Seeing History: Public History in China 9783110983098, 9783110996180

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Author Biography
Introduction: Complex Public History
Part I: The Origin of Modern Public History in China
Part II: Past Making in the Present: Presentations and Patterns
Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese
Chapter 2 Oral History: History, Memory, and Identity
Chapter 3 Family Narrative, Personal Memory, and Public History
Chapter 4 Museums and the Public
Chapter 5 When Environmental History Goes Public
Chapter 6 Performing History: Cultural Memory in the Present
Chapter 7 Playing the Past: Historical Video Games as Participatory Public History
Chapter 8 Public History: The Future of Teaching the Past
Part III: Prosuming History: A Paradigm Shift
Epilogue: The Future of China’s Past
Glossary (Chinese Characters)
Permissions
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Na Li Seeing History: Public History in China

Public History in International Perspective

Theory, Method, and Public Practice Edited by Indira Chowdhury and Michael M. Frisch Advisory Board Thomas Cauvin Bronwyn Dalley David Dean Heather Goodall Hilda Kean Julia Lajus Na Li Serge Noiret Ricardo Santhiago

Volume 3

Na Li

Seeing History: Public History in China

ISBN 978-3-11-099618-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-098309-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-098329-6 ISSN 2626-1774 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942755 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: CHUNYIP WONG/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface In May 2013, I met Wu Wenguang, an independent documentary filmmaker in China. He started the Vernacular Memory Plan and Grassroots Studio project in 2011. Integrating visuals and sounds into memories, Wu’s project documented the history of the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. Around 20 participants – villagers, innovative documentary filmmakers, and young volunteering students – were actively involved. The journey of recording and documenting individual stories and memories through visuals gradually became a quest for a renewed sense of identity, an alternative understanding of history. I was surprised about Wu’s daring passion for documenting the vernacular memory of the still sensitive part of Chinese history. In November 2013, I was sitting at a public history conference held in the newly renovated Suzhou Museum, observing quietly and listening attentively. The public, mostly local residents and history enthusiasts, came to present and discuss a wide range of historical issues. Emotions ran high, and my heart was stirred. For some reason, Raphael Samuel’s words came to my mind: “history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian’s ‘invention’. It is, rather, a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands.” How come such an ebullient “social form of knowledge,” so steeped in popular memory, remains an intellectual blind spot? I wrote this book because these stories need telling. The idea was conceived at Suzhou conference, and public history had become a major focus of my work since then. Writing this book has been quite a journey, and in many ways, a cumulation of the past eight years of my life, an outgrowth of my effort to understand public history in China, to engage genuine public dialogues, and to establish public history as a field of study at the college and university level. Two key universities, Chongqing University and Zhejiang University, where I have worked as Professor and Research Fellow, provided institutional and financial supports for various projects included in this book. Most of the research and field work were carried out in conjunction with my public history undergraduate and graduate courses in Chongqing and Hangzhou. The cumulating meaning of such a challenging task has evolved during numerous conversations with public historians, history educators, and, most important of all, an educated and concerned public, in many cities across China. Back in 2013, the first Public History Seminar took place in Chongqing, where a small group of scholars and practitioners gathered to discuss an emergent field of public history. Later that year, the first National Public History Conference was held in Suzhou, where a much larger and more diverse group of participants engaged https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-202

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in candid yet provocative conversations about public history. I was fortunate to be part of the conversations on both occasions. Many colleagues I met in Chongqing and Suzhou remain my best cohorts, and we have worked closely to define and develop the field since then. Along the way, three National Public History Faculty Training Programs took place in three major cities in China from 2014 to 2019. Collectively, a group of visionary public historians and educators have brought their experiences and expectations to the programs. As the organizer of these programs, I was humbled by such diversity and dynamics. In 2017, with a fledgling Center for Public History and many young and innovative colleagues and students, I launched Public History (《公众史学》), the first national journal of public history in China. The journal has since served as a meeting place for scholarly as well as layman’s discussions, exchanges, and reflections about public history, from which my thoughts about public history have been shaped and reshaped. An especially big thank you goes to all my colleagues at the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities in Chongqing University, and the Institute for World History in Zhejiang University, for their invaluable advice, criticism, and comments on the early drafts. In particular, Chen Xin, whose partnership in many matters, personal and professional, is valued more than I can express; Wang Xi, a prominent UStrained Chinese historian, patiently guided me through many difficulties in the early years of establishing public history in China, and wrote an insightful preface to my second book, A Critical Introduction to Public History (《公众史学研究入门》): I have tapped tremendous wit and wisdom from both. Outside of my institutional homes, Meng Zhongjie (East China Normal University), Zhao Yafu (Capital Normal University), Yang Xiangyin (People’s University), Mei Xueqin (Qsinghua University), Zhou Bin (Fudan University), Chen Heng (Shanghai Normal University), and many others have helped me significantly improved this book. My two doctoral students, especially You Lishi and Liu Yushi, have provided considerable research, translation, and logistics supports for the Center for Public History at Zhejiang University. As the field has evolved so rapidly in the past decade, a work about public history in China would become instantly obsolete, or remain incomplete at the best, without dialogues with colleagues globally. My mentors, David Glassberg and Marla Miller at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was trained, continue to champion my work in China. David accepted my invitation to lecture about history and memory in the first National Public History faculty training program in Shanghai in 2014; Marla serves on the board of Public History, and advised me on many challenging issues when I worked in the field. Along the road, many veteran public historians have helped in ways big or small: Sharon Babian, Rebecca Conard, John Dichtl, James Gardner, Anita Jones,

