Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. viii, 350 pp. (Figures.) US$59.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3687-0.
In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton, a scholar of Chinese Studies, covers a broad swath of issues relating to how people, events, and sites are remembered and commemorated in contemporary China. Denton emphasizes the role of the Chinese state, most notably during the post-Mao era, in the creation and maintenance of these remembrances and commemorations. Chapters are devoted to history, literary, ethnographic and military museums as well as monuments, memorials, and red tourism. Themes relating to “exhibitionary culture,” in Denton’s words, and the development of post-Mao narrative histories are clearly articulated. The writing is smooth, and the research effort that went into this book is impressive. There are extensive discussions of the secondary literature, especially as it pertains to remembrance and nationalism in contemporary China.
Denton points to a set of complex cleavages that are managed, in most cases with apparent success, by those who have official responsibility for remembrance in China. The conflicts and accommodations between national and local narratives and between forces of commercial entertainment and high-minded commemorative history-making are central to his analysis. Denton argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exerts a profound influence over China’s “memoryscape … and to dismiss this state presence as nothing but propaganda is to fail to understand the complexity of the state/people relationship” (4).
Relying on his own research and the research of others, Denton carefully describes exhibits and memorials while skillfully connecting these descriptions to his main themes. The book contains discussions of China’s premier history museums, official remembrance sites devoted to Lu Xun and the Nanjing massacre, and memorials to Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai. In chapter 2, Denton traces the history of post-Mao exhibits at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing, later combined with the Museum of Chinese History to form the National Museum of China, which opened in 2011. In a 1996 exhibit at the then Museum of the Chinese Revolution, Denton finds a new emphasis on China as a nation, although the historical inevitability of CCP success and the socialist path that China followed continued to be prominently displayed. Here, as in so many cases, Denton describes changes in tone or emphasis vis-à-vis earlier exhibits, but the narrative of Party dominance, inevitability, and success remains front and centre.
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the creation of the National Museum of China, overseen by the Ministry of Culture, involved a complete transformation of the original building and revised exhibits. In the new museum, which Chinese officials hoped would rival storied institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre, exhibits trace Chinese history “from imperial glory to decline in the face of Western imperialism” leading ultimately to present renewal. Denton points to a decidedly more fluid and less disruptive treatment of Chinese history in which “present revival” is “built on ideals from the classical past” (71–72). We should not be surprised, as Denton was not, to find traumas such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Famine ignored or glossed over. This neglect is fully consistent with past museum representations.
Red tourism, which has been avidly promoted in China, is a mix of commerce, rural development, history lesson, and patriotic education. Local and national historical narratives often meld at these sites and impose, as Denton notes, “a revolutionary memory on the landscape of China” (215). In his discussion of red tourism and the Hunan memorials to Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai, Denton calls attention to what he describes as the “Confucianization” of Liu and Peng, who were both purged by Mao. Both the Liu and Peng sites were extensively developed in the post-Mao era, and reflect, in Denton’s view, the “neo-traditionalism that has crept into party discourse” (234). The theme of a persistently developing neo-traditionalism, linking Confucian and socialist morality, is a recurrent theme throughout Exhibiting the Past.
On occasion Denton gives us insights into how Chinese visitors view what they are seeing. While travelling with a group of fellow tourists to Liu’s and Peng’s memorials, Denton refers to the irony that the older visitors expressed in the glorification of the once disgraced officials (230). This is a very good book, but readers might wish to see more discussion of audience: who visits and what messages do visitors take away from the memorials and museum exhibits that are at the heart of this book. Studies of museum audiences are notoriously difficult, but one suspects that Denton has more information on his fellow visitors than he has shared in this book. But this is a minor point; scholars of China, museums, and nationalism, will be happy to have this book. Denton offers a richly researched and thoughtful analysis of how officially sanctioned history-making and commemoration have fared in post-Mao China.
Rubie S. Watson
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
pp. 694-696