“The revolution will not be televised … the revolution will be no re-run, brothers; the revolution will be live.” So chanted the American Black Power advocate Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, when “permanent revolution” was in full swing in China and Maoism inspired radicals everywhere. But as Denton shows in this meticulous, erudite and sensitive work, China's revolution is now anything but “live.” Mao's successors have eviscerated revolutionary socialism and consigned its carcass to the museum. In a post-socialist society animated by market forces, “the revolution has become sightseeing” (p. 238).
This study focuses mainly on the past quarter-century, characterized by the prioritization of urban development, and the rise of a new urban middle class. Demand from prosperous urbanites has driven rapid growth in domestic tourism, which governments at national and local levels have encouraged. While helping to “brand” particular localities for the tourist market, museums have also served as important vehicles for a programme of “patriotic education,” refashioning historical narratives to bolster Party legitimacy. As this book's plentiful illustrations demonstrate, a vast outpouring of concrete has resulted.
Denton takes his readers on a thematically ordered tour of the museological landscape: from prehistory and “national origins,” to modern and “revolutionary” history, the military, resistance against Japanese imperialism, exemplary leaders, martyrs, distinguished writers, ethnic minorities and, finally, visions of a utopian future. But this is far more than an armchair guide to heritage landmarks. Every chapter begins with an extended discussion of the historiography of its particular theme, peppered with illuminating references to film, literature and popular culture. The issues highlighted in these opening sections are then further explored through cases studies. The outcome is a volume that provides perhaps the best available introduction not only to the museology but also to the historiographical politics of contemporary China.
Several broader refrains recur throughout the analysis, one concerning the widespread emphasis on continuities linking pre- and post-revolutionary periods. Whereas Maoist propaganda portrayed the revolution of 1949 as a definitive break with “old China,” museums today stress the Communist regime's custodianship of civilizational glory. Thus the “Museum of the Chinese Revolution” on Tiananmen Square has been subsumed within the “National Museum of China” (NMC), whose modern history exhibit is entitled “The Road to Revival.” Trumping assertions of revolutionary rupture, the trope of “revival” encompasses the project of modernization itself, with the Communist regime depicted as continuing the good work initiated by its late Qing and Republican predecessors.
“Revival” of course implies a preceding fall or decline, now generally attributed not to the internal contradictions of “feudal society,” but overwhelmingly to national “humiliation” by foreign imperialists. Citing Ian Buruma concerning the “pseudoreligion of victimhood” in contemporary Chinese culture (p. 134), Denton discusses the centrality to this of the War of Resistance against Japan. Particularly during the 1990s, commemorating this conflict was crucial to attempts to construct a broad-based, depoliticized patriotism embracing Communists, Nationalists and all those committed to “reviving” China. Nonetheless, on this issue and others, museum messages have varied. Beijing's Military Museum and NMC, reflecting an intensely “masculinist” discourse of nationhood, glorify armed struggle and military victory, while the more “contemplative” Nanjing Massacre Memorial commemorates the horrors of war. But recent refurbishment there too has involved a “monumentalisation of trauma” – “ramping up its visual rhetoric and magnifying the victimization narrative” (p. 149) – partly motivated, Denton suggests, by the market economy, which renders this wartime tragedy key to Nanjing's tourism “branding.”
Among elements of traditional culture slated for “revival” has been a highly conservative version of Confucianism. Denton writes of the “Confucianization” of key revolutionary leaders – notably Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai and Mao himself. Feted for his literary prowess, in the manner of emperor-poets of old, Mao's political agenda is nowadays treated with studious vagueness. Similarly “depoliticized” are former revolutionary exemplars, such as Lei Feng, now reinvented as models for hard work and filial obedience to the Party-state. Meanwhile, in his native Shaoxing, the revolutionary laureate Lu Xun has become the “Disneyfied” object of a local heritage industry, his coruscating attacks on social injustice ignored, along with his “sardonic take on the conservative ideology behind the nostalgic impulse” (p. 188).
Indeed, as Denton shows, nostalgia pervades contemporary museums in part precisely because it underpins a profound conservatism; the Party-state, no longer an agent of revolution, seeks to entrench itself as the embodiment of a neoliberal, authoritarian status quo legitimized by tradition. But nostalgia also sells – especially to affluent urbanites for whom the past, revolutionary or otherwise, feels increasingly remote. The commodification of heritage is another recurrent theme here, revealed, for example, in the marketing to jaded Han urbanites of “ethnic” exotica, and the related “museumification of the village” (p. 212) in some minority regions (and elsewhere). Perhaps the most striking instance of commodification relates to “museums of the future” – urban planning exhibition halls. Here the vision of a sanitized, hi-tech modernist utopia is intimately related to a drive to attract investment and, quite literally, sell the city. Nantong's example lends new meaning to the phrase “exit through the gift-shop,” the exhibit culminating in a real-estate salesroom, and the hall itself located within a vast new shopping mall.
As pedagogical institutions, China's museums deliver a tightly controlled national curriculum – notwithstanding significant local variations. And in museums as in schools, what is not taught is at least as significant as what is. Throughout this study, aspects of the null curriculum of the Chinese museum are highlighted. Along with the political agenda that inspired them, the catastrophes of the Maoist era are a blank. Celebration of the achievements of modernization also precludes any acknowledgement of social costs incurred. Commenting on the NMC's “Road to Revival” exhibit, Denton writes, “China has no social problems, no economic inequality, no tensions between ethnic groups, no intellectual dissent, no corruption and no despair” (p. 73).
Fully grasping this requires the reader – like the museum visitor – to possess considerable prior knowledge of recent Chinese history and politics. Although clearly written, accessible and relatively light on jargon, this book is therefore perhaps aimed primarily at a specialist readership, or at least at those contemplating postgraduate studies in contemporary Chinese culture or politics (for whom it is ideal). At the same time, Denton inserts numerous comparative references to museums and cultural discourses elsewhere – especially in North America – reminding us that the politicization of heritage is by no means an exclusively Chinese pursuit.
This is a valid and important point, although the Party-state's considerable control over information means that the context within which museums are viewed and interpreted differs quite drastically from that pertaining in North America. The regime's capacity to shape popular memory is certainly far from untrammelled. Commenting on the Party's attempt to promote a “squeaky-clean” image of its first-generation leaders, Denton writes, “one can't help but wonder whether average citizens, empowered by the Internet, buy into this ideology any more” (p. 176). Irony is a prominent feature of popular culture, threatening to subvert much of the propaganda relayed through museums or the state-supervised media. Nonetheless, as he rightly concludes, the power of official narratives to shape popular consciousness remains considerable, in so far as these narratives tap, or respond to, important elements of popular discourse and folk memory: “most people accept prevailing narratives, not because they are unthinking or passive, but because their personal identities … economic well-being and … dreams are intertwined with those narratives” (p. 267).
