The question how we can define the national museum concept and its role in shaping national identity has recently become a matter of considerable interest for historians and others. A broad definition might be that a national museum is a state or government funded institution that plays an important role in shaping and mediating public discourses of national identity. This role is a key element in our understanding of the national museum concept. We commonly implicitly assume that national identities will naturally be addressed at national museums. However, some governments utilize national museums to show their version of history and country’s identity, rather than provide an unbiased outlook. A good example of that would be Chinese national museum, which is used by the Chinese government to show the achievements of the party and shape political views of Chinese people in line with the party propaganda.
National Museum of China was established in 2003. It was created my merging Museum of Chinese Revolution, founded in 1950, and National Museum of Chinese History, founded in 1949.
China spent nearly $400 million and ten years on the reconstruction of the museum. The government was striving to turn National Museum of China into a showcase of history and culture and to demonstrate accomplishment of the communist party. It was designed with an intention to build the world’s largest museum after one roof.
The National Museum of China doesn’t offer an unbiased representation of the country’s history. It is the most prominent symbol of the Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative of history and suppress alternative points of view, rather than the product of extensive research, discovery or creativity. It demonstrates how much money and effort the party is willing to spend on propaganda.
The government rejected proposals to create a permanent historical exhibition that would show the disasters of early Communist rule — especially the Great Leap Forward, a political campaign that took place between 1958 and 1962 and resulted in a famine that killed more than 20 million people. Instead, the authorities decided that the exhibition on contemporary China should focus on the party’s triumphs. The exhibition called “Leader • People” featured a number of contemporary art masterpieces by famous Chinese artists. History of China and revolution are shown in bright cheerful colors and the exhibit contains no art pieces dedicated tp the disasters of the early communist rule.
However, not only modern history is idealized. Another permanent exhibition, on China’s ancient history, presents an idealized version of the past. It tells an uplifting story of Chinese ethnic groups pulling together to create “brilliant achievements.” Organized by Chinese dynasties, it tries to show how all of the 56 ethnic groups in today’s China have always worked together. Even the Mongolian empire, which conquered China in the 12th century, is made part of the story. It is referred to as a precursor of today’s multicultural China.
Politics, by contrast, defines the other exhibit, “The Road to Rejuvenation,” which recounts the history of China from the First Opium War of 1839 to the present day. This was the exhibit significantly simplifies the history. “The exhibition demonstrates the glorious but long course of achieving national happiness and prosperity and fully reveals how the people chose Marxism, the Communist Party of China, socialism, and the reform and opening-up policy”, the description says.
The historian Yang Jisheng whose landmark book on the Great Leap Forward famine is banned in China said that “The party wants to determine historical truth, it worries that if competing versions are allowed, then its legitimacy will be called into question.”
Even though many countries do not present their history in terms independent historians consider fully credible, very few countries can compete with China in so strictly suppressing the setbacks of the past. As a result, Chinese public rarely has access to versions of history that differ from party propaganda. Since even the Internet is censored, it is really easy for the party to present its own version of the history through museums, books and other ways of propaganda.
The National Museum, which has unlimited access to incredible treasures and relics of China’s long and extremely interesting history, has failed to escape the political constraints that for centuries have hobbled the study of Chinese history. The way that the past of China is represented in the museum made the museum not about the past of the country, but rather about how the communist party wants to view itself.
After opening, the museum spent more time closed than open. It formally opened in 1961, then closed at the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It finally reopened again in 1979 and then gone through a series of closings and openings as multiple party leaders wished for their own interpretation of the past. The exhibition on contemporary history was closed in 2001. The government wanted the National Museum to promote a modern image of China to the outside world. When Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics, and officials were worried that the national capital would not be a worthy host since a British research institute rated Beijing a third-tier city together with Warsaw and Bangkok. Officials noted that Beijing had no noteworthy museums or galleries.
The government decided to create a museum that could compete with the rest of the world in time for the Olympics. Two museums on Tiananmen Square were combined and renamed the National Museum of China. The name change from Museum of the Chinese Revolution and National Museum of Chinese History also allowed for shows that did not directly touch on Chinese history, although history going to be ones of its main themes.
In the 1990s, museum curators proposed a more honest look at the problems that led to the current era of reform. Initially, a section called “10 years of tortuous development” in the 1950s and ’60s was designed. It included the Great Leap Forward’s devastating famine. Curators of the museum proposed a similar section in the current exhibit. They argued that this era was decades in the past and the party was now strong enough to withstand criticism. That government rejected this idea, as it was not ready to face the mistakes of the past. In the end, the famine, widely regarded as the worst in recorded history, is only euphemistically mentioned by the phrase that “the project of constructing socialism suffered severe complications.” The Cultural Revolution was reduced to the photograph and brief caption.There is also no mention of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 or the disgraced party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, who helped pioneer economic reforms but was forced out of power after the unrest that year.
The difficulty in coming up with an acceptable interpretation of China’s recent past makes it hard to fill vast spaces and come up with exhibitions for the national museum. Instead, space is being filled with exhibitions on topics like the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment exhibit does not relate to Chinese politics, it will also not mention any political ideas, such as universal human rights — that drove that period of European history.However, the success of the National Museum might directly depend on the ability to approach political topics in an unbiased way.
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