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Page Miller, Patricia Melvin, Constance Schulz, Jannelle Warren-Findley, Robert Weyeneth, among others. In particular, Martha Sandweiss at Princeton University worked closely with me on the first National Public History Faculty Training program in 2014, a collaborative cross-cultural experiment. Philip Scarpino at Indiana University at Indianapolis, Theodore Karamanski at Loyola University Chicago, and Alison Marsh at University of South Carolina flew to Chongqing in 2015 for the second National Public History Faculty Training program. They generously shared their experience, and with the help of professional translators, engaged in many candid dialogues with the participants. The National Council on Public History has been unwaveringly supportive. When I was serving on the Board of Directors from 2017 to 2020, Nicole Belolan, Kristen Baldwin-Deathridge, Catherine Gudis, Modupe Labode, Sharon Leon, Cathy Stanton, Alexandra Lord, Stephanie Rowe, and Joan Zenzen, among others, have offered encouragement and advice for my efforts to establish public history programs in China in countless ways. Outside the United States, Thomas Cauvin, David Dean, Andreas Etges, and Serge Noiret at the International Federation for Public History; Steven High in Canada; Paul Ashton, Paul Hamilton, Anna Clark, Tanya Evans in Australia; Alexander Trapeznik in New Zealand; and James DeGroot in Britain have offered many inspiring global insights, and helped me connect with public historians around the world. I have also been extremely fortunate to work with the editors of major public history journals, James Brooks and Sarah Case at The Public Historian, Paul Ashton at Public History Review, and Marko Demantowsky at Public History Weekly, who provided incredible support for Public History. Their professionalism motivated me to present public history to a larger and more thoughtful audience, with rigor and joy. Over the years, I have delivered the major themes evolved in this book as keynotes, seminars, panels, roundtables, and working groups, among other forms, at a series of seminars and conferences, including National Public History conferences in Suzhou in 2013 and in Hangzhou in 2018 (in conjunction with the first Editorial Meeting of Public History); the National Public History Faculty Training Programs in China (Shanghai, 2014; Chongqing, 2015; Hangzhou, 2019); the National Council on Public History annual conferences from 2013 to 2019; International Forum of Historia em Quarentena/ Produzir E Divulgar Historia em Tempos de Crise in Brazil in 2020; Oral History, Public Memory and Political Identity: A Transnational Dialogue, Oral History Conference, Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies & National Oral History Association of New Zealand (NOHANZ), in 2020; and “Public History in China and its Global Implications” at Historians in the Public Sphere lecture series, University of Oxford, in 2021.

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Like the nature of public history, this work is largely a result of collective intelligence. To weave scattering insights, inspirations, critiques, and advice together, I would like to thank my editors Michael Frisch, Indira Chowdhury, and Rabea Rittgerodt for their incredible intellectual and editorial support. Michael ran a three-day workshop about digital media and public history in Hangzhou, as part of the third National Public History Faculty training program in 2019. Our dialogues have continued ever since. Indira invited me to speak at the Centre for Public History at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (CPH-SMI), Bengaluru in India, which spurred my thoughts on public history in the broader regional context. Having implicated all these colleagues and friends, near and far, I now go to my family. This book was very much written in transit between different moving parts of my life. The writing started initially during the long flights between Hangzhou and the San Francisco Bay area in California. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, my teachings were moved into cyberspace, and travel plans held up. The manuscript was completed in my new apartment near the Pacific Ocean. Living along the coast reminds me, daily, that the beauty of public history, like the waves and sunsets, lies in unpredictable, imaginative, and dynamic flows. In the past few years, I have witnessed, with sadness, the passing away of my father, and embraced, with fresh joy, the coming of Anthony, my third child. This book is dedicated to my parents, Li Zhongchi (1950–2018) and Kai Xuequn, who brought me into the world in the first place and gave me a heart to pursue my dream with tenacity and joy; to Wang Liang, my love and best partner in life that one can imagine, who is always there, always willing to listen, and always sees the best part of me; and to Annabel, Alexander, and Anthony, my three beautiful children, who have taught me to notice, enjoy, and celebrate the most treasured aspects of life. Without them, none of this would have been possible, or worth pursuing.

Contents Preface

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Author Biography

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Introduction: Complex Public History What is Public History? 2 Complex Public History 4 Seeing History in China Now 9

1

Part I: The Origin of Modern Public History in China Mapping the Landscape 19 Tracing the Origins 33

Part II: Past Making in the Present: Presentations and Patterns Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese 45 History, Memory, and Historical Consciousness 47 The Project: Chinese and the Pasts 49 Initial Findings: A Statistical Overview 51 Preliminary Patterns of Public History Making 60 Chapter 2 Oral History: History, Memory, and Identity 62 Where We Were and Where We are Now: Oral History as a Source in Chinese History (A Concise Review of the First Three Thousand Years) National History, Memory, and Tradition 68 Women’s History, Local History, and Histories of Professions 75 Family History and the Medical Humanities 79 Going Public: The Past is not a Foreign Country 80 The Popularity of Oral History 83 Historical Consciousness: Doing Deeper 87

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Chapter 3 Family Narrative, Personal Memory, and Public History 93 Family History in China: A Brief History 94 A Changing Landscape: Family History from Below 102 A Blurring Boundary between the Private and the Public 103 A Professional and Amateur Divide 110 A New Quest for the Old Question 111 Family Stories and Public History 113 Chapter 4 Museums and the Public 118 Genealogy 118 The “Museums and the Public” Project Issues and Analysis 131 Visions for Museums in China 140

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Chapter 5 When Environmental History Goes Public 144 Nature as Material Culture: The Dredging History of West Lake 147 A Story of Nature by Design 151 The Rhetorical Power of Nature 154 Presenting Environmental History as Public Memory 157 An Oral History and Public Memory Project 162 Place-Based Narratives and Insights 163 A Communicative Space: Environmental History as Public Memory 166 Chapter 6 Performing History: Cultural Memory in the Present 169 Performing History in China: Snapshots 170 Reenacting History, Performing Identity: An Illustrative Case Nationalism from Below? 177 Cultural Memory: Reenacted and Remediated 179 Shaping Historical Consciousness 189 Chapter 7 Playing the Past: Historical Video Games as Participatory Public History 193 Video Games in China 193 Historical Video Games: Feeling, Touching, and Playing the Past

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Contents

The Power of Historical Video Games An Emergent Form of Public History

205 215

Chapter 8 Public History: The Future of Teaching the Past 219 When Traditional History Education is Challenged 219 How Can Public History Contribute? 221 Educating the Educators: National Public History Faculty Training Programs 228

Part III: Prosuming History: A Paradigm Shift Prosuming History 241 An Uncommon Ground 244 Deep Fundamentals 247 Two Caveats 252

Epilogue: The Future of China’s Past Glossary (Chinese Characters) Permissions

269

Bibliography

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Index

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Author Biography Na Li is a public historian and urban planning scholar. Her research focuses on public history and urban preservation. During her decade-long work in China, Na Li has pioneered the field of public history in China. She was appointed Research Fellow/Professor at Department of History, Zhejiang University (2017–2022), and the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Chongqing University (2012–2017). She is Founding Editor for Public History: A National Journal of Public History (《公众史学》). She served on the Board of Directors for the National Council on Public History (2017–2020) and has written two monographs, Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto’s Urban Landscape (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Public History: A Critical Introduction (Peking University Press, 2019), which focus on public history and urban preservation. She is Associated Researcher, Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-204

