Abstract
Heritage is often differentiated from history by its selectivity (Logan 2007: 34). While history seeks to explain the past, heritage is a filtered depiction of these events. However, as seen in Chap. 2, historiography in China was traditionally a moral project, centered on describing the lives of both the upright and the immoral in order to instruct people in how to live. This historical approach continued after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party against the Nationalists. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, the presentation, depiction, and interpretation of China’s past have been a political and pedagogical project. Immediately following the defeat of the Nationalist government, all museums were nationalized and reorganized to reflect a strict linear view of Chinese history based on a historical materialist interpretation. Drawing on the work of Henry Lewis Morgan (1818–1881) and Fredrick Engels (1820–1895), this social evolutionary model took as self-evident a universally applicable linear view of history, in which all societies advanced through similar material stages of development. Practicing archeologists were expected to interpret their findings through this politically inspired prism. Moreover, because the Communist Party emphasized a particular ideological interpretation of the past, open inquiry or a nonpolitical analysis of findings was impossible (Keightley 1977: 124). As a discipline, archeology was defined as a subfield of history, which in turn was classified as a social science that provided objective facts.
Heritage plays an important role in the Chinese Communist Party’s promotion of cultural nationalism to fill a void left by the Party’s abandonment of world revolutionary socialism and Maoist nationalism. We begin with a broad discussion of the links between political goals, nationalism, and archeology before turning to a specific focus on China. After an introduction to heritage policies in China following liberation in 1949, we turn to the impact of the Cultural Revolution on culture, both tangible and intangible, that marked the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the reasons why the CCP has since embraced the promotion of cultural preservation. Of importance also is the use of heritage as a moral/educational tool. The Cultural Revolution not only resulted in immense damage to tangible culture and sites, this also significantly impacted society’s collective memory of the past. The net result is that heritage sites, museums, and artifacts also serve a pedagogical purpose, to simultaneously educate visitors about the past and shape them as modern subjects in the present.
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Notes
- 1.
This list included 33 Communist Party revolutionary sites, 14 grottoes, 11 stone carvings, 19 tombs of famous people, 77 historical buildings, and 26 archeological sites (Liu 1987: 97).
- 2.
‘The Gang of Four’ is the named used by the Communist Party to describe four key leaders who, after Mao’s death in 1976, were blamed for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. These were Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife; Zhang Chunqiao, second deputy premier; Yao Wenyuan, a member of the Party’s Politburo; and Wang Hongwen, who was Vice-Chairman of the Politburo at the time of his arrest. Jiang Qing and Zhang were each sentenced to death (commuted to life imprisonment in 1983), Yao to 20 years, and Wang to life imprisonment. Jiang subsequently committed suicide while on medical release in 1991. Zhang was paroled in 1998 and died of cancer in 2005. Yao was released from prison in 1996 and died of diabetes, also in 2005. Wang Hongwen was never released, and died of liver cancer in 1992.
- 3.
These were called provincial [shengji], municipal [shiji], and county [xianji] “cultural relic protection work units” [wenwu baohu danwei].
- 4.
The Memorial Museum of the People’s War of Resistance against Japan in Beijing, the September 18th Memorial Museum in Shenyang, and the Museum of the Nanjing Massacre in Nanjing
- 5.
The five Confucian relationships define how people should interact and are premised on the fundamental inequality of society. These relations are ruler and subject, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife, and (the only human bond based on equal standing) friend to friend.
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Shepherd, R.J., Yu, L. (2013). The Politics of Heritage. In: Heritage Management, Tourism, and Governance in China. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(), vol 2. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5918-7_3
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