In many Western societies today, we hear growing calls for ‘decolonisation’ of cultural and educational institutions. To the extent that they counter obfuscation of the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, such calls are welcome. However, viewed from Asia, Western public debate over ‘coloniality’ often appears narrowly self-referential. Where earlier generations hailed a civilising ‘white man’s burden’, today that formulation is often inverted, blaming a monolithic ‘colonial Western modernity’ for all the world’s ills.Footnote 1 With many decolonialists falling into what Jack Goody termed the ‘trap’ of being ‘eurocentric about ethnocentricity’,Footnote 2 a reductive juxtaposition of Western coloniality and its non-Western victims maintains the topi-wearing, swagger-stick-wielding white male colonialist at centre stage.
In Against Decolonisation, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues that binary thinking about coloniality and ‘obsessive-compulsive eurocentrism’ deny indigenous agency.Footnote 3 Far from promoting diversity and inclusion, a focus on ‘authenticity’ and the pedigree of ideas tacitly endorses chauvinist narratives of the kind favoured by autocrats dismissive of universal human rights. In many societies today, bald dichotomies of colonialism’s perpetrators and victims, or of ‘indigeneity’ and foreignness, infuse fascistic visions of nationhood. This poses acute challenges for public history.
Fuelling obsessions with cultural authenticity and indigeneity is the widespread prevalence of what Josephine Quinn calls ‘civilisational thinking’. Enlightenment-era European arrogance, Quinn argues, has obscured how far Greco-Roman ‘civilisation’ is indebted to ancient Egypt, the Levant, and India. ‘It is connections, not civilisations,’ she insists, ‘that drive historical change.’Footnote 4 Today, however, enthusiastic proponents of ‘civilisational thinking’ include authoritarian regimes both Western and non-Western. In Xi Jinping’s China and Narendra Modi’s India, ideologues popularise narratives of uniquely ‘Chinese’ or ‘Hindu’ civilisation-states, just as United States vice-president, J. D. Vance, fulminates against the threat to ‘Western civilisation’ supposedly posed by non-white, non-Christian immigrants.Footnote 5 Claiming a pedigree more ancient than the upstart West, the likes of Xi and Modi invert the latter’s colonialist narratives, asserting instead the uniqueness and superiority of their own civilisational inheritance.
This article discusses how binary thinking about colonialism obscures the complexity and interconnectedness of the Asian past, as it is portrayed primarily in the museums of East and South Asia. It shows how such thinking is associated with a drive not just to legitimate contemporary borders but also to purify purportedly immutable national selves. Positing a pure indigenous selfhood threatened by corrupting alien influences obscures the practice of oppressive majoritarianism and colonialism by Asian regimes themselves. Public history is deeply implicated in this obfuscation, as it is weaponised by repressive autocracies to channel resentment towards putative enemies at home and abroad.
In many societies today, nationalist narratives are infused with a rhetoric of ‘security’ calculated precisely to camouflage or distract from a social reality of chronic insecurity. In China, ‘National Security Laws’ mandate ‘National Security Education’, obliging educators and citizens to uphold the officially sanctioned national narrative.Footnote 6 In Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–ruled India, too, the securitisation of the past occurs in a context of chronic inequality, threadbare public welfare, and labour market dysfunction (fuelled in part by the rise of artificial intelligence).Footnote 7 Political and socio-economic elites across Asia and beyond see in public history a tool for deflecting public anger away from structural injustices by stoking divisive majoritarianism. Ethnoculturally defined majorities are exhorted to blame their insecurities not on their more privileged compatriots but on the machinations of perfidious foreigners and domestic traitors.
In contexts—such as Britain—where major museums still enjoy relative political autonomy, scope should exist to push back against the manipulation of the past by champions of such majoritarian ideologies. Untroubled by official censors, curators should feel able to tell stories that do justice to the nuance and complexity of Asian histories and the colonial past. However, culture wars, funding constraints, and market forces often conspire against this. Arguments over the colonial origins of their collections have put Western museums on the defensive. Anthropology and ethnography, and with them the very idea of cosmopolitan museums dedicated to the comparative study of humanity, stand condemned for complicity in histories of colonial oppression.Footnote 8 In portraying ‘native’ or non-Western peoples, considerations of authenticity and indigenous voice increasingly trump those of expertise. Meanwhile, financial constraints render museum managers reliant on corporate and overseas sponsors with agendas of their own.
This article begins where the British empire ended—in Hong Kong—with discussion of the implications for public history of the 2020 National Security Law. These include enhanced promotion of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) neo-traditionalist narrative of ‘Chinese culture’, premised on a homogenous and totalising vision of ‘Chineseness’. That vision marginalises and delegitimates notions not only of distinctive Hongkongese identity but also of diversity or multiculturalism within China more widely. A central theme concerns claims of Chinese victimhood at the hands of a hegemonic, colonial West. The CCP’s interweaving of victimhood and ‘civilisational’ glory finds echoes in the legitimating narratives of majoritarian South Asian regimes. Exploring some of these parallels, I attribute them in part to attempts to distract popular attention from the structural, economic, and political causes of insecurity. I then discuss why public history in at least one Asian society—Taiwan—has evolved in a rather different direction, embracing diversity and questioning one-dimensional accounts of colonial victimhood. The Taiwanese case offers a fresh perspective from which to reassess public debate over colonial legacies at the opposite end of Eurasia—in Britain. I suggest that museums in the West need to work harder to resist a self-referential preoccupation with ‘decolonisation’ when reflecting on what they can learn from—and contribute to—the understanding of Asia’s colonial past and present.
