Museums, memorial sites and exhibitionary culture in the People's Republic of China

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 183, 2005, Pages 565-586

  Denton, Kirk A ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL IDENTITY; CULTURE; ETHICS; MUSEUM;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 30944441200     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741005000366     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Jianzhu chuangzuo (ed.), Zhongguo bowuguan jianzhu yu wenhua (The Architecture and Culture of Chinese Museums) (Beijing: Jixie gongye, 2003), p. ii.
2. The 2003 edition of the Zhongguo tongji nianjian (China Statistics Yearbook) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji, 2003) gives the figure of 80 million visitors for the year 2002 (p. 787).
3. To put this in some comparative perspective, about 100 feature films (officially-approved) were produced in 2002; and 170,000 books were published (with sales amounting to some 43 billion yuan). See China Statistics Yearbook, pp. 783-795.
4. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
5. See Stephen E. Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2002), p. 31.
6. To put museum growth in China in perspective, it should be pointed out that in 1949 China had around 20 museums. By the beginning of the Cultural Revolution there were 160. From 1980 to 1999, the number rose from 365 to 1,357.
7. For figures, see Wang Hongjun (ed.), Zhongguo bowuguanxue jichu (Foundation of Chinese Museum Studies) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2001), p. 114.
8. The PRC ranks seventh in the world in number of museums, well below the top three, the US (over 8,000), Germany (over 4,500) and Italy (just under 3,500).
9. Ibid. pp. 129-130.
10. Museum construction and renovation is continuing at a fast pace. In Beijing alone, in the next few years, the number of museums will increase from 118 to 130, through an investment of some RMB 7 billion.
11. According to Su Donghai (in ibid.), China is entering a new "peak" in museum construction. Some project that by 2015, China will have half again as many museums as it does today.
12. I am thinking of such cultural forms as television soap operas centred around teenage love, pop music concerts, "campus fiction" about young love, internet novels (and, more recently, a text messaging novel), pornographic internet sites, fashion and design magazines.
13. There are an increasing number of privately-owned and funded museums in China, but the vast majority continue to be funded primarily by different levels of government. It is also true, however, that some state-run museums are able to rely increasingly on non-state funding (donations from outside sources and revenue from visitors). James Flath argues that this frees them from the imposition of official "stateist" narratives of history, but as I argue below I don't think this is necessarily the case. See James Flath, "Managing historical capital in Shandong: Museum, monument, and memory in provincial China." The Public Historian Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring 2002 ), p. 54.
14. As it is for museums in the West, funding is clearly a concern for Chinese museologists today (see Wang Hongjun, Foundation of Chinese Museum Studies, pp. 398-414).
15. See Kirk A. Denton, "Visual memory and the construction of a revolutionary past: Paintings from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 203-235.
16. Su Donghai, "Museums and museum philosophy in China," Nordisk Museologi, No. 2 (1995), pp. 61-80.
17. Lü Jimin (ed.), Dangdai Zhongguo de bowuguan shiye 1998 (The Enterprise of Contemporary Chinese Museums, 1998) (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo 1998), pp. 101-103.
18. Wang Hongjun, Foundation of Chinese Museum Studies, p. 109.
19. For a collection of state laws and official proclamations regarding cultural heritage, see ibid. pp. 493-559.
20. For the reference to "spiritual civilization," see ibid. p. 511.
21. For a general discussion of the rise of patriotic education (aiguo jiaoyu) in the 1990s, see Baogang He and Yingjie Guo, Nationalism, National Identity and Democratization in China (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000).
22. As Paul Cohen has shown, nationalism and patriotism were not just a product of state intervention, they constituted a general ethos in the cultural field as a whole. The 1990s saw the appearance of numerous texts in the "national humiliation" (guochi) mode, works that sought to recall China's history of national humiliations at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialists, the Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (China can say no) books being only the most obvious examples. See Paul A. Cohen, "Remembering and forgetting: National humiliation in 20th-century China," Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 2002), pp. 1-39.
23. See Wang Hongjun, Foundation of Chinese Museum Studies, pp. 522-25. The language of this state document reveals, to my mind, a strong self-consciousness in officialdom about the appeal of popular culture forms.
24. For a complete listing of the sites, as well as a detailed description of each, see Aiguozhuyi jiaoyu shifan jidi da bolan (Great Overview of Patriotic Model Sites) (Beijing: Hongqi and Guangdong renmin, 1998).
25. When I visited the exhibition, the hall was packed with visitors. Though the free admission and the fact that it was a Saturday no doubt accounted for the large turnout, the national media attention contributed to it.
26. Typical of the socialist aesthetic is the National Museum of China (formerly the Chinese History Museum and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution), designed by Zhang Kaiji in the late 1950s. There are plans to renovate the museum, including building an addition, before it reopens in 2007, just in time for the Olympic Games. The exterior of the museum will, museum directors have assured the museum community, remain intact.
27. For an excellent collection of essays on this topic, see Michaela Giebelhaus (ed.), The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
28. The architect, Xing Tonghe, was highly conscious of striking a balance between a foreign and a traditional Chinese aesthetic. Although it perhaps cannot compete with the Bund in terms of being a visual icon of Shanghai, images of the museum appear regularly in Shanghai and internationally. The museum appears as the centrepiece of Global Museum's internet banner: http://www.globalmuseum.org/.