Introduction: Complex Public History This book is about public history in China, but it is not a book of History. Rather, it is about historical potential: the what-might-have-been, the unrealized visions, the expanded horizons, or the imagined possibilities. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, public history, as a watchword and as a practice, has found expression in everyday life, old photographs, family ephemera, spontaneous memorials, historical reenactment, historical video games, and oral testimonies, to name but a few of its manifestations. At a glance, these avocational passions might seem to be no more than a fad. So long as we view them as isolated and scattered evidences of change, we will continue to miss the larger significance lurking in the seemingly chaotic, random, and unconventional approaches to the past. At the most immediate level, media technology has visibly altered the scale and manner of how the ordinary Chinese people access information about the past. It also makes it possible to construct a diverse range of communities, physical or virtual, dedicated to exploring the past. Impacted by the same technological advances, traditional history in China has become increasingly distant and irrelevant; public history, by contrast, seems pervasive, immediate, and interesting. The technological-centered explanation, however, diverts attention from a still larger and more significant meaning of the current massive rush to understand the past, and even more deeply and subtly, a substantial change in the public’s basic assumption about the past. Something is missing here: how is it possible that more professionally trained historians are losing ground to an avocational public? To ask this question is not to attack Chinese historians, but to bring one fact into sharper focus: a progressive blurring of the line that has long separated producers from consumers of historical knowledge. When public history was imported from the United States to China around the turn of the twenty-first century, it was introduced as a sub-field within academic history, and has developed along that path ever since. Professional historians in China, even some forward-looking ones, see public history as merely presenting a change in the patterns of participation in history-making. This book offers a sharply different view. It contends, essentially, that public history represents more than a research domain within history or within any existing discipline, nor does it fit into any established narratives, but rather, a fundamental change of the entire process of history-making in China. In this process, the public has shifted from passive consumers of history to active participants in a process for which Alvin Toffler, decahttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-001

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des ago, coined the term “prosumption,” the interrelated process of production and consumption. Seen in this light, public history makes obsolete the old structure for building and acquiring historical knowledge: it challenges the old assumptions, supersedes the rigid academic hierarchy, and stirs the imaginations of the multitudes. With an assemblage of case studies, this work makes a case for a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), and launches a concept, complex public history, i.e. public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems.

What is Public History? What is public history? When I first encountered the term at a graduate seminar in Amherst, Massachusetts, Robert Kelley’s definition was introduced and explained: In its simplest meaning, Public History refers to the employment of historians and the historical method outside of academia: in government, private corporations, the media, historical societies and museums, even in private practice. Public Historians are at work whenever, in their professional capacity, they are part of the public process. An issue needs to be resolved, a policy must be formed, the use of a resource or the direction of an activity must be more effectively planned – and an historian is called upon to bring in the dimension of time: this is Public History.1

Wesley Johnson echoed this practical application of history skills, and argued that “It is rare when any profession witnesses the birth of a new field, especially when that specialization is History [. . .] However, this is one year when the discipline of history is seeing a new field, Public History, emerge.”2 An idea born in the late 1970s out of job crisis in the United States, innovative at the time, seems inadequate to capsulate a myriad of public histories in a variety of cultural contexts in the twenty-first century. Forty years after the birth of public history, I met Wesley Johnson at the National Council on Public History annual conference in Las Vegas; he was impressed with the booming public histories in China, and delighted to witness the launch of the first national journal of public history in the Chinese language, Public History (《公众史学》). In the inaugural issue of Public History, I define public history as “an audience-centered historical practice, that focuses on the issues and demands of the public in the contemporary world. In public history, historians work with the public to build

 Kelley, “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” 16.  Johnson, “Editor’s Preface,” 4.

What is Public History?

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the past into history.”3 My effort to define public history involves a different purpose: I try to define it to see various phenomena under the umbrella of public history through it. Modern public history, at its core, is a verb, in present tense: it means history(ing) in the public sphere. It enlivens history; it provokes, critiques; it is contextual and transnational. Methodologically, public history is best understood through particular examples, grounded in specific time, space, and cultural context. Early in my work on Kensington Market in Toronto, I became fascinated with a public history perspective in understanding urban landscapes. As a young urban planning scholar, I realized that there was something inadequate with the rational approach to cities. Walking through the narrow streets and talking with the residents from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, I invited the residents to share their stories, to help us better preserve the urban built environment that truly matters to them. I proposed, in naiveté, a culturally sensitive narrative approach, in which “a shared authority” lies at the heart. When the residents of Kensington Market urged me to publish the study as a book, I realized that my work had found a place in a major Canadian metropolis well-known for its ethnic diversity and desire to preserve such ethnic neighborhoods. I am not sure whether “a pastiche of interdisciplinary methodologies” of this study, as one book review claims, “hopefully, will transpose to Vancouver, Montreal, and other cities with similar urban features,”4 but it motivates me to further explore how critical urban preservation issues emerge through engagements with particular problems in particular settings at particular points in a broader surrounding cultural and political discourse. In the subsequent years, what emerged at the fringe then has gradually become the focus of my research and teaching. I ventured into a range of public history projects in a drastically different culture, and worked to establish public history programs at college and university level in that culture. My journey has crossed “two cultures” in several senses.5 For one, public space is complex, and the production and the consumption of history within that space involves levels of complexity. In my research about historical regions and cities around the world, I tried to understand urban structures and changes, with a hope to better preserve the historical built environments for a different future. While urban

 Li, “Editor’s Preface,” 1. See the original Chinese text: 公众史学是突出受众的问题、关注点和 需求的史学实践;促进历史以多种或多元方式满足现实世界的需求;促成史家与公众共同将“过 去”建构为历史。 .  Lipinsky, “Na Li, ‘Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto’s Urban Landscape,’” 210.  Here I borrow the term “two cultures” from Charles Percy Snow. See Snow, The Two Cultures.

