Chineseness’ of both the KMT as a Party,
and Lien Chan as an individual. Lien toured historical sites in Nanjing (including
the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum), visited both the Shanghai Museum and the Shanghai
Urban Planning Museum (see below), was taken to see the Terracotta Warriors in
Xi’an, and made a visit to the 9.18 Anti-Japanese War Museum in Shenyang. Here
he was quoted as declaring that ‘Northeast China was occupied by the Japanese
invaders for 14 years and my hometown (sic.) Taiwan was even under the control of
the Japanese for 50 years. These are the great shame of our nationality’, adding ‘We
can forgive, but we will not forget, and we will never permit any attempts to tamper
with history’ (People’s Daily Online, 2005).
Just as the CCP has sought through textbooks, museums and the media to revive
and reinforce memories of the patriotic struggle (by all Chinese) against Japanese
aggression, so it has maintained an embarrassed silence with regard to the
continuing revolution of the Maoist era. The Great Leap Forward awaits its
memorial or museum, as does the Cultural Revolution—both dismissed by the postMao elite (in numerous published memoirs) as disastrous egalitarian experiments,
but subjected to only superficial scrutiny for fear of attracting bad publicity to the
Chairman and the Party. For example, in Beijing’s Museum of Contemporary
Chinese Literature (Xiandai Wenxue Bowuguan), which was established after
lobbying by the son of the famous novelist Lao She, there is no mention of the
Cultural Revolution, despite the fact that many prominent writers were among its
victims. Lao She himself committed suicide in a lake north of the Forbidden City
after being tortured and humiliated by Red Guards. Implicitly, therefore, history in
the People’s Republic still ends in 1949, and the subsequent period, to the extent
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 373
that it is commemorated in public monuments, memorials or museums, is viewed
overall as a Long March towards progress and prosperity.3
From ancient past to hyper-modern present—museums and the reinvention of Chinese
tradition
Gu Wei Shi Yong (use the past to serve the present) was one of Mao’s favourite
aphorisms, though the use or abuse of history in this way can hardly be regarded as
peculiar either to Mao or to China. Mao did not reject the entire ‘feudal’ past out of
hand, despite the excesses of the Cultural Revolution with its struggle against the
‘Four Olds’ and the bizarre ‘Anti-Confucius and Lin Biao Campaign’. He was, for
example, an admirer of the Emperor Qin Shihuang, who is regarded as having
created the first unified Chinese state in 221 B.C. (and who was also a renowned
book-burner and cultural revolutionary of sorts—he unified the Chinese script).
However, Mao’s successors, in their drive to construct a broad patriotic ‘united
front’, have conscripted not only the First Emperor, but also a range of both
historical and semi-mythical figures from Chinese tradition.
Emperor Qin Shihuang is celebrated both as the creator of the terracotta warriors
(now housed in a massive modern museum outside Xi’an), and as the ruler who
ordered the construction of the Great Wall of China. Folk memory of the
construction of the Great Wall traditionally emphasised the awful human cost
involved in its construction, and the tyranny of those rulers—notably Qin
Shihuang—who instigated it. However, particularly since the 1972 visit to China
of America’s President Nixon—who was famously photographed on the Wall at
Badaling near Beijing—it has been officially celebrated as a symbol of the
outstanding technological prowess of the Chinese people, and as a monument to
their collective efforts and creative energies. Nor is the Wall’s role in defending
China against nomadic ‘barbarian’ invaders emphasised since, as is discussed further
below, the groups (such as the Mongols) from which these invaders came are now
officially regarded as ‘Chinese’ too.
In Shaanxi Province, about one hundred miles north of the Mausoleum of Qin
Shihuang near Xi’an, is the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor—the Huangdi Ling.
The Yellow Emperor was traditionally regarded as the ancestor of the Zhonghua
Minzu (or ‘Chinese race/nation’) and father of Chinese civilization. Steles at his
mausoleum feature dedications in the calligraphy of emperors and their officials, as
well as Republican leaders (including Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kai-shek) and their
Communist successors (though Mao declined to pen the inscription for the hilltop
shrine itself—this was done by Guo Muoro instead). The post-1989 period has
witnessed a new official interest in encouraging what might be described as a Yellow
Emperor cult, with National People’s Congress Chairman Li Ruihan making a
much-publicised visit to the mausoleum in 1994. In recent years, the annual
ceremonies to celebrate the Yellow Emperor’s birthday have grown increasingly
lavish, and the mausoleum has been extended with the addition of a huge new
temple-like structure with a large square in front. The Yellow Emperor’s significance
374 E. Vickers
and usefulness to the regime lie partly in a symbolism that, since it is fundamentally
‘racial’, transcends the divisions amongst Chinese (or ‘Huaren’) in the People’s
Republic, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore and other points ‘overseas’.