Securitising the past in present-day Hong Kong
In 2019–2020, Hong Kong was rocked by protests that, though sparked by an ostensibly narrow legal issue, quickly spiralled into violent confrontation between predominantly youthful protesters and the police. Discontent was fuelled not only by frustration at a lack of progress towards democratisation (vaguely promised under the terms of Hong Kong’s 1997 retrocession) but also by a marked deterioration in the economic prospects of local youth. Effectively priced out of the local housing market, young people also faced increasing competition in education and employment from new migrants from mainland China. Such concerns over economic insecurity and labour migration resembled factors blamed for rising populism in Europe and the United States. However, in Hong Kong, resentment was exacerbated by a sense of utter powerlessness to influence a government answerable ultimately not to local people but to the CCP authorities in Beijing.Footnote 9
Shocked by the intensity of the protests, officials responded with a draconian clampdown on civil liberties and a drive to purge public consciousness of subversive ideas. The pro-Beijing media blamed discontent on the insidious influence of ‘foreign forces’, justifying the imposition in 2020 of a ‘National Security Law’ that mandated ‘National Security Education’. School curricula, public museums, and other media must now promote patriotism by depicting Hong Kong’s culture as essentially and immutably ‘Chinese’. With British rule dismissed as a passing phase, citizens are exhorted to deepen their understanding of and identification with the ‘Chinese history and culture’ portrayed as authentically ‘theirs’.Footnote 10 Beijing is determined to reverse what it sees as an illegitimate colonial sundering of the immemorial and inviolable unity of the Chinese nation.
In 2020, the Hong Kong Museum of History’s (HKMH) permanent exhibition was closed for renovation (it eventually reopened in spring 2026). Meanwhile, in 2024, much of the vacated space was given over to a new exhibition on ‘National Security’.Footnote 11 Visitors were greeted with a five-minute video on modern Chinese history (Lishi changhe 歷史長河, or The Long Stream of History), framed as a parable of ‘national security’. Reminded that Hong Kong has been Chinese territory ‘from time immemorial’, viewers were told of its separation from the motherland as a result of foreign invasion. Violent ‘humiliation’ of China and its glorious, 5,000-year-old civilisation had culminated in the horrors of the Japanese invasion of the 1930s–1940s. Relief came in 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), although foreign depredations continued. Eliding the chaos of the Mao era, the narrative skipped forward to the post-Mao period of ‘Reform and Opening’, portrayed as bringing prosperity to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland alike. But following Hong Kong’s 1997 return to Chinese rule, the video related, prosperity and stability were threatened by the ‘terrorism’ of the 2019–2020 youth protests—an attempted ‘colour revolution’ instigated by ‘external forces’. In this context, the 2020 National Security Law was justified as essential to safeguard the nation against the enduring threat of foreign subversion. This HKMH exhibition embodies a sweeping and paranoid conception of ‘comprehensive national security’ (in Xin Jinping’s 2014 formulation),Footnote 12 extending from ‘biosecurity’, ‘polar security’, ‘deep sea security’, ‘space security’, and ‘financial security’ to ‘cultural security’.
At the heart of ‘cultural security’ is the vision of ‘excellent Chinese traditional culture’ that today underpins the Communist Party’s legitimating narrative.Footnote 13 That vision is epitomised by Beijing’s gift to Hong Kong on the 25th anniversary of its ‘return to the motherland’—the Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM), opened in 2022 by Xi Jinping himself.Footnote 14 Inside this new temple to Chineseness are exhibits celebrating the Manchu emperors of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, as Confucian exemplars embodying the assimilatory genius of Chinese culture. A Communist regime might be expected to highlight the oppressive foundations of dynastic rule: genocidal wars of conquest,Footnote 15 exploitation of the peasantry, or the systematic subordination of women. However, the HKPM portrays Qing emperors as model fathers, sons, and rulers, radiating Confucian virtue throughout their realm. The implied parallels with today’s exemplary autocrat in Beijing hardly need elaborating. The museum also devotes an entire gallery to celebrating the contribution of Hong Kong’s local business elite to preserving ancient Chinese artefacts and supporting local museums, thus keeping alive the flame of Chinese tradition in colonial Hong Kong. Treasuring ‘excellent traditional Chinese culture’ has become the ultimate manifestation of patriotic loyalty.
The irony in the Communist Party’s embrace of neo-traditionalism extends beyond the stark contrast with its strenuous efforts during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) to eliminate ‘old’ culture. In its use of the National Palace Museum (NPM) as a nation-building tool, the Party is mimicking tactics pioneered by its rival and predecessor, the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT). In the 1960s, as the CCP ramped up its attacks on ‘tradition’, Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT regime on Taiwan built Taipei’s National Palace Museum as a symbol of its drive to ‘restore’ Chinese culture. For decades, the Communists loudly denounced the thieving KMT for spiriting away the NPM’s artefacts during its retreat to Taiwan, demanding their prompt return to Beijing. The KMT meanwhile portrayed itself as preserving Chinese civilisation against Communist ‘bandits’ intent on trashing it. However, as Taiwan has democratised since the 1990s, and young Taiwanese have become increasingly alienated from China, the CCP has changed its tune. In its cultural outreach to both Taiwan and Hong Kong, Beijing now seeks to shore up a deeply conservative version of Confucian familism and cultural nationalism. Far from insisting that the Taipei NPM ship its collection back to the mainland, during the KMT presidency of Ma Ying-jeou (2008–2016), the Communist authorities actually loaned artefacts from the Beijing NPM for exhibitions in Taipei.Footnote 16
For older generations in Hong Kong and Taiwan, identification with Chinese tradition was a major source of pride, distinguishing their communities from the Communist mainland. However, tradition as embraced by the CCP holds drastically diminished appeal for young Hongkongers and Taiwanese today. In part this reflects changing lifestyles, questioning of patriarchal norms, and declining deference to established authority. However, it is also related to profound alienation from China in societies where mainlanders are increasingly seen as ‘others’ threatening young people’s economic prospects and security.Footnote 17 The more strenuously the regime in Beijing seeks to associate itself with ‘excellent traditional Chinese culture’, the less young people in Taiwan and Hong Kong appear inclined to identify with its conservative vision. The CCP’s attempts to invoke foreign threats to China’s glorious civilisation may hold some appeal for the Han Chinese majority on the mainland, just as similar narratives have bolstered support for nationalist populism elsewhere around the world. However, for populations already marginalised by the Party’s totalising conception of Chineseness, the securitisation of that vision tends only to exacerbate their alienation.