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planning focuses on the future, historic preservation, paradoxically, holds on to the past and provokes nostalgia. Why do we preserve to plan? The city is “a pattern in time,” a complex adaptive system; it functions in a continuum. One cannot truncate the historical membranes of the built environment when planning its future. For years, when searching the survival shards and fragments of the past, my intellectual quest for urban planning and public history converge in the system view: public history(ing) operates like cities, which “happen to be problems in organized complexity” in Jane Jacob’s visionary observation, “the variables are many but they are not helter skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole.”6 Almost half a century later, Michael Batty echoes: “cities in particular and urban development in general emerge from the bottom up and that the spatial order we see in patterns at more aggregate scales can be explained . . . in two distinct but related ways: through cells, which represent the physical and spatial structure of the city, and through agents, which represent the human and social units that make the city work.”7 More succinctly, Batty recently writes: “cities are . . . par excellence complex systems: emergent, far from equilibrium, requiring enormous energies to maintain themselves, displaying patterns of inequality spawned through agglomeration and intense competition for space.”8 Similar to cities, public history takes place in a dynamic and networked space, with an infinite web of meanings. Such a space, fluid, non-linear, emergent, represents “the edge of chaos,”9 where the components of a system never quick lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either; where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. It is complex.

Complex Public History The active, or proactive, making of history reveals the complexity of history making. At a non-linear temporal scale, the line between the production and consumption is fading; the public is prosuming history. Various actors, amplifying, reinforcing, self-mulitplying, snowballing, work in new structures and generate

 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  Batty, Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-based Models, and Fractals, 6.  Batty, “The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities,” 769–71.  See Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.

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new behaviors of history making. These new structures and behaviors produce heterogeneity and unpredictability, in which we witness the power and novelty to add, change, or evolve. In the new model of prosumption, a range of seemingly idiosyncratic historical practices either challenge the status quo, or enrich our understanding of the multiple pasts. I suggest that we take a system view of public history, referring to public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems, which I call complex public history. Why do we need a new phrase? First, we are dazed at a surprising variety of public histories, and understandably so. But if we approach such an astonishing amount of public history activities with a rigid disciplinary approach, we may capture “whats” but will fail to grasp “whys” and “therefores.” Modern public history migrates between history and other territories, museums studies, oral history, family history and genealogy, historical performance, and digital humanities, to name but a few of such fields. It does not belong to any discipline; it draws upon, generates, and influences history as a discipline; it thrives on interdisciplinary exchanges. If we view historical events as happenings that follow a linear order, we will be surprised at the disproportionately large numbers of such events that seem to just “happen.” Yet, indeed, they are responses to a changing political and cultural environment. Politically, we see an increasing de-scaling of the nation as the spatial unit and authority on producing history; structurally, public history is different from traditional history in that they work in an open, dynamic, and perpetually novel environment, where multiple historical agents engage in intense, generative, and dynamic interactions, with new types of historical knowledge emerge. Complexity allows for the emergence of history-making from below, which resonates the core of public history. A system view may add new insights, or even lead to new discoveries. Second, it provides a tool for crossing “two cultures,” i.e., academic history and public history. The ordinary public in the everyday production and consumption of history becomes vital. Trivializing public history as a passing fad is sheer practical and intellectual loss. When traditional historians refuse to dialogue with public historians (and vice versa), when historical knowledge is no longer corralled in the library stacks or archives, when one group is busy writing for academic journals and monographs for tenure-promotion and despise the other group as shallow and popular pursuit without any intellectual depths, while another is actively engaging in all sorts of historical activities, both are missing out creative opportunities, and thus both are self-impoverished. One can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless we take our eyes off short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless we are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless

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you consider limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.10 Events, historical or not, are the most visible aspect of a larger complex—but not always the most important. We are less likely to be surprised if we can see how events accumulate into dynamic patterns of behavior.11 To search for the pattern, we need a fresh paint. First, what is a system? A system is its interlocking stocks, flows, and feedback loops, and those interconnected sets of elements that are coherently organized in a way that achieves something.12 Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are systems composed of interacting agents described in terms of rules. These agents adapt by changing their rules as experience accumulates. In CAS, a major part of the environment of any given adaptive agent consists of other adaptive agents, so that a portion of any agents’ efforts at adaptation is spent adapting to other adaptive agents.13 Aggregation, tagging, nonlinearity, flows, diversity are some of the basics of CAS, as John Holland brilliantly explained.14 For him, all of the agents involve great numbers of parts undergoing a kaleidoscopic array of simultaneous interactions. They all seem to share three characteristics: evolution, aggregate behavior, and anticipation.15 Then, what is complexity? The word complexity derives from the past participle of the Latin complectere, complexus, which means consisting of interconnected or interwoven parts; composite; compound; involved or intricate, as in structure. The idea of complexity, in Ilya Prigogine’s words, investigates emergent, dynamic, and self-organizing systems that interact in ways that heavily influence the probabilities of later events.16 Neil Johnson summarizes, in a more accessible language, that complexity means a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways; the very richness of these interactions allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization; their behavior is affected by memory or “feedback.”17 In the past few decades, the idea of complexity has traveled from natural sciences to social sciences and humanities, and the journey is complex in and of itself, with surprises, setbacks, and momentous steps. One of the earlier attempts to explore the implications of complexity within various disciplines and fields of social sciences is David Byrne and Dill Callaghan’s Complexity Theory and the Social Scien-

       

Meadows and Wright, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 87. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 12. Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, 10. Ibid., 11–14. Holland, “Studying Complex Adaptive Systems,” 1–8. Prigogine and Stengers, The End of Certainty. Johnson, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory, 14.

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ces: The State of the Art,18 in which complexity theory found its genesis back in the late nineteenth century by G.H. Lewes in response to the revolutionary theory based on the work of Darwin and Russell.19 In sociology, Miklas Luhmann synthesizes functionalism and phenomenology with the early insights of complexity theory and thus challenges the simpler versions of the critique of functionalism. His social system is a grand synthesis with Parsonian functionalism phenomenology.20 In management, Philip Anderson argues that applying complex adaptive systems models to strategic management leads to an emphasis on building systems that can rapidly evolve effective adaptive solutions. Strategic direction of complex organizations consists of establishing and modifying environments within which effective, improvised, self-organized solutions can evolve. Managers influence strategic behavior by altering the fitness landscape for local agents and reconfiguring the organizational architecture within which agents adapt.21 In education, complexity is applied in advancing the purpose of education as a process and the modes of formulation of knowledge within that process.22 In urban planning, my disciplinary home, Christopher Alexander recognized in the 1960s that the complexity of “natural” cities arises from an “inner nature” or “ordering principle.”23 He argued that the units forming a city comprised overlapping and hierarchically ordered sets. Around the same time, Jane Jacobs also noticed the complexity of cities and the advantages to residents arising from this complexity. For Jacobs, such complexity emerged spontaneously and organically from the bottom up. Like Alexander, she strongly opposed prevailing planning theory and practice – which intrinsically operated to reduce complexity.24 More recently, Michael Batty echoes Alexander and Jacob’s message, explaining that “cities are . . . par excellence complex systems: emergent, far from equilibrium, requiring enormous energies to maintain themselves, displaying patterns of inequality spawned through agglomeration and intense competition for space.”25 Planning scholars have collectively built the Complex Theories of Cities, referring to the cities as complex systems whose whole represents more than the sum of its

 Byrne and Callaghan, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art (Routledge, 2003).  Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Trübner & Company, 1875).  Luhmann, Social Systems, 457.  Anderson, “Perspective: Complexity Theory and Organization Science,” 216–32.  Osberg and Biesta, Complexity Theory and the Politics of Education (Brill, 2010); Mason, “Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education,” 4–18.  Christopher, “A City is not a Tree: Design,” 3.  Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Jacobs, The Economy of Cities.  Batty, “The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities,” 769–71.

