What can we learn about China's national story from its museums?

Greetings once again, with local buzz (and a message from President Xi) about Karl Marx' 200th birthday, and the 170th anniversary year of the publication of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto in 1848.  It's still said to be a guiding philosophy for China's re-construction as an officially communist country.  But would Marx recognize China today in his vision of the future?  I've been thinking about this lately--partly as a result of my immersion in local museums, while Barbara meets each day (all day!) with her classes--as I zoom about on Shanghai's excellent Metro system (photo below of the People's Square station as people change trains).  The trains are running on time.

My experience of three very different museums (though all excellent!) is that the story they tell focusses on the struggle and sacrifice to fight foreign influence (imperialism) and to establish a communist society which will build a new China that replaces the older, outmoded, "feudal" order.
But the story often seems to stop in 1949, once China has become an independent nation about to reorganize itself along a vision of what communism calls for.  In other words, the social movements, struggles, and losses (seen at the Martyrs' Monument in Barbara's earlier post) which dominate the first half of the 20th century are the key story or narrative--with little or no attention to the next 25 years under Mao.

The Shanghai History Museum includes the struggle against Western incursions, which affected Shanghai more than any other part of China.  Beginning in the 1840's, Britain, France and the U.S. carved out "concessions" here in China's primary port (part of which included the Opium Wars of the mid-1800's, and which lasted well into the 20th century).  In the photo at left we see one of the boundary markers for the American concession; the museum also notes that what would become Standard Oil had considerable control over oil here, important as the area became more modern and industrial.


The museum also documents some of the long period of struggle within China itself, between the Nationalists (one of whose goals was against Western influence), leaders of the new Republic of China established after the collapse of the last traditional Chinese dynasty (with its line of emperors).  It's rival was the Communist Party of China (CPC), organized "underground" and holding its first small Congress in 1921 here in Shanghai.  The armed struggles between the two movements cost hundreds of thousands of lives over several decades, and the resistance to Japanese incursion in the 1930's and the World War II period were similarly costly to Chinese life.   (Footnote: during World War II China was an ally of the U.S. against Japan, which led the U.S to revoke its anti-Chinese "Chinese Exclusion Act" passed in 1882 to prevent further Chinese immigration into America).

The history museum also notes that the city welcomed Jews fleeing from the coming Holocaust in Europe in the 1930's and 1940's.  Note the caption: "All cities denied access for Jews.  Shanghai was the only exception."  This refers to the fact that neither Britain nor the U.S. were open to further Jewish immigration in spite of the danger Jews were facing; in one case, an ocean liner with mostly Jewish passengers was turned back by the U.S.; many of its people later died in the camps of eastern Europe.  (We visited the old Jewish neighborhood when we were here last year.)

This painting shows the victory celebration in Shanghai in 1949 when the fighting ended and a new China could be envisioned.  It would not be easy to rebuild--China was poor, many areas in ruins from years of civil war and resistance to the Japanese, and many of its people likely traumatized by the experience.  (The museum notes that after Shanghai was retaken, over 150,000 of the Nationalist soldiers were killed outside the city limits: what would that have meant to their families, but also to the victorious soldiers who had carried this out?)

Both the art and history museums include large-scale images of the traumas through which China had gone in the decades before 1949.  Here we see victorious Chinese soldiers evidently wiping out the last of a Japanese garrison: bravery, suffering, loss, sacrifice are common themes.  We fought so hard, we gave so much, is the message I see in them.  Perhaps that is part of the reason that the museums so often do not show or speak of the failures to come, as the new centralized government sought to make real the vision they believed was true.

Looking back, we know that China's Great Leap Forward policy (1958-1962) was so costly.  The policy sought to completely reorganize and "collectivize" agricultural and industrial production.  The hopes for that program can be felt in the photo at eft, of idealistic and joyful young people working on the new collective farms, which promised abundance.  But they did not, and several tens of millions of Chinese died during this time, often from starvation.  The Cultural Revolution which followed (1966-1976) until Mao's death meant great social dislocation and conflict.  Neither are even mentioned in any of the museums I've visited.

Instead, I've seen images such as the painting at right, when after "China opens up" starting in 1978, its leaders dream (here, literally) of a new kind of economic growth through integration into the world economy, of modern architecture (here Pudong), of "lifestyles," while still under the organizing principle of "communism."

In the art museum, we see President Xi, who recently was granted exception from 5-year term limits in office, depicted as visiting with the people, holding one of their children, an evidently benevolent and popular figure.

As I write this I'm also thinking about how reluctant those of us Americans who've most benefitted from the land taken from native people, and the wealth generated for a new nation by slavery, have been to acknowledge that.  It may be something we (too) prefer to forget, something that's painful to acknowledge.  But today we are telling ourselves more often that we need to know more about who we've been as a people.  It's only in recent years that we've established national museums devoted to the story of Native Americans and African Americans in Washington, D.C.  What does it mean for China if it does not tell itself what its more recent stories mean for today?

The buildings we often put together to hold our stories "soar" as we see at right (the China Art Museum).  Does the truthfulness of our stories also store what we see reflected there?

What stories for the future are younger Chinese folks telling themselves, and each other?

Thanks for hanging in there for a rather long post!