From diversity to homogeneity: reframing ‘Chinese’ identity
The Communist Party’s more explicit alignment with a chauvinistic, monolithically Han vision of Chinese identity is alienating not just for Hongkongers and Taiwanese but also for non-Han ‘minority nationalities’ (shaoshu minzu 少数民族). In its revolutionary phase, the CCP liked to portray Mongol, Tibetan, and Uyghur ‘workers and peasants’ as united with their Han comrades by shared experience of class oppression.Footnote 18 Even then, assumptions of Han superiority informed the belief that ‘minorities’ would eventually assimilate to the ‘advanced’ culture of their Han ‘elder brothers’. However, in the early twenty-first century, that veneer of multicultural tolerance has dissolved. With the CCP no longer positioned as a socially revolutionary force, its performance legitimacy faltering, and ‘national security’ a growing obsession, the Party openly invokes an identitarian narrative centred on the Han majority.Footnote 19 This has fuelled a downward spiral in relations between the Communist regime and many of China’s minorities. Under Xi, official suspicion of disloyalty among groups such as Tibetans and Uyghurs has melded with Han chauvinism in an explicitly hierarchical vision of Chinese nationhood, with the Han guiding and civilising their primitive non-Han ‘brother nationalities’ (xiongdi minzu 兄弟民族) towards assimilation as the explicit goal of educational and cultural policy.
‘Cultural diversity’ is now presented by the CCP as something that China promotes on the global stage, even while the government ruthlessly suppresses it at home.Footnote 20 The official vision is of China as a unitary ‘civilisation state’ whose distinct ethical and political outlook is rooted in immemorial tradition. This state is girding itself for an inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’ with a ‘hegemonic West’ seeking to impose its alien values. This is the line that China presses internationally, as it seeks to win friends and influence across the Global South. For example, addressing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in July 2023, Xi Jinping plugged China’s ‘Global Civilisation Initiative’ and called for promoting ‘inclusiveness and coexistence among all civilisations’.Footnote 21
At home, meanwhile, a ‘Patriotic Education Law’ enacted in July 2023 signalled the intensifying drive to impose a totalising vision of ‘Chineseness’, as did a ‘Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress’ enacted in March 2026.Footnote 22 For more than a decade, the CCP’s intensifying promotion of a selective vision of ‘Excellent Chinese Traditional Culture’ has downplayed the reality of cultural change, largely ignoring critiques of Chinese tradition advanced by modernisers over the past century—for example, in relation to the treatment of women.Footnote 23 This vision is also highly selective in its treatment of ‘minority’ cultures, seeing them as ripe for ‘museumification’: if such cultures are valued at all, it is generally as collections of inoffensive exotica comprising traditional dress, cuisine, music, and dance.Footnote 24 Meanwhile, the educational use of the major non-Han languages has been effectively outlawed over the past decade, in a move that threatens to extinguish the literary cultures of Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols.Footnote 25 If current policies are maintained, these cultures will survive in China only as museum exhibits, not as living traditions.
Even within museums, key aspects of these non-Han cultures are suppressed or denied. Religion offers a particularly stark example. Tibetan Buddhism is acknowledged and in certain respects even celebrated. For example, in Hong Kong’s Palace Museum the Qing emperors’ interest in Tibetan Buddhism receives considerable emphasis. This is in part because, like the Qing emperors before them, Communist leaders today believe that Lamaism can be appropriated and fashioned into a tool for enhancing central control over China’s Tibetan population. Crucially, since the CCP regime claims that all of Tibet is inseparably part of China, it follows that Tibetan Buddhism, by definition, can be depicted as belonging uniquely and exclusively to ‘Chinese culture’. Despite its atheist ideology, the Party invokes the chakravartin principle to justify its role as protector and custodian of the Lamaist community. It hardly needs stating that this embrace of Tibetan Buddhism denies meaningful autonomy or agency to the lamaist hierarchy; it is ultimately the atheistic CCP alone that decides what constitutes acceptable Buddhist tradition, or indeed who qualifies as a genuine reincarnation of the Dalai, Panchen, or other lamas.Footnote 26
Nevertheless, the recognition afforded to Tibetan Buddhism is in marked contrast to the fierce suppression of Islam, implicitly seen as entirely alien to ‘Chinese culture’. The CCP has become convinced that Islam, particularly amongst the Turkic populations of Xinjiang, cannot be politically co-opted. As a result, the Islamic character of Uyghur culture is today systematically ignored or denied in public history and official discourse. Especially since 2015, the regime has sought literally to erase manifestations of Islamic culture from Chinese territory, with the physical destruction of mosques and other Islamic sites and suppression of Islamic religious practice.Footnote 27 In exhibitions and school textbooks, a similar erasure is taking place.Footnote 28 This is often associated with an emphasis on Xinjiang’s pre-Islamic, Buddhist heritage, which prevailed during the Tang Dynasty when the ‘Western Regions’ (Xiyu 西域) fell within the ambit of Chinese imperial rule. The focus on Xinjiang’s Buddhist heritage conveniently sidesteps 800 years of Islamic dominance in the region, harking back to a relatively brief period when the Western Regions were bound to the Tang imperial capital both politically and culturally.
