Books: Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao

For the last decade no discussion about growth and development in the world’s museums could long ignore China.

New museums were said to be popping up like mushrooms, exactly how many no one seemed quite sure; Chinese buyers, for whom money appeared to be no object, were appearing in foreign auction houses, snapping up objects from eclectic shopping lists; governments and their museums all over the world buzzed around offering advice, exhibitions and training, keen to open the doors to exhibitions of Chinese treasures which had long been denied to their public.

China is, in Marzia Varutti’s words “a buoyant country spinning spectacularly ahead”.

Frenetic activity

It is this rapidly changing world that Varutti sets out to capture in Museums in China, the fruit of field research carried out from 2003 to 2008 and then in 2012.

Her visits coincided with what was, and remains, a period of frenetic activity for Chinese museums.

She must at times have felt as though she was trying to nail jelly to the wall but the result is a book which gives a very real sense of the driving forces behind China’s museum upsurge and the environment in which museums staff carry out their work.

If accurate statistics on the number of museums in China have been hard to come by, it’s probably because they have been so busy building there has been little time to count.

According to a recent article in The Economist, China had just 25 museums when the Communist Party took control of the country in 1949.

Today, well, what is the figure today? The State Administration of Cultural Heritage says China aims to have 3,000 museums by 2015 but that target appears to have already been overtaken.

According to the Chinese Museums Association, by the end of 2012, China, going like the proverbial stream train, already had 3,866 museums. In that year alone 451 new museums had opened their doors to the public. More than one a day.

Despite reports that the engine of growth and development in China’s museums has begun to slow, these are impressive figures. But remember that China has a population of more than a billion so that’s about one museum for every 380,000 people, about a third of the figure in the developed world.

It’s easy to see why this desire to challenge the US, in terms of numbers of buildings and square metres of gallery space, worries some directors who see this state-driven policy as unsustainable.

China, they fear, lacks the objects and staff with the professional skills to fulfil the demand and the potential generated by this dramatic growth.

So why, besides this rather diversionary competition with the US, are museums so important to 21st century China?

Varutti quotes Hung Chan-tai of Hong Kong University: “A public museum in China is seldom about the past. It is about the current image of the party and how the party wants itself to be seen.”

Chinese material heritage

Museums offer a deceptively neutral space in which Chinese material heritage, be it drawn from imperial collections or revolutionary memorabilia, can be used time and time again to uphold and strengthen the legitimacy of political authority. Narrative, the stories objects can be made to underpin, is all.

Whether or not you have been to China to witness the museum explosion for yourself, there’s much to learn from Varutti’s detailed and readable study.

True, the book has something of the flavour of a doctoral thesis: the Development of Museums in China with a special study of the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese museums.

And there were gaps which it would be good to see filled – the management structure in individual museums, the way in which new initiatives were promulgated and coordinated across such a huge country, the working relationship between the state authorities and the new private galleries and museums.

But these were minor niggles. Something bigger seemed to be missing. Looking again at the inevitable black and white photographs, I suddenly realised that I had no real feeling for visitor experience at the average Chinese museum.

I fear that in many cases, especially away from the showpieces on the beaten track, it may be more than a little dull. Here, as Varutti warns, exhibits are likely to support the increasingly obsolete state narratives based on patriotism, historical materialism, socialism and revolution.

Please form an orderly queue by the door.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant