Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao by Marzia Varutti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao by Marzia Varutti Qiliang He, Phd Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao. By Marzia Varutti. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2014. 190pp. £60.00 (cloth). Marzia Varutti’s Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao fits well into the current scholarly trend of exploring the dramatic sociocultural transformations in post-Socialist China. In the past two decades, as the author shows, the number of museums has increased significantly (p. 1). The massive campaign of constructing or renovating museums, which is chiefly driven by the government at various levels, results from the Communist state’s eagerness to seek “a new discourse, a new vocabulary, a new rationale and, ultimately, new sources of political legitimation” following the collapse of the Socialist bloc in the early 1990s (p. 3). As a locus for displaying “cultural nationalism” and fostering a new narrative to mobilize the people in this post–Cold War era, museums took on special significance in the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to legitimize its regime, especially because the Communist ideology was no longer “the main cohesive force in Chinese society” (p. 2). As a consequence, museums in China stand out as an important topic of scholarly inquiry. In 2014 alone, at least two book-length studies on museums after Mao’s times were published.1 [End Page 385] The main argument of Varutti’s book is that museums in China “have played a crucial role in rooting political authority, instilling a sense of unity, creating a common identity and developing images of the national self” (p. 159). The book’s ten chapters center on the Communist Party’s politics of identity and memory. The first chapter is devoted to the discussion of “cultural heritage” in Ancient and Imperial China and its ties to political authority. Chapters 2 and 3 concern the development of museums in China, particularly after 1949, and different actors, such as the government, state-owned enterprises, and professionals, who contributed to the changes of museums. In chapters 4 through 8, the author investigates how museums help to shape a specific type of memory of China’s past and thereby construct a narrative of the Chinese nation that legitimizes the Communist Party regime. The final two chapters turn to the museums dedicated to China’s ethnic minorities in an attempt to show how the representation of other ethnic groups in China was conducive to the consolidation of a Chinese (Han-centrist) nationalism. The author makes some major scholarly contributions that will enable readers who are interested in culture and politics in post-Socialist China to better understand the Communist regime’s strategy for maintaining its political structure while ushering in a market economy. For example, the author traces the trajectory from visitors to “customers” (p. 160) to illustrate the altered nature of museums in China. But Varutti’s most intriguing observations concern “the tension between the remnants of Marxist and socialist ideology” and “the more recent renewed attention paid to ancient history” (p. 104). The two competing interpretations of China’s history—namely, that of the past “portrayed as a dark age of oppression” in Marxist evolutionist theory versus that of the glorification of China’s ancient culture, coexist uneasily in the museum system at present. Both, nevertheless, are in complicity with each other in justifying the Communist Party’s leadership. With all the illuminating observations Varutti makes, this book nevertheless raises some questions that she does not fully answer. First, while the author has visited over fifty museums nationwide, the vast majority of them are located in the economically and culturally developed areas in the East, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. The exceptions are those in Sichuan and Yunan, which help the author make sense of museums of the ethnic minorities. Therefore, the book fails to give a more balanced account of the thriving of museums in the whole country. I am particularly interested in the economically disadvantaged hinterland, where the impetus behind building museums was essentially the promotion of tourism. Therefore, economic considerations, besides the ideological factors, could well be another driving force of the museum boom in China in...