Having abandoned revolutionary socialism and class struggle as key elements of its unifying narrative, the Communist Party has defaulted to the xenophobic nationalism always present in its ideological mix. Celebration of ‘excellent traditional Chinese culture’ is associated with claims to a moral superiority and innocent victimhood portrayed as intrinsic to the national character: in a tellingly biological metaphor, Xi and his lieutenants are fond of asserting that ‘China has no conquest gene’.Footnote 29 Obscuring the violence associated with China’s various wars of conquest, the expansion of the nation to its current borders is depicted as the outcome of peaceful cultural osmosis, as superior Chinese civilisation naturally overwhelms and absorbs its inferior neighbours—or as modernising Communists ‘liberate’ their minority compatriots from the backwardness of Lamaist rule or feudal despotism.Footnote 30
Portrayed as threatening this natural unity is the eternal, existential menace of foreign imperialism—the supreme challenge to the political, cultural, and racial oneness of China. As economic growth has stuttered in recent years, the CCP has felt less able to rely on performance legitimacy to quieten domestic criticism.Footnote 31 Colour revolutions, the 2011 Arab Spring, and revolts in Tibet and Xinjiang in the early 2000s reawakened fears triggered amongst Communist leaders by the traumatic collapse of the Soviet Union, reinforcing determination to prevent their regime succumbing to a similar fate. Feminists, activist lawyers, Marxist students, and others drawing attention to social injustice have been ruthlessly suppressed, branded as traitorous agents of ‘Western thought’.Footnote 32 The same charge is levelled at Hongkongers or Taiwanese calling for democracy, autonomy, or independence, who are portrayed (e.g. in the National Security exhibition at the HKMH) as dupes of a perfidious, hegemonic ‘West’ that seeks to weaken and divide the Chinese nation.
Whatever sense of cultural or political distinctiveness ‘minority nationalities’, Hongkongers, or Taiwanese may possess is dismissed as the illegitimate consequence of colonial legacies or foreign influence. Public portrayals of the history of these regions seek to reinforce a teleological narrative of the ever-closer union of China’s constituent territories and peoples. This is achieved by focusing narrowly on the relationship of these peripheral regions with ‘China’, ignoring or glossing over historical periods when that relationship was slight or non-existent. This approach is exemplified by a Taiwan annex inaugurated in 2015 at the Museum of the War of Resistance against Japan at Lugouqiao, near Beijing.Footnote 33 Originally established to commemorate China’s 1937–1945 war with Japan (which broke out nearby), with this new annex the Lugouqiao museum extended the narrative of Sino-Japanese conflict back to the Jiawu War of 1894–1895, when Qing defeat resulted in the cession of Taiwan to Japan. Valiant Taiwanese resistance to Japan’s colonial occupation is celebrated, but the lived experience of Taiwan’s inhabitants under Japanese rule is ignored or caricatured. Similarly ignored in mainland exhibitions and school texts is the history of Taiwan prior to Chinese colonisation in the seventeenth century, as well as internal developments on the island since its separation from the mainland at the end of the CCP–KMT Civil War in 1949.
At every opportunity, the CCP seeks to frame China’s past as a narrative of unified national resistance to Western and Japanese imperialism. Tibetans who fought to resist the British incursion of 1904 (under Sir Francis Younghusband) are portrayed as patriots nobly defending the entire Chinese motherland against the danger of partition; for example, in a 2024 exhibition held in Beijing to commemorate the 120th anniversary of that event.Footnote 34 In their efforts to enhance ‘national education’, Hong Kong’s authorities have similarly sought to highlight the territory’s role in China’s national struggles against foreign imperialism. In September 2024, the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence reopened after a refit, newly rebranded as the ‘Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence’; here, as with the treatment of Taiwan at the Lugouqiao ‘War of Resistance’ museum, the Sino-Japanese conflict is used to weave a local narrative into the larger ‘Chinese’ story.Footnote 35 This echoes a wider drive since 2020 to import the CCP narrative of the War of Resistance into Hong Kong, marked also by public commemoration on 19 December of ‘Nanjing Massacre Memorial Day’.Footnote 36 Rather than dwelling on the specificities of Hong Kong’s experience of war and occupation, the aim is to promote identification with a wider national struggle.
The CCP’s use of public history for patriotic education thus propagates a worldview structured around simplistic binaries—colonisers versus colonised; perpetrators versus victims of imperialism; aggressive, exploitative Westerners and Japanese versus harmonious, peaceable Chinese. The past and present reality of Chinese colonialism in peripheralised regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong is nowhere entertained. Enhanced emphasis on ethnocultural purity and superiority; on the manifold threats facing this essentialised national self; and on the consequent urgency of defending ‘national security’ all strongly resonate with the paranoid majoritarianism characteristic of fascist ideologies.Footnote 37 Moreover, similar agendas, premised upon similar narratives, are today embraced by many regimes, not least across Asia, that face a similar cocktail of persistent or growing inequality and uneven economic growth. A distinctive feature of many Asian or non-Western variants of authoritarianism is the weaponisation by elites of memories of colonial victimhood, and their cooptation of elements of the ‘decolonial’ agenda fashionable in Western scholarly circles.Footnote 38
Neo-traditionalism and ethnocultural exclusivity: China in an Asian context
