The first few months of 2014 saw the unlikely publication of three English-language books devoted to the history and politics of Chinese museums – the two books under review here, and my own Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. [Editor's note: see review in this volume.] Given that not a single such book had been published before 2014, this is quite remarkable. The sudden interest in museums in China is in part a reflection of the rapid proliferation of museums that has taken place there in the past three decades. It is also a product of the heightened scholarly concern with issues of historical memory following the political liberalizations of the post-Mao era.

The two books under review here are different in scope and approach. Whereas Lu's book has a broad historical sweep that begins with 19th-century missionary museums and ends with museums in present-day China, Varutti's book, like my own, focuses on museums after the Cultural Revolution. Lu is more sociological in approach, adopting terms such as “agents” and Bourdieu's notion of “habitus” to describe the various forces behind Chinese museum development. Varutti also considers the “actors” involved in shaping museums and their exhibits, but she favours “discourse analysis” of the display of objects and is more concerned with the political, particularly nationalist, implications of these narratives. Especially in later chapters of the book, Lu takes as a principal focus the impact of museums on local society, whereas Varutti has her sights set firmly on the display of objects. Whereas my book focuses on history museums, Lu and Varutti treat a broader range of museum types.

Lu's foci are the various “agents” who initiate and drive the formation of museums. In the early stage of Chinese museum development, discussed in chapter two, Western missionaries, such as the French Jesuit and zoologist Pierre Heude, were the key players. Almost all accounts of the development of museums in China mention the Ziccawei Museum, which Heude established in Shanghai in the 1860s, but Lu's is more detailed and informative, and she also broadens the picture of early museums by discussing less well-known missionary museums in Tianjin and Shandong. Lu finds subtle differences in the motivations behind these museums, some clearly to serve the proselytizing cause, others with a more popular, educational mission, and still others facilitating European research on the natural history of China. Social elites were also key agents in the formation of early Chinese museums. In chapter three, Lu juxtaposes the Shanghai Museum (established by the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857 for foreigners interested in Chinese natural history and culture) and the Nantong Museum (established and managed by Zhang Jian, an important late-Qing scholar-official), to showcase the variety of elites, both foreign and Chinese, involved in early Chinese museum formation. In later chapters, Lu focuses on the role of political parties/states (the Nationalists in chapter four and the Communists in chapter five). Her discussion of the politics surrounding the transformation of Beijing's Imperial Palace into the Palace Museum is particularly fascinating. Chapter five nicely juxtaposes a fine arts museum (Shanghai Museum) with a revolutionary history museum (Museum of the Chinese Revolution) to highlight two kinds of “politics” behind the Mao-era state intervention into the museum world.

Whereas chapters two through four offer a somewhat comprehensive overview of museum developments in the late Qing and Republican eras, chapters five through eight constitute a sketchier treatment of the history of museums in the PRC. Given the explosion of museums after 1949, this approach is understandable, but it leaves huge gaps, especially in museum developments since the 1990s. Chapter six compares public and private ecomuseums in Guizhou and concludes that, though they have made some contributions in raising awareness about heritage preservation, ecomuseums may have in fact exacerbated the very destruction of ethnic culture they seek to prevent. Chapter seven looks at the impact of the “Grotto Museum” (Lu hides the name of the museum and gives pseudonyms of her interviewees to “protect their privacy,” but it clearly refers to the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang) on surrounding villages. In its focus on the sociological impact of tourism, this chapter seems rather out of place in a book about museums.

Lu can be reductive in her analysis, and the writing is mechanical and rife with grammatical infelicities and mistakes (e.g., “Centre Committee of the CCP” [p. 122], Sun Yat-sen's San-min Doctrine” [p. 131], “Jiang Zeming” [p. 131], etc.). She refers to the “Dang village” ecomuseum, which, I think, must be Tang'an village. These kinds of confusions could have been avoided with the inclusion of a Chinese character glossary (the bibliography also does not include characters or English translations of Pinyin titles). The analysis is sometime repetitive, with a “Discussion” section at the end of each chapter dutifully summing up comments made earlier in the chapter. The most significant contribution of the book is its treatment of late Qing and Republican era museums, which have received relatively little attention in the scholarship. Lu's willingness to embrace museums established by foreigners – French Jesuits, American Presbyterians and British Anglicans – within the purview of the history of “Chinese” museology is refreshing. Strangely, though, Lu neglects to recognize the early museums in Hong Kong, where she lives and works, and Macau.