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parts, where macro dynamics cannot be reconstructed by aggregating the behavior of “typical” inhabitants.26 These interdisciplinary travels have been more about borrowing the basic idea of complex and retooling it than creating “a new subject.”27 In 1999, Nigel Thrift’s pioneering exploration of the place of complexity offers a different perspective. He advances the idea that “the dissemination of complexity theory which reinstates the links between geography and the complexity theory. For him, complexity is “a scientific amalgam, an accretion of ideas, a rhetorical hybrid . . . based on the emergent or self-organizing impulse.”28 This insight, probably for the first time, levels our attention beyond the disciplinary boundary. Probing deeper, complexity approaches both signify and enhance a new “structure of feeling”;29 one that combines system and process thinking, as John Urry claims, and follows that a “complexity turn” emerges.30 Such an emergent structure involves a sense of contingent openness and multiple futures, the unpredictability of outcomes in time-space, a charity towards objects and nature, diverse and non-linear changes in relationships, households, and persons across huge distances in time and space, the systemic nature of processes, and the growing hyper complexity of organizations, products, technologies and socialities.31 More poignantly, Paul Cilliers situates complexity in the postmodern society. Complexity, based on a system of relationships, arises through large-scale nonlinear interactions, according to Cilliers. In the postmodern society, non-linearity, asymmetry, power, and competition are inevitable components of complex systems.32 At a global scale, complexity involves a wide array of systems of networked or circulating relationships implicated within different overlapping and increasingly convergent mobile, material worlds or hybrids. The global, then, is comprised of various systems, operating at various levels or scales, and each constitutes the environment for each other. Thus, crisscrossing societies are mobile, material systems in complex interconnection with their environments.33 Recently, treating nations as complex systems, Eric Kaufmann attempts to link complexity with nationalism, and argues that complexity theory addresses the very essence

 Portugali, Complexity, Cognition and the City; Portugali et al., Complexity Theories of Cities have Come of Age: An Overview with Implications to Urban Planning and Design.  Barthes, “Research: The Young,” 72.  Thrift, “The Place of Complexity,” 33.  Ibid.  Urry, “The Complexity Turn,” 1–14.  Ibid., 4.  Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, 120.  Urry, “The Complexities of the Global,” 245.

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of what constitutes the nation,34 complexity allows for the emergence of national identity from below, and the role of mass publics in the everyday production and consumption of nations is vital.35

Seeing History in China Now One would think that if an idea starts from natural sciences, we learn it more as a tool, a method, and a model. Yet, through the interdisciplinary trespassing, we inherit an attitude, a rhetoric, a metaphor, and a culture. Thoughts survive, if they work, if they propagate, if they find an appropriate milieu, a welcoming territory, as Philip Goodchild elegantly writes.36 Approaching public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems, I see, through projects, stories, and cases depicted in this book, four core features emerge – emergence, reinforcing feedback loops, distributed information, an open, dynamic, and perpetually novel system. To better understand these features in real space and time, this book presents a collection of essays, which evolve around a reasonably focused set of concerns about public history over the past eight years. Most scholarship on public history has so far focused on the United States and Western Europe, and this work, the first one to explore public history in China, attempts to fill an important gap. The assemblage of disparate pieces, cumulatively, reveal certain directions if not any coherent statements of related concerns. Public history in China originates from a unique cultural tradition that values harmony between the heaven and the earth, and follows a distinctive pedigree that emphases chronology and continuity. Understanding the fragmented impulses in how a public sense of history is shaped and how an historically conscious public engages the past, this book explores why public history has such a widespread appeal and mobilized a general population from almost all walks of life. Despite its geographic focus, this work involves numerous dialogues with public historians, practitioners, and educators from around the globe. This reflects the shifting nature of public history in the past two decades. Since I started working on this book, public history has gradually shifted from nation-state focused to a global phenomenon. In 2015, in the thick of my field work in China, I organized a working group, Teaching Public History through International Collaborations, at the National Council on Public History (NCPH) annual conference.

 Kaufmann, “Complexity and Nationalism,” 7.  Ibid., 21.  Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, 211.

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Participants of that group actively engaged in and compared public history pedagogy from a transnational perspective, which inspired me to lead the second National Public History Faculty Training Program in China, and edit a theme issue for Public History Review in 2015. While public history takes place in a specific national setting, these crossboundary dialogues become necessary: national forms of public history are internationally connected through the Internet, as Serge Noiret and Thomas Cauvin claim in their call for “new global forms of public history,”37 focusing on the active presence of the local pasts that are compared internationally. Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik offer a similar insight in their edited volume, What is Public History Globally?: “Like culture, public history comes from somewhere: it is local; it is from ‘around here’ – a locality, region, state or nation. But it is open to transnational flows and international development.”38 As readers will see in the following pages, the projects included in this work come from the Chinese context, yet all with some level of global implication. In an author interview with the Oral History Review in 2020, I shared the particular significance of oral history going public in the new digital era, and how the methodology, indexing, presentation, and production all defy disciplinary codes.39 Following that interview, I gave a keynote speech, Oral History, Public Memory and Political Identity: A Transnational Dialogue, at the Oral History Conference, Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies & National Oral History Association of New Zealand (NOHANZ); I realized that many challenges that I faced in China find a similar expression in New Zealand. In the same year, I was invited to speak International Forum of Historia em Quarentena/ Produzir E Divulgar Historia em Tempos de Crise in Brazil40 to discuss the role of public historian during the COVID-19 global pandemic. At that forum, I discussed my work in China with public historians from three continents, and the repercussions were diverse and dynamic across national borders. More recently, at the tenth anniversary of the Center for Public History at the Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in India, I discussed public history as a subdiscipline and as a social movement with scholars and educators in the region. Cross-referencing public history practices in a gamut of cultural context provokes further thoughts along the path: how much is the challenge in a particular space and time transferrable? With emergent digital technology, what are the

 Noiret and Cauvin, “Internationalizing Public History,” 25–43.  Ashton and Trapeznik, eds., What is Public History Globally?: Working with the Past in the Present, 6.  See https://oralhistoryreview.org/current-events/ohr-conversations-na-li/.  See https://www.historiaemquarentena.com.