Themes of anti-colonial resistance and rejection of Western sermonising over human rights resonate both with many Asian elites and with Western progressives, helping to explain why China’s leaders deploy these narratives abroad as well as at home.Footnote 39 Through cultural diplomacy, especially in countries associated with its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI),Footnote 40 Beijing contrasts a history of ‘win-win’, peaceful, and mutually respectful interaction between China and its Asian neighbours with the violence and exploitation of Western colonialism. Prominence is often given to the story of the early-fifteenth-century Ming treasure fleets, commanded by Admiral Zheng He, whose allegedly peaceable expeditions to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean are contrasted with the violent incursions of later European colonialists. As the director of the National Museum of China (NMC) put it in the foreword to a 2005 exhibition (preceding the BRI), ‘Without a single inch of land conquered, without a single penny robbed, [the Ming fleets] were carrying forward the advanced Chinese civilisation, leaving happiness and friendly laughter to the lands visited.’Footnote 41 In Colombo Museum in Sri Lanka, the display of a Ming tablet erected by Zheng’s fleet in 1409 features a modern Chinese gloss that reinforces this narrative. The explanatory text fails to mention the violence that accompanied the Chinese incursion, when the local king was captured and transported back to China.Footnote 42
Another aspect of China’s cultural diplomacy related to the CCP’s growing neo-traditionalism is the deployment of religion. This ranges from attempts to appropriate the Mazu cult in cross-Straits dealings with Taiwan,Footnote 43 to appeals to Confucianism as a pseudo-religious ethos binding overseas Chinese (and East Asians more broadly) to the Chinese motherland.Footnote 44 Within China itself, as already noted, Islam has in recent years been suppressed, stigmatised through association with ‘terrorism’ and subjected to a concerted campaign of ‘Sinification’, with mosques widely demolished or remodelled in ‘Chinese’ style.Footnote 45 However, in Southeast Asia, Beijing has promoted celebration of Zheng He’s status as a ‘Chinese Muslim’. At the Cheng Ho (Zheng He) Museum in Malacca (Melaka), Malaysia, visitors are told that ‘China played an important part in the spreading of Islam in Southeast Asia’, and that ‘Cheng Ho’, as a ‘strong believer’, helped promote the religion within China, too.Footnote 46 While the museum itself is not directly CCP-sponsored, a plaque there to ‘Zheng He Maritime Silk Road Culture’ links the admiral to the BRI, which has seen Malacca (controversially) become a major hub for state-sponsored Chinese investment. Elsewhere, Buddhism plays a prominent role in Chinese cultural diplomacy, as at the World Buddhism Museum in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where the Chinese gallery deploys Tibetan imagery to portray the PRC as a Buddhist superpower.Footnote 47 In the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, meanwhile, the Gangaramaya Vihara, or Temple of the Buddha’s Hair Relic, boasts a lavish new Chinese-style shrine, adorned with dragon pillars.Footnote 48
However, China’s religious diplomacy is necessarily somewhat muted or indirect, given the CCP’s commitment to atheism. The funding for the Chinese shrine at the Gangaramaya Vihara came from a Chinese businessman rather than the Chinese state, while the establishment of the Cheng Ho Museum at Malacca was spearheaded by Tan Ta Sen 陈达生, a Malaysian–Chinese scholar with ancestral ties to Fujian Province. Religion is a sphere in which the CCP typically operates through allies and proxies, coordinated (to varying extents) through its ‘United Front Work Department’.Footnote 49 Ultimately, religion for the Party is a tool of influence or control, not a touchstone of belief; something to be manipulated for political ends but not permitted to shape those ends themselves. Within China, the preoccupation with ‘national security’ and growing nativism dictate heightened suspicion of ‘alien’ faiths, particularly Islam, alongside selective celebration of Chinese beliefs as elements of ‘excellent traditional culture’. For Beijing’s propagandists, though, it is the party-state itself, as the embodiment of the glories of the Chinese race-nation, that constitutes the supreme object of devotion and loyalty.
Its diffidence over religion distinguishes the CCP from India’s emphatically Hindu BJP, but otherwise there are striking resemblances in the ways these regimes mine the past to construct their legitimating narratives. Above all, both draw a crucial distinction domestically between aspects of culture seen as ‘native’ and ‘alien’, even while their cultural diplomacy somewhat more expansively celebrates ancient legacies of inter-Asian cultural exchange. For the BJP, Buddhism, seen as an outgrowth of India’s fundamentally Hindu civilisation, can be accommodated within its Hindu-supremacist worldview and deployed externally for diplomatic purposes. On the day of the 2023 temple festival at Colombo’s Gangaramaya Vihara, the courtyard was festooned with banners carrying a greeting from the Indian High Commission, while at Kandy’s World Buddhism Museum, China’s gallery may be the largest, but India’s is the first.
In the Indian capital, Delhi, the National Museum has since 2021 given new prominence to its Buddhist exhibits (while neglecting its Islamic Mughal ones),Footnote 50 and in 2023 it staged a special exhibition highlighting the history of Hindu cultural influence in now predominantly Buddhist Southeast Asia.Footnote 51 At the same time, outside the museum, the entire New Delhi cityscape is being remodelled, with Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Indo-Saracenic architecture considered both unacceptably ‘colonial’ and unduly ‘Islamic’ by the BJP authorities.Footnote 52 Campaigns of anti-Islamic architectural erasure unite the BJP and CCP agendas of cultural nativism. Nothing can be allowed to complicate the portrayal of a purely Chinese or Indian civilisation assailed on all sides by enemies threatening to defile it.