Similarly, the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian outside Beijing is portrayed as
relating somehow (exactly how is not made clear) to the ancestry of all Chinese
people, and the procession of the Olympic torch to the opening ceremony of the
2008 Games is reportedly scheduled to start at the site. (Chinese scientists remain
sceptical of the ‘Out of Africa’ theory regarding human origins.)
The attempt to ground the legitimacy of the CCP regime in appeals to peculiarly
‘Chinese values’ has also involved a rehabilitation of Confucius, whose birthplace at
Qufu in Shandong has witnessed a huge surge in tourism, and is now graced with a
large new ‘Confucius Research Centre’. Displays at this Centre highlight the
significance of the Confucian legacy not just for China (and Hong Kong, Taiwan
and the overseas Chinese), but for East Asia more broadly, and prominently feature
endorsements from current state leaders. Confucius’ new appeal to the regime lies
partly in the emphasis of the orthodox Confucian tradition on loyalty, discipline and
respect for established authority, and his exhortations to moral behaviour (for
example with regard to bribe-taking or -giving) on the part of rulers and ruled alike.
In addition, though, the rapid economic growth and modernization of East Asia’s
other largely Confucian societies—notably Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and
Singapore—has transformed the sage from a ‘feudal’ embarrassment responsible for
China’s stagnation (as he was seen by Weber and many of the May 4th
modernisers), into an embodiment of Asian moral superiority and developmental
exceptionalism. In this respect, the CCP has largely followed the lead of Lee Kuanyew, the Singapore patriarch, who since the 1980s has loudly preached the gospel of
‘Asian values’ as the key to a strategy of modernization that avoids the decadence,
societal breakdown and decline in respect for authority seen as bedevilling the
contemporary West.
Confucian values are thus no longer seen as incompatible with the CCP’s claim to
represent ‘advanced forces’. The pursuit of modernization has always been a key
goal of CCP rule, and a key element in this process has been the reshaping of
China’s urban landscape. It was Mao who in the 1950s ordered the destruction of
Beijing’s monumental city walls, and replaced them with a modern four-lane ring
road. In recent years a substantial section of the wall has been reconstructed as a
tourist attraction, but meanwhile the bulldozing of old Beijing has proceeded apace.
Surviving areas of traditional hutongs (lanes of old single-storey courtyard residences)
are now largely confined to the district north of the Forbidden City and around the
imperial lakes. As a result, this area has increasingly been transformed into an openair theme park of ‘old Beijing’—with cycle-rickshaw tours and bars and cafes
catering to Western expatriates, backpackers and well-heeled locals. Plate glass and
concrete predominate elsewhere in the National Capital, though sometimes with
‘Chinese characteristics’ such as up-turned roof corners. No building better
symbolises the ultra-modern aspirations of the municipal authorities than the
space-age structure housing the new Capital Museum—the museum was previously
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 375
located in the old Confucius Temple (now being restored). Inside this museum, the
visitor can view reconstructions of hutong architecture and traditional street scenes
that only ten years ago were visible almost everywhere across the old centre of the
city.
The transformation of China’s cities is celebrated in a new kind of museum—the
Urban Planning Museum. The first of these opened in Shanghai, the mainland’s
most modern city, and a similar museum was opened in 2005 in the inland
metropolis of Chongqing. These museums embody the very hi-tech modernity that
they promote—thus audio-visual shows, computer screens and interactive exhibits of
various kinds predominate. They also display, for the benefit of foreign investors as
well as inquisitive locals, not only the extent of past achievements but the scope of
the local government’s vision for the future. Thus Chongqing’s Urban Planning
Museum complements the new Three Gorges Museum down the road—the latter
celebrates and preserves the regional heritage (much of it soon to be submerged by
the rising waters), while the former holds out the promise of a brighter, more
prosperous future resulting from this massive engineering project. In Shanghai, the
new Shanghai Museum and the Urban Planning Museum are located almost nextdoor to one another, and architecturally both exemplify the modernising aspirations
of the municipal authorities. The Shanghai Museum, which houses an extensive
collection of artefacts from China’s dynastic past, is built in the shape of a ding (an
ancient Chinese ceremonial vessel), while the Urban Planning Museum, though less
distinctive, is architecturally just as self-consciously modern. Both museums were
visited in 2005 by Lien Chan, the Taiwanese Kuomintang leader, underlining the
point that Taiwan and Shanghai share both the glorious heritage of China’s ancient
civilization, and a prosperous and technologically sophisticated present and future—
a future being constructed, in the case of Shanghai, largely through the combination
of Taiwanese investment and know-how with mainland labour.