Varutti's book is centred on the argument that museums in the post-Mao period serve two principle political causes: legitimizing the state by stressing its continuity with an ancient past and solidifying identification with the nation by exhibiting the diversity of China's ethnic groups. On several occasions, she advances the idea of the heterogeneity of historical narratives in Chinese museums – the overlapping of Marxist-Leninist models, new views of the ancient past, and nostalgia – but those complexities get lost in the overarching tendency to fit museums into these two political goals. The nostalgic narratives in Chinese museums in particular get short shrift in Varutti's book, and she barely mentions the wealth of alternative and counter-memories – even in public exhibitionary contexts – that vie with those of the state.

Varutti is by training a museologist, and her book is more informed – in quite productive ways – by recent trends in museum studies than Lu's book (Lu is an archaeologist, though she has extensive experience in heritage conservation). As such, her book seems to be written for a non-China specialist readership. Much of it is taken up with introductory material – an overview of Chinese attitudes toward cultural heritage, history of the development of museums in China and of Chinese museology, an introduction to the important “actors” at play in the museum world, and general discussions of the politics of historical memory – and some Sinological readers might get impatient. At the same time, some of Varutti's discussion comes across as an introduction to basic facets of museum studies, though as part of a “Heritage Matters” series and aimed toward a museum studies readership, one wonders why this would be necessary. In these respects, it's not entirely clear to me what the intended readership is.

Varutti frequently calls upon Alfred Gell's theory that “art” has “agency” to affect people's consciousness and social behaviour, but the theory hardly seems necessary to make the almost-universally accepted argument that museums can forge a sense of national belonging in the spectator. To justify her use of Gell, Varutti takes issue with Tony Bennett's Foucauldian approach to museums “as disciplinary tools.” “In China,” she writes, “museums serve more as tools to legitimise political authority, rather than to exercise it. In other words, museums act more as media to promote the government's ideology than as an apparatus of control” (p. 89). This statement misconstrues Bennett, who actually says that museums are different from “disciplinary institutions” in that they “project power” rather than try to hide it and because they are “cultural technologies concerned to organize a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry” and foster new forms of seeing and of subjectivity. Bennett's argument is effectively akin to Gell's “agency.” Moreover, isn't legitimizing political authority a form of “exercising it”?

Varutti is not a Sinologist, and she admits her Chinese abilities do not allow her to read “specialized literature without help” (pp. 5–6). A non-Sinological take on Chinese museums is to be welcomed, but just because she may not be using Chinese language sources (the bibliography lists, by my count, three Chinese-language sources), does not allow her to then claim that there is “sparse” (p. 5) scholarship in Chinese on museums. In fact, a large amount of material has been written in Chinese on a range of museological topics. Varutti's weakness in Chinese also leads to some unfortunate errors. For example, she says the Chinese term for “heritage” is wenwu (artifact) (p. 9), when it is yichan. And the proper romanization for “unified, multi-ethnic state” is tongyi de duo minzu guojia, not duominzu guojia (p. 130). One wonders, moreover, what the Chinese characters are (none are included) for biji, which Varutti translates as “secret book boxes” (p. 16). And her lack of knowledge of the Sinological world leads her to misidentify Jiwei Ci as a “historian” (p. 96) (he's a philosopher) and Chang-tai Hung as a “museologist” (p. 22) (he's a historian).

These relatively minor problems aside, the book has many strengths. Varutti's general thesis that after 1989, the government made a conscious effort through museums and other cultural forms to “inscribe [its] legitimacy in a line of continuity with the imperial tradition by claiming a historically uninterrupted link to that source of authority” (p. 89) is well argued and substantiated, although she perhaps simplifies the Maoist take on the feudal past in order to highlight the shift. To be sure, Mao denounced the feudal past, but he also saw in that past a “splendid old culture … that is a necessary condition for developing our new national culture and increasing our national self-confidence” (“On New Democracy”). Varutti's discussion of the “civic identity” role of museums of science, industry and culture is excellent, as is her detailed analysis of ethnic minority museums in Southwest China, particularly that of the meanings of mannequins, miniatures, and dioramas as exhibitionary technologies in such museums. To her “gender construction” discussion, one could add that while some ethnic minorities are indeed gendered female, others (Tibetans and Uyghurs come to mind) are usually gendered male.

Read together, these two books offer a fairly comprehensive overview of museums in China, and they complement each other quite nicely. They give us a clear sense of why museums have been important sites for the importation of Western cultural values, how they have been used for political purposes, and how they are responding to globalization and to global trends in historical memory.