Associated with the drive for civilisational purification is a narrative of victimhood, as both Hindu fundamentalists and CCP neo-traditionalists display the paranoia of ‘majorities with minority complexes’.Footnote 53 Such narratives serve to whip up what the historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, describes as ‘popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples’.Footnote 54 The impulse to invoke ethnoculturally based loyalties and enmities gains greater impetus at times of economic uncertainty, growing inequality, or political tension. The consequent securitisation of national identity is most blatantly evident in China’s National Security Laws and associated cultural initiatives; but a similar agenda informs recent Indian legislation on citizenship, the revocation of Kashmiri autonomy, and measures to reshape the teaching of history in schools.Footnote 55
Consistent with the characterisation of the governing ideologies of China and India today as fascistic is their tactic of invoking loyalty to a purportedly threatened ethnocultural majority in order to distract from, or exploit, simmering socio-political tensions. China is experiencing falling growth, rising unemployment, and chronic inequality.Footnote 56 India exhibits enormous poverty, educational dysfunction, and under-employment, with the benefits of economic growth channelled disproportionately to privileged elites.Footnote 57 Moreover, the narratives of superior-yet-persecuted ethno-national selves depend as much on gaps or absences as on outright historical falsification. In China, for example, the ravages of Western colonialism and Japanese invasion loom large in public history in part because later cataclysms—the Civil War of the late 1940s, the Great Leap Famine of 1958–1962, the Cultural Revolution—cannot be commemorated for fear of inviting criticism of the CCP regime.Footnote 58 In India, the absences and distortions in the Hindutva narrative include the original fascist inspiration for founding the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; the BJP’s parent organisation), its collaboration with the British colonial authorities, and its role in inspiring, if not actually instigating, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.Footnote 59
For both India and China, the advance of neoliberal globalisation in the late twentieth century and early 2000s has brought both enhanced prosperity and social dislocation. Alarm at accelerating social and cultural change has created an opening for nationalists and populists intent on blaming all manner of social ills on ‘Western hegemony’. Upper-caste Hindus and CCP elites alike have sought to co-opt ‘poorer co-ethnics’ in a struggle against ‘foreign’ ideas or Westernised ‘intellectuals’.Footnote 60 At the same time, with apparently unconscious irony, proponents of Asian variants of nationalist populism have invoked decolonial ideas, generated largely by Western intellectuals, in order to justify rejection of purportedly ‘Western’ notions of liberalism, democracy, and rights.Footnote 61 But whereas Western decolonialists tend to identify with the progressive left, anti-colonial Asian ethnonationalists lean rightwards. In both India and China, intensifying ethnonationalism has gone hand in hand with neoliberal agendas of ‘responsibilisation’ and an increasing psychologisation of educational discourse. Implicit in such messaging is the imperative of avoiding what the CCP portrays as decadent Western ‘welfarism’. Public history in the national-populist mode promotes consciousness of collective victimhood, pride in a glorious but threatened civilisation, and gratitude to the heroes who have saved it from oblivion. ‘Gratitude education’ reinforces patriotic education.Footnote 62
However, ethnonationalist agendas premised on narratives of persecution by foreign enemies or hegemonic Western colonialists enjoy far from uniform appeal across contemporary Asia. In Asia as Method,Footnote 63 the Taiwanese scholar Kuan-Hsing Chen engages with anglophone debates over decolonisation—or, as he puts it, ‘de-imperialisation’. A central problem he identifies is the ‘obsessive critique of the West’ typical of mainstream discourse on ‘decolonisation’. Chen argues that this eurocentric vision of colonialism obscures or distorts Asian experience, not least by ignoring the ‘Han racism’ associated with an oppressive ‘Chinese empire’. In making this case, he testifies to a dramatic shift in Taiwan’s public discourse on culture and identity since the 1980s. Taiwan’s experience illustrates how rejection of oversimplified narratives of colonial victimhood and of authoritarian myths of homogenous nationhood can go hand in hand, supporting the advance of more liberal and inclusive conceptions of belonging.
Nuancing engagement with colonial legacies: the Taiwanese case
Talk of ‘Han racism’ or Chinese imperialism was anathema during Taiwan’s long period of Martial Law under the KMT (1949–1987). During those decades, as under Japanese colonial rule, the authorities preached a totalising vision of national identity, premised on biological unity, civilisational superiority, and the spectre of alien aggression. Nation and regime, one and indivisible, demanded absolute loyalty. Following its retreat to Taiwan, the KMT invoked the dire threat of Communist barbarism, positioning itself as guardian of the sacred flame of Chinese civilisation.
However, during Taiwan’s subsequent democratisation, public discourse on the island’s history has been transformed. Traces of Japanese rule, previously condemned or obscured, are now preserved, and the legacy of Japan’s developmental colonialism—from irrigation networks to railways, public health and education—is widely celebrated. Also subject to extensive re-evaluation is the period of Dutch rule during the seventeenth century. In a landmark exhibition on seventeenth-century Taiwan at the National Palace Museum in 2003, the museum’s director, Tu Cheng-Sheng, writing in the exhibition catalogue, lamented the 1662 expulsion of the Dutch by the Chinese warlord Koxinga, or Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功. Tu speculated that if Koxinga, celebrated by Chinese nationalists for defeating ‘Western imperialists’, had left Taiwan alone, the island might have escaped China’s clutches and enjoyed an eventual transition to postcolonial independence.Footnote 64
Such remarks indicate how public history in contemporary Taiwan, faced with the looming threat of Chinese irredentism, remains highly politicised and contentious. In this context, nostalgia for the Japanese colonial era—spurred by a desire to celebrate any non-Chinese ingredients in Taiwan’s cultural mix—has made strange bedfellows of liberal Taiwanese and far-right Japanese nationalists. A narrative of ‘native Taiwanese’ victimhood at the hands of various externally imposed regimes—encompassing the KMT as well as Dutch, Qing, and Japanese—fails to acknowledge the suffering at Japanese hands of many post-war refugees from the Chinese mainland. Darker aspects of the Japanese colonial period, such as the involvement of Taiwanese women in the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ system, tend to be downplayed in the public historical arena.Footnote 65 Also often downplayed is the oppression experienced by the island’s indigenous peoples, whose lands were forcibly colonised not just by the Japanese but also by the ancestors of those who now portray themselves as ‘native Taiwanese’.
Nonetheless, by comparison with neighbouring societies in East Asia (or indeed elsewhere), Taiwan’s public history sector allows for diverse and conflicting voices to be heard. This is evident not least in the treatment of colonialism. An exhibition entitled The Discovery of Taiwan, opened in 2017 at the National Taiwan Museum in Taipei, celebrates the contribution of Japanese anthropologists and naturalists to recording and cataloguing for posterity the island’s flora, fauna, and indigenous cultures. Contrasting with this rather hagiographical treatment of enlightened colonial scholars is the new permanent exhibition at the (still awkwardly named) National Museum of Prehistory in Taidong. Departing from its earlier, rather ahistorical approach,Footnote 66 this now documents the complex and often catastrophic impact on indigenous cultures and livelihoods of centuries of Chinese settlement and foreign colonial rule.Footnote 67
Growing acknowledgement of Chinese settler-colonialism in Taiwan, and its implications for the indigenous population, partly accounts for waning enthusiasm for the figure who spearheaded the island’s incorporation into the Chinese realm: Koxinga.Footnote 68 The year 2024 marked the 400th anniversary of Koxinga’s birth, an event celebrated with great fanfare in the Zheng clan’s ancestral home of Quanzhou in Fujian, China. In July, at a commemorative event in Hirado, Kyushu (Japan), Koxinga’s birthplace, a large delegation from China (principally from Quanzhou) swamped local and Taiwanese participants.Footnote 69 Chinese speakers hailed Koxinga as a national hero for expelling foreign colonialists from Taiwan, while Japanese and Taiwanese officials were more circumspect, stressing his ‘Asian’ significance. Meanwhile, in Tainan, site of Koxinga’s victory over the Dutch, his birthday was entirely eclipsed by celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the city’s founding—by the Dutch. The city’s former ‘Zheng Chenggong Museum’ was renovated and rebranded as the ‘Tainan Municipal Museum’, with commemoration of Koxinga now confined to a small corner of the display.Footnote 70 Meanwhile, a special exhibition at the nearby National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH), entitled simply 1624, featured Koxinga in a section entitled ‘History Classroom’, designed to illustrate how historical figures can be subject to divergent interpretations.
However inconsistently, museums, memorials, and other vehicles for public history in contemporary Taiwan thus invite exploration of the complexities of colonialism. Taiwan’s geopolitical predicament helps explain why theories portraying ‘colonial Western modernity’ as the ultimate global villain are liable to meet with scepticism there. A narrative emphasising the multiple influences on the island’s past helps legitimate Taiwan’s pitch for recognition as a multicultural Asian society. The island’s evolution as a vibrant democracy existentially threatened by a giant, predatory neighbour has fostered a relatively nuanced public historical engagement with colonialism. This presents a telling contrast to the prevalence elsewhere of sometimes cartoonish morality tales of foreign colonial oppression and native victimhood.
China’s hidden colonialism at the British Museum
The recognition in Taiwan’s museums of the complex entanglements of Asian and Western variants of colonialism echoes the findings of ‘New Qing History’ scholarship. Historians such as Peter Perdue, James Millward, and Emma Teng have argued that the Qing should be seen not as a passive victim of Western imperialism but as itself a major player in competitive empire-building across early modern Eurasia.Footnote 71 Perdue, for example, analyses the bloody Qing conquest of Central Asia in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries, while Teng’s study of travel writing about Taiwan shows how the ideologies and attitudes of Chinese colonialists echoed those of their European counterparts in North America. Other scholars emphasise how Chinese colonialism in regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia is an ongoing, indeed intensifying, project.Footnote 72
Such scholarship, unsettling to the CCP’s one-sided narrative of Chinese colonial victimhood, might be expected to influence China-related public history outside the PRC. Indeed, work by New Qing historians is cited in the catalogue for China’s Hidden Century, a major 2023 British Museum exhibition, whose gift shop was well-stocked with copies of Perdue’s China Marches West. However, the exhibition itself offered little to challenge the likely preconceptions of the predominantly Chinese crowds who flocked to see it. Apart from the prominence given to artefacts pertaining to women, it was hard to identify aspects of the display that might have looked out of place in an equivalent exhibition in Shanghai or Beijing.
The exhibition’s title was also baffling, since China’s nineteenth century—which witnessed the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium War, and various Western incursions—is amongst the eras of Chinese history least ‘hidden’ to a Western public. These relatively familiar themes were amongst those receiving greatest coverage in China’s Hidden Century. Largely ignored, meanwhile, were important episodes obscured in CCP-approved narratives, including the Qing’s attempts to consolidate its contested borders in Xinjiang, Tibet, Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. The late nineteenth century witnessed intensifying Han-Chinese colonisation of border regions from Xinjiang and Mongolia to Taiwan, as the Qing sought to bind these regions more closely to Beijing. However, despite citations of Perdue and other ‘New Qing historians’ in the exhibition catalogue, the theme of Qing China as an active player in the imperial rivalries of the age was not developed in the exhibition itself.Footnote 73 In short, an opportunity was missed to use a major public exhibition to portray China as one massive empire in a world of competing empires, rather than a passive, opulent, highly cultured behemoth beset by foreign predators and internal strife. The role of China as itself an often brutally predatory power is indeed largely ‘hidden’ from public view, and—in light of current events in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and around Taiwan—urgently demands interrogation.
Since the curators were evidently aware of these aspects of Qing history, why was their spotlight trained elsewhere? Here Adam Kuper provides a clue, when he observes of the British Museum in the early 2000s that ‘money was tight. The Treasury kept squeezing the budget. Sponsors and donors increasingly called the shots.’Footnote 74 That situation has worsened during the intervening years of austerity and public sector budget cuts. Core funding for China’s Hidden Century came from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, but its main sponsor was Citibank, a multinational bank with substantial commercial interests in China. A key co-sponsor was the Huo Family Foundation, which promotes China–US–UK educational and cultural ties and was established by a Chinese hedge fund manager who is a naturalised US citizen and major donor to Britain’s Conservative Party.Footnote 75 Artefacts and funding were supplied by various private foundations linked to wealthy families and individuals based in Hong Kong and Singapore. Shanghai Museum and other Chinese museums also lent assistance. This combination of parsimonious public funding and heavy reliance on China-linked sponsors—and paying customers—can only discourage overt challenges to CCP-approved narratives. Indeed, this tendency was similarly evident in a subsequent British Museum exhibition, Silk Roads, also sponsored by the Huo Family Foundation. The chronological and geographical framing of this exhibition meant that, when it came to coverage of the Chinese portion of the Silk Road (encompassing present-day Xinjiang), the focus was almost entirely on the pre-Islamic (primarily Buddhist) period, thus aligning neatly with the CCP’s efforts to obfuscate Islamic influence on the culture of the contemporary PRC.Footnote 76
Reflecting an apparent desire to appeal to Chinese opinion (whether of sponsors, government officials, or the wider public), a British Museum press release promoting China’s Hidden Century praised the ‘phenomenal cultural creativity’ and ‘resilience’ of ‘citizens of Qing China’ who emerged from ‘cataclysmic civil and foreign wars’ (including ‘Britain’s notorious Opium Wars’) to generate ‘a cosmopolitan cultural modernity’.Footnote 77 Even such stroking of Chinese egos failed to placate nationalists in cyberspace and the state media. In an editorial timed to coincide with the British Museum exhibition, China’s nationalist tabloid, the Global Times, joined demands from ‘other countries looted by Britain, such as India, Nigeria and South Africa’, for ‘restitution of cultural relics’.Footnote 78 Fulminating against the UK’s ‘bloody, ugly and shameful colonial history’, the paper mocked Britain for its groundless ‘sense of moral superiority over others’. Evidently assured of China’s own moral superiority as a victim of colonialism, it urged restitution of ‘looted’ artefacts as ‘a test and verification of Britain’s sincerity in clearing the colonial stain and making amends for its historical sins’. Acknowledging that it is ‘difficult to trace how exactly China lost’ the roughly 23,000 Chinese items in the museum’s collection, the editorial insisted that ‘most Chinese collections were certainly looted or stolen by Britain when it created and later took advantage of China’s crisis, or even directly robbed China’.