Solidarity with the minority nationalities
The Yellow Emperor, the Great Wall, Confucius and even Peking Man may serve as
potent symbols for a regime keen to identify itself with an atavistic sense of ethnocultural ‘Chineseness’. However, while these symbols may appeal to a sense of Han
identity encompassing not only ‘China Proper’, but also the ‘compatriots’ (tongbao)
of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the overseas Chinese, they would on
the face of it appear to exclude the non-Han communities that find themselves
within the borders of the People’s Republic. The guidebook to the ‘China Millenium
Monument’ (Zhonghua Shiji Tan)—erected in Beijing in 1999—attempts to square
this circle by referring on the one hand to ‘certain distinctive qualities exhibited by
the contemporary Yellow Races’, while on the other hand evoking a pluralist,
multicultural vision of Chineseness as follows:
One hundred rivers flow into in the great ocean (bai jiang hui da hai)—this is the basic
path of the development of civilization on the territory of China, and of the formation
and development of the unified, pluralistic Chinese nation (duoyuan yiti de Zhonghua
minzu xingcheng). This serves as the basis for preserving the ceaseless development of
376 E. Vickers
Chinese unity over the two thousand years since the Qin and Han [dynasties], and has
fostered our nation’s special characteristic of enjoying compatibility and solidarity
(women minzu fuyu jianrong yu ningjuli de texing).
The representation of the incorporation of regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang,
Manchuria and Inner Mongolia into the Chinese state as the accomplishment of a
legitimate process of ‘unification’ is not a CCP innovation; as Perdue shows, the
Qing scholar Gong Zizhen ‘justified the conquest as the culmination of a longstanding imperial vision supported by Heaven’ (Perdue, 2005, p. 499). However, an
identification of Chineseness with membership of ‘the Yellow races’ would appear to
sit uneasily alongside, for example, either recognition of the independence of
(Outer) Mongolia,4 or claims to the predominantly Turkic/Uighur region of
Xinjiang.
Viewing history as a teleology culminating in the creation of a China possessing
the current boundaries of the People’s Republic has involved a number of prolonged
controversies regarding which figures from the past qualify for official recognition as
‘national heroes’ (minzu yingxiong). The Song Dynasty general Yue Fei is
traditionally revered in South China for his exploits in fighting Mongol (or protoMongol) invaders from the north about 1000 years ago, and the city of Hangzhou
still boasts a temple dedicated to him. Contemporary scholars debate whether Yue
Fei can correctly be described as a ‘national hero’, since the ‘nation’ today includes
descendants both of the denizens of the Song realm, and of the invaders against
whom the general fought. Nonetheless, at the Yue Fei temple the characters Min Zu
Ying Xiong are writ large on one of the compound walls.
If one side of this teleological coin involves downgrading figures such as Yue Fei
from ‘national’ to merely ‘Han nationality’ heroes, the other side involves
acknowledging ‘heroism’ amongst ‘minority nationalities’. Thus the ruthless invader
Genghis Khan, traditionally (and understandably) the object of fear and loathing on
the part of Han Chinese, is now hailed as ‘one of our country’s outstanding political
and military leaders from the Mongol nationality’ (PEP, 1993, p. 109). The Khan
has been the subject of special exhibitions at the ‘China Millenium Monument’ and
other museums as far afield as Hong Kong, while an area adjoining his mausoleum
in Inner Mongolia has been transformed by a private tourism company (run by Han
Chinese) into a massive theme park, commemorating in concrete the Mongol
conquest of Eurasia.
