Volume 12 | Issue 20 | Number 2 | Article ID 4117 | May 18, 2014 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Exhibiting the Past: China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum 過去を展示する 南京大虐殺記念観 Kirk A. Denton The Development of Museums in China When the CCP came to power in 1949, it proceeded to nationalize all culture industries and cultural institutions, including museums, and to develop them in ways that would align them with the new ideology of state socialism. National, provincial, and local governments promoted, funded, and constructed many new museums. Not long after the liberation of Figure 1. The Military Museum, one of several Beijing, the Central Committee sought to major museums built during the Great Leap establish a Museum of the Chinese Revolution Forward. Photograph courtesy of Stefanie to present an official view of party history, and Thiedig, Kulturgut. in the early 1950s, the state started building memorial halls dedicated to sites of significance to revolutionary history, toDuring the Great Leap Forward, the state important revolutionary leaders, and to cultural sponsored a program to rapidly expand all figures such as the writer Lu Xun. In terms of manner of cultural institutions, including exhibitionary style, the types of museums built, museums. One of the many slogans of the day and the veneration of revolutionary heritage, was “a museum in every county, an exhibition these early PRC museums were deeplyhall in every commune”xianxian ( you indebted to the Soviet influence.1 It was not bowuguan, sheshe you zhanlanshi). According until the Great Leap Forward that a more to one report, by 1958 there were 865 county systematic state effort to build museums was museums and 85,065 commune exhibition instituted. In general, it is useful to see halls, although these figures may be museum development in the PRC as occurring exaggerated, and many of these institutions did in three dynamic bursts: the Great Leap not endure. At the same time as it expanded Forward (1958–1962), the early post-Mao the growth of museums into the Chinese period (1980s), and the post-Tiananmen period hinterland, the Great Leap Forward also gave (1990s– present). rise to some of Beijing’s major national museums, including the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and the Military Museum. These two museums were built in preparation for the 1959 celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Their resulting exhibits presented a narrow, party- centered vision of modern history and forced 1 12 | 20 | 2 APJ | JF the ancient past awkwardly into Marxist revived revolutionary tourism (marketed as red historical categories and stages. The Maoist tourism) to sustain the memory of the view of history was, of course, constructed by revolution in an active, participatory way, excluding details and events that did not though with a nostalgic and commercial conform to the official narrative and bydimension that is markedly different from the suppressing alternative ways of looking at the revolutionary pilgrimages of the Cultural past. Revolution. Like most other cultural institutions, museums The early post-Mao period—the second burst of came under severe attack from radicals during museum construction—saw a profusion of new the Cultural Revolution because they were seen museums, many of which are museums of as “black” warehouses for the culture of the revolutionary history or memorials to “four olds” (customs, culture, habits, and revolutionary martyrs.4 This state-sponsored ideas). Yet some of these museums, and the construction of museums was initially a people who worked for them, continued to be response to the Cultural Revolution and the active in various ways. For example, the collapse of cultural institutions and state Museum of the Chinese Revolution, though control over historical memory. Reopening officially closed in the fall of 1966, helped established museums and revising their organize in June of the following year An exhibits marked what could be called a state Exhibition of the Battle Successes of the reinstitutionalization of memory of the past. Capital Red Guard Revolution and Rebellion For Donghai Su (1995), a former curator at the (Shoudu hongweibing geming zaofan zhanguo Museum of the Chinese Revolution and a zhanlanhui), and Red Guard art exhibits were leading figure in the Chinese museum world, held at the National Museum of Fine Arts.2 One among the important values for museums in the could argue, though, that the Culturalpost-Mao period were to “verify” history and to Revolution was ideologically opposed to the extol such moral virtues as patriotism and self- very notion of the museum, to the ossification sacrifice. of history and of the revolution that the museum seemed to embody. Mao Zedong’s With the death of Mao and the advent of Deng famous phrase from 1966, “I don’t like being Xiaoping–style liberalism, the Maoist master treated as a dead ancestor,” captures this narrative of modern history began to erode.5 antipathy for the reverence of things past that Historiography of the 1980s humanized Mao the museum represents.3 The Cultural and made him much less the central Revolution was motivated in part by a desire to protagonist of the narrative of modern history revive the fading memory of the revolutionary than he had been; political figures purged past, indeed to incorporate that memory into under Mao were rehabilitated. These sorts of the very thoughts and actions of Chinese changes in historiography were then reflected citizens who had become increasinglyin new museums and revamped museum distanced from the revolution. Pilgrimages to exhibitions. For example, in 1982 the “old sacred revolutionary sites (Mao’s home in home” (guju) of Peng Dehuai, who was purged Shaoshan and Jinggangshan being only two of during the Great Leap Forward and severely the more popular) and the imitation “long tortured during the Cultural Revolution, was marches” to Yan’an were instigated not so restored as a memorial site. Chen Yun, Liu much as ways of learning about theShaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping were also revolutionary past as they were to relive that rehabilitated, and large-scale memorial halls past and make it meaningful and alive in the were built to commemorate each. These present. Indeed, the CCP has since 2003 museums restored faith in the party after its 2 12 | 20 | 2 APJ | JF legitimacy had been so undermined by the concerned that Chinese not forget both the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Despite these humiliations and heroism of China’s past.9 The important changes, however, many of the basic state promotion of nationalism must be seen as elements of the Maoist master narrative of one of the most significant factors behind modern history—the temporal tale of liberation museum growth during this period.10 In from darkness and oppression, the central role exhibiting the magnificence of the ancient past of the CCP, the contribution of revolutionary and the glorious rise of the modern nation- martyrs—are retained in early post-Maostate, museums inherently projected this museums of modern history. nationalism to their visitors and sought to forge a sense of cohesion among a population that The state and the party placed morewas being splintered into economic classes by importance on museums in the 1980s than ever the market reforms. It is not that revolutionary before (Wang Hongjun 2001, 109). They ideology has disappeared altogether and has promoted the role of museums in fostering been replaced by nationalism, as Suisheng “spiritual civilization” and passed lawsZhao (1998) argues; rather, as they always enhancing the protection of cultural artifacts have, nationalism and the socialist ideology 6 and regulating museums. Museums were even coexist in state rhetoric and in museum mentioned in the 1982 constitution, where their exhibits. public service role was emphasized.7 This period saw the building of the Memorial Hall of Museums were an important dimension of the the People’s War of Resistance against Japan, larger patriotic education program carried out the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, and the by party organs in the early 1990s. In a March Yuhuatai Martyrs Memorial Park1991 letter to education officials, Jiang Zemin commemorating those executed by thelaunched the program by declaring that the Guomindang in the White Terror after its 1927 country needed to enhance its education of coup. At the same time, of course, many new “early modern and modern Chinese history, museums dedicated to facets of premodern and current events,” with the goal of instilling history were also built, suggesting a changing in young people a “sense of national pride, relationship to the prehistoric and imperial national confidence, and preventing thoughts of pasts. glorifying the West and fawning on the foreign.”11 A circular in the same year issued by The third period of rapid museum development several state bureaus emphasized the followed the crackdown on the Tiananmen importance of cultural artifacts, museums, and movement of 1989 and continues to this day. memorial sites in stimulating patriotism among This renewed state emphasis on museums and the young and of using fresh techniques to memorial sites was motivated by several increase the “attractiveness” xinyinli( ) and factors: a perception that a decline in socialist “influence” (ganranli) of exhibits so that history values, especially among the young, had led could be perceived “directly through the directly to the expression of mass discontent in senses” (zhiguanxing) and have a greater