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45 Chapter 2 Exhibiting the Revolution The Museum of the Chinese Revolution The Discourse of Revolution “Revolution” ( geming) is, of course, one of the keywords of twentieth-century Chinese historical discourse. Beginning in the late Qing, geming became a standard term of the emerging lexicon of modernity (L. Liu 1995).1 Geming meant a radical political and social transformation that offered an exit from the trap of imperial history, with its endless cycle of dynastic rise and decline, and an entry into a new historical trajectory that would lead to a different and better world; it marked a clear break with the old and an entry into the new.2 Revolutions have, of course, punctuated the history of twentieth-century China—from the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911, to the anti-warlord Northern Expedition, to the successful CCP-led struggle against the Nationalists that led to the founding of the PRC, and finally to the Cultural Revolution . As in other national contexts, the remembering and commemoration of (at least some of) these revolutions contribute significantly to imagining into being the modern nation liberated from a pernicious past. Particularly in the socialist world, museums play a critical role in this remembering. The Cubans have their Museum of the Revolution (est. 1959), Hanoi its Museum of the Vietnamese Revolution (est. 1959), the Soviets had their Central Museum of the Revolution (est. 1924), and so on. Each in its own way portrays the revolution as the foundational moment in the history of a coming-into-being as a socialist nation. Although Western nations—France and the United States, most notably—do not have prominent national museums dedicated to their respective revolutions, their revolutionary histories are certainly treated in a variety of exhibitionary spaces and memorial sites.3 In this chapter, I examine modes of exhibiting revolution and revolutionary history in the post-Mao reform era. After looking at some Republican-era examples as a way of suggesting links between KMT and CCP revolutionary narratives, I focus my analysis on the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the most official exhibitionary space for interpreting and propagandizing the meaning of the communist revolution in the PRC. Over its more than fifty-year history, the museum’s representations of the revolution have changed considerably to reflect political and economic shifts. 46 Chapter 2 In the post-Mao era, curators have sought to enlarge the exhibits into a more general history of modern China, one less centered on the party-led revolution, but those efforts have always been circumscribed by the state’s continuing allegiance to the revolution as its central legitimizing myth. Many of the basic tropes and narrative strategies developed in the original exhibits from the early 1960s can be found in post-Mao iterations, even in its most recent exhibit, Road to Revival. Still, the changes in the museum’s representations of the modern past are significant and hint at more radical representational transformations occurring in other exhibitionary contexts, a topic I tackle in the next chapter. The Republican-Era Exhibition of Revolution Although the Soviet influence is critical, the kind of commemoration of revolution we find in PRC museums also traces its lineage back to the Republican era and the KMT memorialization of the 1911 Revolution. This lineage is perhaps not as ironic as it might first appear because the KMT and the CCP were both Leninist parties under similar cultural and political influences. Memorialization of the 1911 Revolution emerged slowly in the wake of the revolution but gained force in the late 1920s as the Nationalist regime consolidated its power and began the process of state building . Commemorating the revolution and its leaders and martyrs lent the KMT legitimacy , which it desperately needed because parts of the country were not under its political control and because it was engaged in a struggle with the CCP. Yet the rhetorical relationship to that revolution was problematic because the revolution had been a failure. Yuan Shikai dissolved the elected parliament of 1912 and the Nationalists were effectively exiled, sending the nation into the political fragmentation of the so-called Warlord period (1915–1925), which necessitated another revolution (the Northern Expedition). In this sense, the Nationalists have tended to commemorate both revolutions together, the latter somehow completing the incomplete trajectory of the former. The KMT and their sympathizers devoted significant time and energy to the exhibition of revolutionary history and memory. The memorial to the martyrs of Huanghuagang, which commemorates the death of...

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