Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China by Denise Y. Ho (review)

Denise Y. Ho’s book, impeccably grounded in archival and oral research, analyzes how certain objects of Mao-era politics (1949–79), glossed as revolution, came to be organized for exhibition in local- and national-level forms. We have long known that Mao’s China was keen on bringing the communist revolution and its associated shifting politics into everyday life. This was done through direct campaigns and mobilizations, song and dance, propaganda posters, and slogans; it was done in literature and drama as well as on residential blackboards that transmitted crucial directives while keeping track of community affairs. Ho’s examples of exhibitionary culture in Shanghai span a range of other possibilities for the visually materialized nature of Mao-era politics in its many ubiquitous forms. She reveals how material objects were made to take on meaning through their contextualization into various narrative strategies, and she explores how narrative strategies were bent to fit the materialized realities of ever-shifting political life itself. This constitutes for her a modal tension. The problem of the relation of narrative to materiality is an old one—scholars must deal with it as a matter of professional hazard, either implicitly or explicitly. Ho finds a way to make this old problem somewhat new, even while her use of the term “curation” falls a little flat.

Chapter 1 is an exploration into how the search for and designation of the First Party Congress site was pursued in the early 1950s. Hardly straightforward and always riven by contradiction, Ho demonstrates how this fraught process was resolved in favor of displaying objects that conformed to the “red line” narrative confirming Mao’s centrality to the Chinese Communist Party formation and development. Unsurprising in its narrative findings, the chapter nevertheless makes for interesting historical reading. Chapter 2 examines how the transformation of the Fangua Lane shantytown became a story of urban renewal in the name of the proletariat (in unmarked contrast to 1990s-era Shanghai urban renewal in the name of the market). That pre-1949 substandard housing was torn down and rebuilt, and that certain families were moved back in to enjoy modernized socialist infrastructure is a utopian story of worker-centered urbanism combined with inevitable disappointments about how partial that utopia in fact was and could ever have been. It is not startling that exhibitions on Fangua Lane rendered it synonymous with the promise of the proletarian socialist state, although Ho renders the story well. Chapter 3 investigates the “love science and eliminate superstition” campaigns of the early 1960s aimed primarily at school-aged children in an attempt to pry them loose from “feudal” beliefs and to inculcate into them commitment to the omnipotence of science. As Ho comments, “By making science and superstition opposites, the exhibition made them mutually exclusive” (132). This is not a novel insight—it is integral to all enlightenment theories—and how “curation” contributes conceptually rather than merely descriptively is not clear, but again the story is effectively told.

Chapter 4 takes up the mid-1960s movement for class education through which each individual was to be compelled to think of themselves as a collective classed subject. This political consciousness-raising presented, as Ho documents, the problem of how to exhibit class solidarity and class treachery, when the designated main threat of “peaceful evolution” was difficult to put on display, because the nature of the process it names is characterized by deviousness and secrecy. The resultant compromises, Ho demonstrates, became the stuff of cultural revolutionary attack a short while later. In chapter 5, Ho narrates how the Red Guards celebrated their successes at ferreting out and smashing class privilege, understood as the threat of peaceful evolution, in their mostly haphazard curatorial practices, through which they amassed household objects seized from “bourgeois” families, and piled them up for public viewing. Reminiscent of land reform practices when landlord abundance...