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global implications of public history? As an intervention into a field that is rapidly evolving yet not quite established, this work is seeking a global reach of public history scholars and educators. While the principle audience is intended to be academic in character, the book also tells the stories that history provides, which makes it an ideal candidate for a wide breadth of readers. History enthusiasts interested in public history in China or internationally will find in this work some food for thought. This book is organized around both the process of development and emerging themes. Think of the following as the roadmap. We start from the origin. Part I, The Origin of Modern Public History in China, tracks various manifestations of the past-in-the-present in China. Public imagination has been captured by sepia photographs, intimate family ephemera, windswept architecture, carefully crafted natural and historical walks, historical games, and emotional oral testimonies. This part provides a broader thematic grounding for the subsequent chapters in several senses. For one, it traces the origin of modern public history in China back to the New Cultural Movement at the turn of twentieth century, specifically from the late Qing dynasty and to the People’s Republic era. For another, it maps the public history landscapes, with a series of cases as signposts. These emergent practices offer an ever-expanding space of dissidence and possibilities outside established categories or disciplinary boundaries, and have a profound impact on how people see, feel about, and engage with the past. Recognizing these fragmented public history impulses and claiming “everyone is their own historian” only get us started. In a shifting landscape of media technology, public history in China is far from being a research field; it is a social movement pulsing with enormous energy. However, technology, an agent for change, simply accelerates an impulse that has been present for some time. Public history is present at its own making and has emerged in the last two decades alongside a deteriorating notion of a national identity unified by the state. This connection owes its origin to a quintessentially Chinese cultural tradition. The core analysis of the subsequent chapters takes the readers on a journey through public history in China—less as definitive statements than as what can be collectively considered as forays, explorations, provocations, and inspirations. Part II, Past Making in the Present: Presentations and Patterns, presents various aspects of public histories at different scales, including historical consciousness, oral history, family history, public environmental history, museum interpretation, historical performance and reenactment, historical video games, and historical education. The eight chapters, all project-based and context-dependent, range widely in different areas of focus. Each analyzes a specific theme or pattern of public history, and leads readers into a more complicated understanding of the past and present. All

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chapters involve extensive archival research and field work at specific sites of investigation. With these projects, I have worked with public historians, museum curators, archivists, heritage site managers, archaeologists, urban planners, documentary film makers, historical reenactors, and history educators, at different levels, on the ground, across China. The applied level of history making often involves substantial practical experiences, is where we encounter most complexity, and is where we gather most insights. I can, therefore, write with greater confidence. The expansion of public history, despite unearthing an uneasy relationship with some aspects of its past, constitutes a search for citizenship and new contemporary Chinese identity. Public debates have begun to emerge over the place of the past, exploring the role of history in national culture and society, the role of historians and formal history education, and forms of participation in history. In turn, these discussions have raised further questions: How should the past be re-interpreted? Who owes the past? How is history produced, disseminated, consumed, and shared in the public sphere? How can China create an historically-based national culture? Chapter 1, “Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese,” probes these questions. It discusses the “Chinese and the Pasts” project, which explores the material, narrative, didactic, and moral genres of historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese. This project, one of the first public history projects that I took on when returning to work in China, draws on a series of national and regional survey projects in the United States, a few European countries, Australia, and Canada. I have discussed the project with David Thelen, David Glassberg, Jannelle Warren-Findley, and Philip Scarpino in the United States, Paul Ashton and Paul Hamilton in Australia, and Steven High in Canada. While the “Chinese and the Pasts” project hopes to yield data that are comparable with those studies, it realizes the limitations of the previous studies. Though representative samples at a national level were collected, these studies lacked indepth probing into the attitudes of the cross-section of the populations. Also, if the primary targets were to investigate people’s attitudes towards the pasts, the quantitative approach poses a significant methodological challenge. Despite Rosenzweig and Thelen designing the survey, carrying it out, and ensuring that it followed the highest professional standards of academic survey research, the US survey had the general biases in collecting the statistical samples. In the 1990s, the survey used telephone survey – the question asked and the way of asking affect answers received and are shaped by the context in which the questions were asked. Without another systematic study, there is no way to know which contextual factors may have affected the responses received. Though the surveys in the US, Australia, and Canada used some methods employed by ethnographers and oral historians, they were neither an ethnography nor an oral history. All studies

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used computer software for coding the data, which required a certain level of uniformity in format and layout. The “Chinese and the Pasts” project survey was carried out at the regional scale, and the results remained inconclusive, but the preliminary findings gave me some confidence to take on various public history projects later. First, material culture stands as a convincing way of engaging the public. Places or sites of public history are highly valued in people’s learning about the pasts. Functioning as narrative media for historical events, these places or sites possess material rhetoric and potential for public history activities. They impact historical consciousness of ordinary people in a profound way. Second, there is a strong push towards personal, family, and local history. Family is a highly cherished place for making or doing history, and it intimately impacts people’s sense of the past. Third, the public respects institutional and professional authority. Public history does not contradict professional history. Instead, it welcomes professional intervention. How do various public histories influence the historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese? Chapter 2, “Oral History: History, Memory, and Identity,” attempts to address the question through arguably one of the most popular forms of public history in China – oral history. Even before I returned to China after more than a decade interval, I heard about a booming variety of oral history that has attracted steadily increasing scholarly and public attention. This chapter surveys the landscape of oral history and addresses two core questions: first, why has oral history become popular with such scope and intensity? Second, how does oral history influence the historical consciousness of a cross-section of ordinary Chinese? It introduces the idea of public oral history, and calls for a more critical analysis of the diverse, dynamic nature and uses of oral histories in a public history making. Closely related to oral history is family history and genealogy. With state control being a consistent pattern for more than two thousand years, family (jia) and state (guo) seem inseparable in China. During the twenty-first century, however, media technology, freer access to information, and increasing mobility have tilted this delicate balance. At a massive scale and in various forms and genres, family history and genealogy are flourishing. Chapter 3, “Family Narrative, Personal Memory, and Public History,” traces the genealogy of family history in China, analyzing why and how institutional histories become so complicated and where traditional family history fails. With a critical survey of emerging family history practices, it argues for a more practical-oriented approach, with which family history offers space to connect personal narratives, family memories, and public history. Chapter 4, “Museums and the Public,” presents a project that ran through my years of working as Professor and Research Fellow at Chongqing University. It was conceived when I visited Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum, and realized that something went wrong with the traditional exhibit planning and the