In making such claims, the Global Times joined a chorus of ‘blanket condemnation of all transactions in the age of empire’ that today assails the world’s cosmopolitan museums.Footnote 79 While some acquisitions during the high tide of European imperialism can certainly be traced to looting, Kuper shows that the sweeping condemnation of ‘colonial’ acquisitions, and associated demands for restitution, ‘downplay local agency’ in contexts where collectors ‘were typically drawn into established systems of exchange’.Footnote 80 In other words, the history of collections such as that of the British Museum is more complex than is typically assumed by those—whether CCP propagandists or Western decolonialists—who fulminate against their ‘colonial’ origins. Meanwhile, railing at the coloniality of institutions such as the British Museum serves to distract from the CCP’s own role in eradicating the cultural heritage of colonised peoples on China’s imperial periphery today, in what has been characterised as an ongoing campaign of ‘cultural genocide’.Footnote 81
Conclusion
Amidst the disputes over colonial legacies and ‘repatriation’ that swirl around institutions such as the British Museum, serious questions arise concerning the purpose of cosmopolitan museums in the twenty-first century. Whose culture and history do they represent, and to whom? Is there such a thing as shared ‘human’ culture or history, or just ‘Chinese’, ‘British’, ‘Indian’, and other ethnoculturally circumscribed national or ‘civilisational’ histories? And in representing that history—or those histories—who has the right to decide how the story is told?
In answering such questions as they pertain to the portrayal of the Chinese and wider Asian past, it is important to consider the political context for public history in Asian societies today. As this article shows, that context consists of the rise of populist–nationalist, often fascistic, narratives of nationhood in China, India, and elsewhere. The truths that ‘it is connections, not civilisations, that drive historical change’,Footnote 82 or that ‘every human society is hybrid, a dynamic amalgam of traditions and populations’,Footnote 83 are anathema to regimes that insist on the unique and incommensurable properties of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Hindu’ civilisation. Authoritarian states confronted by spiralling inequality, social tensions, and demands for self-determination seek to shore up their legitimacy through invoking alien threats to the purity and ‘security’ of ‘excellent traditional culture’. Loyalty to the ethnocultural collective trumps recognition of shared humanity, as public museums become identity museums, dedicated to bolstering majoritarian ‘cultural self-confidence’.
If it is increasingly difficult, or impossible, for museums in Beijing, Hong Kong, or Delhi to challenge such nationalistic myth-making, this underlines the importance of autonomously managed, cosmopolitan museums dedicated to telling the stories of humanity. An exhibition staged in the PRC will not invite visitors to reflect critically on Qing colonialism and its legacies, but one at the British Museum might. However, the capacity or willingness of such cosmopolitan institutions to perform that role is hamstrung both by financial weakness and a fear of riling activists insistent that only authentically indigenous voices can speak about ‘their’ past. Far easier, as Kuper puts it, to stage ‘bland temporary exhibitions that pander to sponsors’.Footnote 84
The fetishisation of indigeneity, which often aligns progressive Western decolonialists with intolerant Asian nationalists, needs countering not just because of the existential threat it poses to the cosmopolitan museum but because it undermines indigenous agency. The case of Taiwan demonstrates how recognition of cultural hybridity and historical complexity distinguishes a liberal–democratic approach to public history from that of autocratic nationalists for whom loyalty to an ethnoculturally defined ‘people’ is the supreme imperative. It also illustrates how abiding tensions between descendants of settler-colonialists and of indigenous communities are not unique to the West. Conviction of the special malignity of Western colonialism has prompted widespread reluctance amongst Western-based scholars to be drawn into Asian controversies over rights or identity and the historical debates that inform them. However, failure to assert the claims of expertise over identity or pedigree can end up betraying Asian opponents of totalising, nativist narratives of values and belonging.
Taiwan’s example should encourage scholars and curators in the West and beyond to reassert the value of expertise. As Kuper observes, ‘it would be absurd to suppose that your average Londoner understands more about her city, its history, its ethnic complexity, its informal customs, than a qualified researcher, who might come from Paris, Bombay or Singapore…’. ‘Most natives’, he writes, ‘struggle to recognise the significance of unspoken conventions and taken-for-granted prejudices.’ All the more so, when those conventions and prejudices are not merely unspoken and taken-for-granted but assiduously exploited and reinforced by state propaganda. Scholars and curators who enjoy academic freedom and professional autonomy thus bear an obligation, regardless of their own ethnicity or ‘positionality’, to expose the public to critical scrutiny of the colonial legacies of both Western and Asian powers, in all their vexed complexity.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those involved in organising—and funding—the conference ‘Exhibit Asia: Partition and the Transition to Nation States in South and East Asia’, held at Royal Holloway University of London in September 2023. This article is an extensively revised and expanded version of the keynote lecture delivered at that event.
Conflicts of interest
None.