When it comes to the treatment in museums of the cultures and customs of
minority nationalities, however, the approach is typically more condescending than
awe-inspiring. The museums of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and the
Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, which trace their history back to the early
decades of the People’s Republic, both adopt a quadripartite division, modelled on
Soviet precedents. Thus there are sections on Natural History, Ethnic Culture and
Customs, Pre-revolutionary history and Revolutionary history. Marxism remains
more prominent as a theme in the historiography of these ‘minority’ regions, partly
because the discourse of class struggle remains important in justifying the liberation
of these areas from ‘feudal oppression’. While no claims are made in Tibet for any
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 377
‘revolutionary’ history, at the Gyantse Tzong (fort) south-west of Lhasa, one finds
both a ‘Memorial Hall of Anti-British’ (sic.) reminding visitors of Younghusband’s
imperialist adventure of 1904, and nearby a gruesome display of life-size waxworks
demonstrating the barbaric tortures used by landlords in ‘old Tibet’ to exact their
unearned increment from the peasantry. Museums in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and
Tibet trumpet the benefits bestowed on these regions by China—both in the present
and in the distant past. For example, the museum in the oasis town of Hami finds
2000-year-old precedents for the mutual benefit and harmony seen as characterising
relations between the national centre and the Far West in the present day:
In order to strengthen management of Western regions, the Han dynasty garrisoned
troops or peasants, opened up wasteland and grew food again in Hami on a large scale,
bringing about advanced production techniques and experience, and promoting the
economic development of the Western regions. At the same time, crops, music and
dance of the Western regions were introduced eastwards to the inland, making
contributions to the development of the inland [regions].
The portrayal of this relationship—past and present—represents the Han centre as
the source of advanced technology and civilization, and the minorities at the
periphery as providing raw materials, luxurious frippery and a touch of exoticism.5
Similar assumptions regarding ‘minority’ cultures are reflected in the sections in the
Urumqi and Hohhot museums on ‘Ethnic Culture and Customs’. These feature an
array of colourful ethnic costumes, and cases full of various ceremonial and everyday
objects, with little attempt to set these in any meaningful historical context. The
depiction of ethnic customs and cultures as essentially static and unchanging denies
the minority nationalities the status of historical agents in their own right, and
portrays them instead as historical raw material to be shaped and moulded for their
own benefit by the ‘advanced’ Han. The public promotion and celebration of ‘interethnic solidarity’ (minzu tuanjie), whether in museums or in pageants such as the
annual ‘Grape Festival’ (Putaojie) at Turpan in Xinjiang, ritually acknowledge the
paternal solicitude of the (Han-dominated) authorities, and the carefree prosperity
consequently enjoyed by the all-singing, all-dancing minorities.
Museums and cultural politics in Hong Kong and Taiwan
The Nationalist Kuomintang regime traditionally shared a ‘one China’ programme
that—even more explicitly than the Communists—saw non-Han groups as inferior to
and dependent on their Han big brothers. Taiwan, which became the haven of the
Kuomintang regime after 1949, had been viewed by the mainland elite as a semicivilised frontier region additionally tainted by its colonial subordination to Japan from
1895 to 1945. The fact that Taiwan itself had been colonised by the Chinese only since
the early seventeenth century, and had prior to that been inhabited almost exclusively
by Polynesian tribes, was something that was emphasised by the Japanese as much as it
was downplayed by the Kuomintang. The Japanese made the anthropological study of
Taiwan’s aborigines the central task of their colonial museum in Taipei, partly in order
to support the view of Taiwan as a savage and largely non-Chinese ‘terra nullius’ prior
378 E. Vickers
to its cession to Japan—and thus as ripe for colonization (Harrison, 2001). However,
after the retrocession to Nationalist China this anthropological collection was neglected
for the best part of half a century, while the museum’s exhibition rooms were largely
given over to displays of Chinese art. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the
construction on the outskirts of the city of the National Palace Museum to house the
treasures transported to Taiwan from the Forbidden City in Beijing. This suitably
palatial construction and its contents were calculated to inspire awe and reverence for
the matchless heritage of Chinese civilization, and thereby reinforce a sense of Chinese
national pride amongst all Taiwanese.
However, the loosening of the Nationalist grip on power from the 1980s onwards
was both caused by, and helped to reinforce and accelerate, a loosening of the grip of
‘one China’ Nationalism on the Taiwanese populace. As I have discussed at length
elsewhere (Vickers, 2007, 2007/8), the rise of a sense of Taiwanese consciousness
has been reflected in a reorientation of museums towards local history and themes
that emphasise or celebrate Taiwan’s distinctiveness from the mainland. This shift
has included the public commemoration of events such as the Nationalist massacres
of Taiwanese conducted on and following February 28, 1946 (colloquially known as
‘228’)—now memorialised in a ‘228 Peace Memorial Museum’ in central Taipei. A
campaign of what is derided in the mainland media as ‘cultural Taiwanese
independence’ (wenhua Taidu) has been pursued with a vengeance since the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took power in 2000. The
various non-Chinese influences on the island’s past—particularly the period of
colonial rule by the Dutch in the seventeenth century—have been the subject of
various special exhibitions, including one staged by that old bastion of Chineseness,
the National Palace Museum itself.
In addition, just as the Japanese did before them, the DPP regime has sought to
draw attention to Taiwan’s Polynesian heritage as a means of underlining the
island’s ethnic and historical distinctiveness from China. New museums dedicated
to the archaeology and anthropology of the aborigines have been opened, and
sections on these themes added to existing museums. However, aboriginal history is
seldom examined in museum exhibitions—as in mainland China, so in the new
Taiwan, the culture and past of ‘backward’ ethnic minorities is refracted through the
dusty lens of anthropological science, and/or the distorting prism of Han-dominated
politics. In the words of an aborigine I met at Taiwan’s National Museum of
Prehistory, ‘Of one hundred visitors coming to this museum, you won’t find one
aboriginal. The only aborigines who come here are the ones that come to… sing and
dance’.6 In his view, this and similar museums presented a sanitised view of
aboriginal culture for consumption by ethnic Han tourists: ‘In these museums and
most of the books about Taiwan’s indigenous people, you don’t see our real faces—
you don’t get our point of view’.
Despite the diametrically opposing political agendas that they serve, there are thus
similarities between the role accorded to museums in China under the CCP and in
Taiwan under the DPP. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that Taiwan’s
President Chen was democratically (if narrowly) elected by an electorate mindful of
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 379
the persistent threat to their island’s autonomy posed by the mainland regime—if
Taiwan’s museums are subject to political manipulation, at least it is ultimately the
Taiwanese themselves who are doing the manipulating, and the abuse of history for
propagandist purposes is contested in a relatively open media.
The same cannot be said of Hong Kong, where the post-1997 authorities have
pursued a programme of ‘national’ re-education, through schooling and through
cultural policy more broadly (Vickers, 2005a). Local pro-Beijing elements are
vociferous in calling for various cultural projects to boost patriotism—from
constructing a new Sun Yat-sen Museum (no self-respecting Chinese city can be
without one), to staging more or less propagandist temporary exhibitions prepared
by mainland museums. It can be difficult for local officials to resist such calls, since
under the new dispensation a reputation for being less than enthusiastically patriotic
is unlikely to enhance one’s career prospects. The Hong Kong Museum of History
boasts a state-of-the-art permanent exhibition but, particularly in the sections
devoted to post-war and contemporary Hong Kong, political developments and
controversial incidents are almost entirely avoided. While press criticism and the
professionalism of museum staff deflected some of the cruder attempts at political
interference in the exhibition design, the narrative of ‘The Hong Kong Story’
nonetheless concludes with a triumphalist audio-visual celebration of the region’s
return to the Chinese motherland. This features a brief clip of one of the annual
candle-lit vigils commemorating the suppression of the Student Movement in June
1989—with an accompanying caption proclaiming ‘Blood is Thicker than Water’
(see Vickers, 2005b, Chapter 3). Thus, just as the May Fourth Museum in Beijing
seeks to emphasise the patriotism of the 1919 demonstrators, while downplaying or
ignoring their democratic objectives, so the Hong Kong Museum of History does the
same with respect to a much more recent movement—and one, moreover, that is
widely seen as having helped to crystalise Hongkongers’ sense of their distinctiveness
from mainland China.
Conclusion
The assumption that identity is something ‘in the blood’ runs deep in Chinese
societies—whether on the mainland, in Taiwan, Hong Kong or among the overseas
diaspora. It is often expressed by the concept of xuetong, or ‘blood-union’, that can
refer to familial and lineage relationships, and by extension is also used to describe
the relationship binding the members of the Chinese minzu (nation/tribe) to one
another. The Kuomintang regime in Republican China (and later on Taiwan)
openly adopted an organicist, biological conception of the nation. For their
Communist successors, a historiography constructed around notions of socialist
materialism and class struggle might have been expected to dictate ambivalence
towards a conception of national identity that appealed to the ‘feudal’ concepts of
clan and lineage. However, in the aftermath of the suppression of the 1989 Student
Movement, and with the subsequent abandonment of socialism in all but name, it
was to precisely such an organicist, essentialising vision of Chineseness that the
380 E. Vickers
Communist regime turned—as witnessed, for example, by the revival of the Yellow
Emperor cult, the role planned for the Peking Man site in ceremonies for the 2008
Olympic Games, and the construction of the ‘China Millenium Monument’.