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role of museums as sites for public education. Museums have grown exponentially since the first public museum was established in China in 1905. How does one design an exhibit for a better-informed public? What kind of interpretive space is needed to engage the public? How do museums function as sites of public history? This chapter examines the genealogy of museum development in China, and argues that the birth of the modern museum in China is a product of the radicalism of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Embedded in the subsequent one hundred years of development are a changing definition of “public,” a remodeled idea of “history,” and an evolving relationship between museums and their public. The “Museums and the Public: Urban Landscape and Memory” project, situated within this broad context, looks at how the public interprets history and landscapes through exhibits, and if or how the exhibits reflect their memories. The project is significant, as it is the first interaction between public history and museums in China, both of which were imported from the West, and struggle to survive and thrive in the Chinese setting. The collaboration is challenging in that it requires political maneuvering, scholarly patience, and attention to multiple stakeholders. A collaborative project such as this becomes both a result of and an agency for change. It also foregrounds the idea of a comprehensive museum that could strive to be inclusive and representative. Museums are facing an evolving public, an increasingly demanding and thinking public that is craving history and active engagement. More educated and sophisticated audiences not only contribute important content for community-based exhibitions; some are excited about exploring contested and complicated histories. Co-curating, co-making history, and co-constructing public memory have come into play. In 2017, I started working at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. The transition coincided with the Green Public History initiative led by Professor Mei Xueqin at Tsinghua University. Attending the Centre for Green Public History inaugural conference in 2019 drew my attention to the following questions: How to interpret environmental history with the public? How to communicate environmental history in public spaces? How to engage a well-informed public with growing environmental consciousness? Chapter 5, “When Environmental History Goes Public,” written at the intersection of environmental history, public memory, and museum interpretation, examines the key issues in what is called “public environmental history.” The analysis focuses on relationships, i.e., the relationships between nature and culture, environment and people, and history and memory. Using as a case study the dredging history of West Lake in Hangzhou, this chapter argues that when environmental history goes public, this means more than framing that history alongside the public as a kind of annotative text in academic research. The communicative process between the scholarship and the public should not be a one-way street.

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Rather, that process calls attention to the rhetorical dimension of public memory and invites meaningful public engagement. The following two chapters take us into a deeper realm of a more public focused engagement; neither fit into any established disciplinary narratives, yet both become massively popular. Performing history, the bodily engagement with the past – living history, heritage performance, war reenactment, festivals, pageants, parades, dramas – has become massively appealing. In various shapes, scripted or improvised, fixed or promenade, solo or ensemble, history comes alive. Chapter 6, “Performing History: Cultural Memory in the Present,” explores the cultural impulse behind such a diverse range of historical performances. With some deliberation upon the public nature of performance, this chapter focuses on the type of performance that involves a more thoughtful public. Performing history, as a form of public history, constitutes a conscious experience, affects historical consciousness, and shapes public memories. Despite challenges in a censored political climate, it presents some exciting potentials for a new historiography. If traditional forms of historical reenactment emphasize the performatory challenge embedded in a variety of cultural practices, historical video games, as one genre of virtual reenactment, have rapidly evolved in the electronic age. Probing the affective, imaginative, playful, interactive, and immersive nature of historical video games, Chapter 7, “Playing the Past: Historical Video Games as Participatory Public History,” argues that the unique charm of historical video games lies in the methodological value and pedagogical virtue of the counterfactual thinking and the capability of shaping historical consciousness digitally and collectively. It also offers further thoughts on how historians can creatively engage with and responsibly intervene in historical video games as an emerging form of public history. What connects the excitement, the nuances, and the dynamics behind such a wide range of public histories? Across these seven chapters, I will show that constant tension exists between the academic and the public culture, and a more complex public has already engaged in a different type of history making. Public history(ing) is socially grounded, as is the knowledge produced out of such a contextual and relational process. The knowledge of public history(ing) is tacit precisely because of the re-engineering of the social bonds in a perpetually novel system. Not only has the nature of historical knowledge changed; so too has the way to acquire such a knowledge. Chapter 8, “Public History: The Future of Teaching the Past,” taps into the pedagogical potential of public history. Starting from where the traditional history education is challenged, this chapter explores how public history contributes to history education in significant ways, such as historical thinking, methodology, and professional ethics. A detailed analysis of three national public history faculty training programs suggests that public history has

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a potential for cultivating new modes of historical thinking and will direct the future of teaching the past. Part III, Prosuming History, constitutes a thematic convergence. This part identifies the connective threads running through the seemingly novel, radical, and daring public histories. The grand metaphor behind is the ideas of presumption, coined by Alvin Toffler in his classic The Third Wave, referring to the interrelated process of production and consumption. The traditional monopoly over the production of history by the state and the educated elites in China is crumbling: the public, who used to sit at the consuming end, have become prosumers of history. Prosumption is not a one-time deal, but a wide range of processes existing along a continuum, and the very continuity becomes part of the historical process. What is exactly new in this model? A perspective of prosuming history rests on four key themes: goal, process, means, and structure. If the goal of historical inquiry is to acquire knowledge about the past, prosuming history aims for tacit knowledge of the past; prosuming history includes the process of co-creating values; media technology stands out as the critical agent in presuming history; and precisely because of the decentralized, participatory, recycling, efficient, and accelerative nature of emergent media technology, history making takes place in a similar emergent and open structure. Various actors, amplifying, reinforcing, self-mulitplying, snowballing, work in new structures and generate new behaviors of history making. These new structures and behaviors produce heterogeneity and unpredictability, in which we witness the power and novelty to add, change, or evolve. With a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), this book will end with where it starts – the core features of complex public history, the nature of historical knowledge, and the role of media technology. I will be returning there to a core claim: modern public history reveals a cultural anxiety, and fills an emotional void. Paradoxically, we are not yet to fully comprehend the complexities of public history. So do not expect anything certain or conclusive at the end. Throughout the journey, we will encounter complexities of public history(ing), competing claims, conflictual interpretations, or subverted expectations; we will be surprised at an ever-expanding shared sense of what is possible; we will be working in a new structure, with a blurring line between production and consumption, with revolutionary media technology, with a historically conscious public. We are envisioning the future of the past.