29. The Fushun Lei Feng Memorial Hall has competition from Lei Feng's native Wangchang, in Hunan, which also has a memorial hall for their native son. The Fushun hall was built in 1964, and then added on to or renovated in 1969, 1992 and 2002. In its 40-year history, some 47 million people have visited it.
30. There is clearly a wealth gap in museum construction. Wealthy cities like Qingdao can afford to build fancy new museums, while smaller towns such as Qingzhou, in the Shandong interior, struggle just to keep their collections intact.
31. Zhao Chungui, "Xu - er" ("Preface, two"), in Jianzhu chuangzuo, The Architecture and Culture of Chinese Museums. Zhao's preface to the volume serves as a kind of manifesto for good museum design, which should be "pluralistic," "individualistic," "humanistic," "holistic" and "standardized."
32. Several essays in ibid. mention this.
33. Sociologists Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell have argued that increased global interaction in "organizational fields" can lead to a homogenization of behaviour, patterns and tastes, what he calls "institutional isomorphorism." See "The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," in Michael J. Handel (ed.), The Sociology of Organizations: Classic, Contemporary, and Critical Readings (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003), pp. 243-253.
34. Chinese museums have begun to use Western design firms in their planning and exhibition design. For example, Gallagher & Associates, a Maryland-based design firm, has been involved in the planning and design of the new Shanghai Science and Technology Museum; Jack Rouse Associates, of Cincinnati, has been involved in designing the new Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing; and BRC Imagination Arts, a multinational design firm, is doing the design of the Great Wall World Cultural Heritage Park.
35. For award winning exhibition designs, see Zhongguo bowuguan chenlie jingpin tujie (Excellent Exhibitions in Chinese Museums: Illustrations and Text), 3 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu).
36. It is telling in this regard that the most famous passage from "Hometown," about many men making a path, is not quoted here.
37. James Flath notes that the Liaozhai Hall at the Pu Songling Memorial Garden has a "version of the classic amusement park haunted house with themes drawn from Pu's famous work." See "Managing historical capital in Shandong," p. 56.
38. Zhang Guobin and Zhi Yuanyuan, "Zai Luzhen yu Lu Xun zhi zi mian dui mian: 'Ba Lu Xun huan gei shijie'" ("Lu Xun's son and Luzhen meet face to face: Giving Lu Xun back to the world"), Dujia luyou, No. 4 (2004), p. 38.
39. Da Hai, "Luzhen: Shi Lu Xun guxiang de zaixian, haishi liti xiaoshuo de changshi" ("Luzhen: Is it a representation of Lu Xun's hometown or an experiment in three-dimensional fiction?"), Dujia luyou, No. 4 (2004), p. 36.
40. The two museums are both located on Liugong Island within a few hundred yards of each other. Established in 1985, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 Museum (Jiawu zhanzhen bowuguan) is located in former headquarters of the Qing Beiyang Navy. The newer museum is called the Sino-Japanese Naval Battle Exhibition Hall (Jiawu haizhan guan); it was established in 1995 as a joint venture of the Liugong Island Administration and a Guangdong corporation.
41. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
42. James A. Flath has argued that "local" museums in Shandong are moving away from national paradigms. See Flath, "Managing historical capital in Shandong," pp. 41-59. I take issue with Flath's contention that "although the stateist narratives are still promoted in some contexts, that interpretation is now divided by subnarratives that promote a localized and increasingly commercialized interpretation of the past that has a problematic relationship with the nation" (p. 5 3) or that "increasingly obsolete state narratives based on patriotism, historical materialism, and revolution" (p. 54). What Flath fails to account for, it seems to me, is that the "commercialized interpretation of the past" has national or stateist implications.
43. One passage reads: "China's private capitalist industry, which occupies second place in her modern industry, is a force which must not be ignored. Because they have been oppressed or hemmed in by imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic-capitalism, the national bourgeoisie of China and its representatives have often taken part in the people's democratic revolutionary struggles or maintained a neutral stand. For this reason and because China's economy is still backward, there will be need for a fairly long period after the victory of the revolution, to make use of the positive qualities of urban and rural private capitalism as far as possible, in the interest of developing the national economy." See Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 5 vols. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), Vol. 4, p. 367.
44. Dai Jinhua has described how the cultural and intellectual discourse in China of the 1990s veered strongly away from terms such as "class" and "revolution." This was a result, of course, of the historical memory of these terms, but it also marks an ideological position that is consistent with the state's emphasis on entrepreneurship. See "Invisible writing: The politics of Chinese mass culture in the 1990s," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 1999), p. 51.
45. I saw the touring exhibit at the Guangzhou Museum in early December 2004.
46. For more information on this firm, see its website, http://www.shuion.com.
47. The museum was reopened after a renovation in May 1999. This included a new building, which was done in a style to match the existing building. For information on the museum, see Ni Xingxiang (ed.), Zhongguo gongchandang diyici quanguo daibiao dahui huizhi (The Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu, 2001).