The contemporary boom in construction of museums on the mainland is a
concrete manifestation of the regime’s claim to the custodianship of ‘5000 years’ of
Chinese civilization. However, identification with a primordial national past has
gone hand-in-hand with the pell-mell destruction of the physical traces of that past.
As noted above, within the space of ten or fifteen years, Beijing’s hutongs and
courtyard houses have been transformed from the dominant architectural feature of
a living city, to a quaint remnant preserved for the benefit of sightseers. The devotion
of a large gallery in the new Capital Museum to traditional local architecture serves,
like the museum building itself, primarily as a demonstration of how far modern
Beijing has come in liberating itself from its past.
Taiwan’s cultural and educational policies since the end of Kuomintang martial law
in 1987 have effected a liberation of a different kind—from the stultifying ‘one China’
political correctness that the old Nationalist regime imposed. However, the drive to
redefine Taiwan as a ‘multicultural’ society, the product of a diverse array of influences
including those of the aborigines, the Dutch and the Japanese as well as the Chinese,
partly reflects a sense that the island’s political distinctiveness can only be legitimised on
the basis of a dilution of ‘Chinese blood’ by an admixture of other ingredients.7
Meanwhile, museums continue to be subjected to political pressures, particularly since
the directors of the major public museums are usually government appointees, although
Taiwan’s pluralism affords some protection from cruder forms of political interference.
On the Chinese mainland and (to a lesser extent) in Hong Kong, however, museums
are openly designated as vehicles for an official programme of political socialization. In
the People’s Republic, the development of museums really needs to be considered in
the broader context of education and cultural policy—something that I will shortly
undertake in a book-length study of museums and national identity in Greater China.
This broader programme of ‘patriotic education’ is fundamentally aimed at legitimising
the CCP project of rapid but inegalitarian modernization and industrialization, while
maintaining unaltered the Party’s grip on power and the absolute insistence on the
unity of the ‘nation’ as the Party defines it. The Chinese revolution is now
commemorated much more as a national than as a socialist achievement, and museums
play a central role in promoting the vision of a modern but uniquely ancient,
progressive but essentially changeless China not only to Chinese citizens but to
foreigners as well. Hence visitors to Beijing in the Olympic year of 2008 will find a new
National Museum of China opening its doors on Tiananmen Square—where
previously stood the now-defunct Museum of Revolutionary History.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy,
which funded most of the travel essential for conducting this research through their
‘Small Research Grants’ scheme.
Museums and nationalism in contemporary China 381
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
The final of the Asian Football Cup in 2004, played between the Chinese hosts and Japan, was
the occasion for raucous displays of anti-Japanese nationalism on the part of Chinese fans. The
anti-Japan theme is prominent in numerous television documentaries and feature films, such
as ‘Tokyo Trial’—a 2006 film about the postwar trial of Japanese war criminals. ‘Hero’
(Yingxiong), directed by Zhang Yimou, was China’s top-grossing film of 2002, and told the
story of an assassination plot against the first emperor of China, Qin Shihuang—a plot which
the assassin eventually abandons, telling the Emperor that he has realised that the unity of ‘All
Under Heaven’ (Tianxia—i.e. China) is of more importance than the fact that the Emperor
has destroyed his kingdom and killed his family. This line raised laughs among some cinemagoers in Hong Kong—but in the Beijing cinema where I saw it, no-one apart from me
appeared to see the funny side.
I am grateful to Marzi Varutti of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies in Geneva,
whose unpublished paper on museums in Shanghai contained this reference. It is unclear,
however, what increase this figure of 3000 would represent, as it is also unclear what
constitutes a museum according to official definitions.
And indeed the Long March itself is now commemorated for embodying a generalised spirit of
patriotic determination that holds lessons for the youth of today—but not specifically for its
role in any struggle to establish a socialist order.
In fact, Mongolian independence is only grudgingly recognised—official PRC historiography
sees Mongolia as having been illegitimately prised out of China’s grasp by the machinations of
the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.
The peripheral position of the ‘minorities’ in representations of ‘Chinese culture’ is reflected
by the design of the exhibition in the Shanghai Museum—the main galleries consist of an
exposition of the Han cultural heritage, while one room on the top floor is set aside for all the
‘minority nationalities’, who are represented by their quaint and colourful costumes,
weaponry, musical instruments and handicrafts.
Conversation with the author, 21 January 2004.
This is particularly the case with the recent trend amongst some of a pro-independence
persuasion for claiming aboriginal ancestry.
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