6 - The Politics of the Past

Summary

This chapter explores the complex relationship that links the Chinese political present to its recent and ancient past. The Chinese political system fits Michel Foucault's definition of ‘discursive regimes’ as ‘systems for managing and policing discourse (who produces or evaluates what will count as true or valid knowledge and what will not, and the conditions of such truth)’ (Hodge and Louie 1998, 10). Within such ‘regimes’, museums are assigned the function of shaping the image of the nation and its past. Yet, while Tony Bennett's (1995) Foucault-inspired paradigm of museums as political tools is not inappropriate in explaining the relationship between the state, museums and society in China, Foucault's approach to museums as disciplinary tools is not entirely satisfactory in the case of China. In China, museums serve more as tools to legitimise political authority, rather than to exercise it. In other words, museums act more as media to promote the government's ideology rather than as an apparatus of control.

The modalities through which museums disseminate official ideology have changed over time. Post-1949, museums aided the spread of Communist ideology and actively participated in the nation-building project. They did so by providing a unified, government-approved vision of Chinese identity, culture and history (notably, revolutionary history), by illustrating the sacrifice of martyrs to the revolutionary cause and by celebrating the accomplishments of the Communist government.