In the past decade we have seen several comprehensive studies of Chinese historical museums and exhibition spaces. Denise Ho's examination of Mao-era Shanghai is a welcome addition to that literature not only for its subject matter, but also for addressing a persistent shortcoming. As Valentina Punzi observed in her review of Places of Memory in Modern China edited by Marc Matten (Brill, 2012), our tendency to focus on institutions has often elided the “complex multivocality of the different social actors” (China Perspectives, 2013 [3]). Curating Revolution brings those voices to the forefront, and although many are still filtered through heavily scripted official accounts and archival documents, when joined by the author's interviews they do much to explain how and why China structured its past during the 1950s to 1970s. Ho recognizes that public history is about storytelling, and while adhering to all of the historian's best practices, the most appealing thing about this book is the way in which it helps the reader to understand both the story and the storyteller.

The book consists of six case studies of museums, historical sites and exhibition spaces. In chapter one, the First Party Congress Site provides an example of how the past was interpreted according to Mao's “Red Line.” This is an interesting way to begin the study, since as Ho reveals there were no records of where the congress had taken place. A fragmentary reference and a vague individual memory were all that remained to lead the curators to the hidden laneway where they could begin the process of recreating a high-profile collective memory. The example reminds the reader of how thin the Party history was at the time, but also how conscious the curators were of the need to build and manage – in other words to curate the revolutionary memory. In chapter two we learn how Fangua Lane, a community in which model socialist housing was deliberately contrasted with an impoverished former shantytown, was used to demonstrate the transformation of both the built environment and the life of the working class. Carefully scripted visits narrated through the yiku sitian (recalling bitterness, reflecting on sweetness) form of storytelling were intended to demonstrate progress, but the fundamental goal was to transform consciousness. In chapter three, the Love Science and Eliminate Superstition Exhibition provides more insight into the methodology of Maoist exhibition practice, by which curators sought to identify and then resolve a specific problem. Organizers would “go the masses and analyze their thinking, then collect materials and rework them to target that thinking; next use an exhibition as a classroom; and finally study the visitors’ responses to determine effectiveness” (p. 104). The illness was superstition and the antidote science, but the underlying problem was class.

The last three chapters look at public history during the Socialist Education Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. In chapter four, Ho describes how the Class Education Exhibition functioned as political tutelage that instructed work-teams on the proper conduct of the Socialist Education Campaign, but also addressed the class problem head-on by teaching that everything – “objects, bodies and landscapes, were embodiments of class” (p. 147). Chapter five goes to the heart of the Cultural Revolution by reconstructing the Red Guard exhibits at the East is Red Department Store and showing that although they were less organized than the aforementioned exhibitions, the Red Guards were no less focused on teaching people to associate material objects with class. Finally, as described in chapter six, the Shanghai Museum mobilized to defend and define certain cultural artefacts (wenwu) as being property of the nation, although in doing so the curators were no less concerned with perpetuating the master narrative by linking those objects to historical stages of class development. As Ho observes in her conclusion, the duty of all curators was to organize the exhibit as a system so that people might learn to see the real world in the same way.

One of the organizing concepts adopted in this study, like many others of the same genre, comes from Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past (University of Chicago Press, 1998). Ho does not waste many words explaining lieux de mémoire, but it is important to consider what Nora means and how the idea might apply to China. For Nora, the lieu goes beyond space and place to encompass the spiritual, nationalistic, patriotic and revolutionary. Remembrance blurs the distinction between common things and great accomplishments and comprises the “overall structure of the past within the present” (xxiv). The question is, were Shanghai's revolutionary curators involved in such an enterprise? I think so, because as Ho shows through her case studies, whether Red Guard activists or career museologists, Shanghai's public historians were not just concerned with delivering propaganda. They were conscious of their duty to structure the entire past within the Maoist present, and actively involved in using remembrance to make revolution.