Museums of diaspora are increasingly present in countries of migrant settlement overseas, but also in sending or ancestral places. It is the latter sort that this deeply original, clearly written and richly researched interdisciplinary study describes and analyses, with China's officially sponsored and funded “Overseas Chinese museums” and its locally based bottom-up museums as its focus. Its author, Cangbai Wang, has worked for several years on museums in China dedicated to documenting Chinese diasporas. Here, he brings together his research into an excellent, well-organized and exhaustive volume. He did his research over a period of more than a decade, as part of a broader project on “research between Europe and China” led by Harriet Evans at the University of Westminster and Bao Jiang at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
One of his principal aims is to achieve a definition of the term huaqiao wenwu, a neologism in which huaqiao refers to “Chinese nationals living abroad” and wenwu to cultural relics or heritage. The word huaqiao is, as Wang explains, “politically charged” (p. 3), given its implication of Chinese nationality, and is an expression of the Chinese government's China-centred view of Chinese diaspora. But although Wang keeps to the term Overseas Chinese when introducing the official world and its opinions, he frames his own observations in terms of plural Chinese diasporas, to “capture the richness and diversity of ethnic and migrant Chinese living outside Chinese lands” (p. 3). Given his commitment to the “conceptual importance of fluidity and hybridity” (p. 4) for cross-border movement, he extends his investigation to associated groups in China such as guiqiao (“returned Overseas Chinese”) and huayi (descendants of Chinese immigrants who have integrated into local societies).
The study starts by establishing a four-way typology of prototypes of China's Overseas Chinese museums. Symbolic museums present “an authoritative representation of Chinese diasporas as a unified and China-oriented entity that has acted as a unique bridge between China and the world.” “Branding museums,” found at the municipal level and supported by local cultural elites, are “driven by the desire to upgrade and market” (p. 17) the regions where they are located. “Memory museums” are sponsored by guiqiao and seek to remember the past “from below” (p. 17), sometimes in resistance to representations from above. The fourth type, which Wang playfully calls “im/possible museums” (p. 17), fall outside the authorized discourse, are controversial, and can be denied official recognition.
The author notes that Chinese museums, as part of the heritage industry, aim to preserve a “settled” catalogue of sites and relics relevant to a shared national identity. However, he himself questions this “territorialised discourse” (p. 18) and favours a hybrid, denationalized, transnational, unsettled view of heritage, which he calls ambivalent, in that it is produced in transnational space and goes beyond the national framework.
The idea that “old-fashioned” Overseas Chinese nationalism no longer adequately represented the meaning of diaspora was recognized in China's first national Overseas Chinese Museum, opened in Beijing in 2014, which promoted the idea of a “double-rooted” diasporic subject with both a Chinese and a world dimension. This Beijing museum has, in Wang's view, helped promote “the (re)imagination of China and the Chinese nation” in a transnational way and the “re-visioning” of its diasporas (p. 38).
Museums established at local level, in the qiaoxiang (the sending lands of Overseas Chinese), where diasporic museums were first established, used “heritagisation” and diasporic resources and sentiments “for the purpose of city branding and urban upgrading” (p. 57). The author asks what drove authorities in the qiaoxiang to build such museums and how they used “museum, monument and ritual” in their (re)making. He finds that “disenchanted reason” combines in them with “enchanted imagination” to increase awareness of the history of migration, improve the local image, transform the cultural and physical landscape (with squares, streets, and monuments), and promote local economic development. Among the transnational flows encouraged by the pursuit of heritage and city branding is that of things – the recovery of China's material cultural heritage by diasporic donors dedicated to the repatriating to local museums of Chinese antiques scattered across the world during the century of China's weakness, an activity that did not begin until the new millennium.
The chapter that Wang devotes to the role of postage stamps in recording diasporic history particularly caught my attention, since its findings parallel my own observations about the role played by qiaopi (remittance letters) in private and public collections. The rise of qiaopi studies in the qiaoxiang has been accompanied everywhere by a philately craze that values not only the stamp but the cover bearing it and the cover's contents. The connection between philately and the documentation of transnational communication is obvious, and Wang's distinction – between the academic interest in philately as a tool for documenting state construction of national identity (its usual focus) and the new role played by stamps in helping to construct local cultural identities – is well taken. The chapter on the “museumification” of guiqiao architecture (“How does a house remember?”) documents a similar shift away from state and elite narratives of museumology in the direction of the collective memories of families and communities.
The penultimate chapter addresses the difficult fact that diasporic history is not only a product of border-crossing, and therefore challenges the conventional territorialized view of heritage, particularly in China as in other countries that have suffered foreign invasion and domination, but of political turbulence, traumas, contestations and deep divisions. Wang concludes that the contested nature of diasporic history requires the development of “new insights and innovative practices” (p. 128) as well as constant negotiation, both among different parties and between past and present. As he rightly points out, the rethinking of “the role of museums in a time of migration” (p. 147) has only just begun in Europe and North America and has barely begun at all in the Sinophone world. His conclusion: it is urgently necessary to integrate museum studies and migration history, and to establish a new focus away from migrants as an abstracted category and towards the material environment in which they move and on which they act.