Part I: The Origin of Modern Public History in China

This work tracks all the manifestations of the past-in-the-present I have discovered in China. As both a watchword and a practice, public history finds expression in everyday life. Public imagination has been captured by sepia photographs, intimate family ephemera, windswept architecture, carefully crafted natural and historical walks, historical games and emotional oral testimonies. These emergent practices offer an ever-expanding space of dissidence and possibilities outside established categories or academic fields, and have a profound impact on how people see, feel about, and engage with the past. Recognizing these fragmented public history impulses and claiming “everyone is their own historian” can only get us started. If historians are to understand how the public’s sense of history is shaped, they should understand how a historically conscious public is formed and resourced. My primary focus is why public history has such a widespread appeal among ordinary Chinese, and how it mobilizes a general population from almost all walks of life in today’s China. The revolution in media technology has shortened distances and altered how people communicate with each other, but technology simply accelerates an impulse that has been present for some time. Public history in China does not rise like the sun at an appointed time: it is present at its own making and has emerged in the last two decades alongside a deteriorating notion of a national identity unified by the state. This connection owes its origin to a quintessentially Chinese cultural tradition that values harmony between the heaven and the earth, humanity and continuity. Modern public history in China can be traced back to the early twentieth century when a growing sense of national crisis triggered a collapse of the traditional idea system, a yearning for roots, and an attempt to popularize history.

Mapping the Landscape The past is popular, but public history is different from popular history. Public history is not a spontaneous engagement with the “mindless” masses; rather, it appeals to a socially stratified public with the capacity for critical thinking. The Chinese public has become passionate about explaining and interpreting the past, and within this “public” have emerged groups of educated, thoughtful, and socially responsible citizens. They actively participate in interpreting and presenting the past, and their writings impinge on public historical consciousness on a different scale. Electronic technology and the expansion of the Internet make it possible to reconstruct a national culture and identity or some kind of community that is otherwise virtual, fluid, rapidly changing, and diverse. Several signposts mark the terrain of public history, from which I have unashamedly collected a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-002

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few sparkling spots and teased out some threads that connect them into a unified whole.

“Unofficial” is the Key Word Confucius says, “if the traditional belief is lost, seek help among the folks (shili er qiu zhuye).”1 One possible starting point in our exploration is oral history, which has long played an important role in collecting and transmitting historical knowledge. Even today, many ethnic tribes that lack formal written records rely solely on oral transmission. State-centered Chinese culture historically values two kinds of primary source: archaeology, and material culture, such as ancient temples, ancestral halls, written records, and the collections of aristocratic families. Discourses of the States (Guo Yu), for example, is an ancient Chinese text that consists of a compilation of speeches attributed to rulers and other men from the Spring and Autumn period (770 BC–221 BC). Even part of the Zuo Tradition or Commentary of Zuo (Zuo Zhuan), an ancient Chinese history, is traditionally regarded as a commentary on the ancient Chinese chronicle Spring and Autumn Annals (Chun Qiu), with the addition of narrative structure to the formal chronicles. Starting in the Han Wei period (202 BC–265 AD), Chinese history became centered on written texts and gradually acquired an authoritative status. Thus, some folk culture, which relies heavily, if not solely, on oral transmission, was lost. However, people without writing did have Wuzhu,2 who were highly respected intellectuals in ancient times, to record and disseminate historical materials through oral history. Such cultures withstand the erosion of time and have a lasting impact on history.3 Thus Chinese history is not just about chronicles, words, and numbers but is peppered with ballads, legends, riddles, and puzzles, which provide a cultural basis for more contemporary oral practices. The popularity of oral history in the last two decades owes much to a renewed search for identity through personal, family, and national history and memory. Driven by a sense of urgency, oral history projects with veterans have been funded by the prestigious National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC), reflecting a research focus that has attracted official attention. For example, the Salvaging and Organizing the Oral History of Anti-Japanese War Veterans

 Confucius, The Great Learning. In today’s vocabulary, crowd sourcing.  Wu zhu were higher intellectuals in ancient times, who claimed knowledge of astrology, geography, and the human world. Wu zhu also claimed to be able to communicate with the unknown, and thus were revered.  Fu, An Introduction to Historical Research Methods (Shi Xue Fang Fa Dao Lun), 5.

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project won a key research grant from NSSFC in 2015. At the same time at a more grassroots level, the Nanjing Folk Museum, collaborating with a few other folk institutions, initiated “Salvaging the Oral History of Anti-Japanese War Veterans,” a volunteer-based oral history project, while the Center for Oral History at Nanjing University hosted the “War Memory” oral history workshop, a collaborative work involving multiple eminent institutions. Another oral history documentary project, Flaming, which features more scholarly input and more structured fieldwork, records the mining industry in deindustrialized Northeastern China, including a photographical ethnography for revitalizing and preserving industrial memory.4 This project, which began in 2016, is an oral history of those who lived through the vicissitudes of state-owned enterprise reform and how these changes affected personal lives and memories. It is lavishly illustrated with 8,000 pictures, 250,000 words of audio interviews, and 30 hours of video interviews, and key recurring themes include the nature of reform, working-class identity, and the experiences of laid-off workers, to name but a few. These projects, which travel between historical recording and imaginative retelling, conflate history and literature in both the Chinese and English languages. The first project of its kind to present oral history together with still and moving images, Flaming has attracted official attention and is listed as a key project by the social research association in Liao Ning Province. In other cases, oral histories are privately funded and mostly volunteerbased. These projects are largely populist and attract techno-savvy and visually literate younger generations. Home (jia) Spring–Autumn (Chun Qiu), the College Student Oral History Video Documentary Project, for example, is funded by a series of nonprofit nongovernment organizations and primarily targets college and university students.5 Founded in 2014, the Home Spring–Autumn projects aim to salvage positive histories and memories that are close to people’s hearts, such as family histories. Their emotional core demonstrates a more clearly democratic intention couched in accessible language with literal and metaphorical implications. Spanning 35 cities across China and involving 167 colleges and universities, 1,200 young students and 300 documentaries, these projects have collected thousands of individual and family stories. Deeply grassroots, participatory and per-

 For an investigative report on the old industries in north-eastern China see: http://mp. weixin. qq.com/s/7bdEzddS-pNkOInCPWtRnQ.  Jia, in the Chinese language, connotes an emotional attachment to family, hometown, and the nation (Guo); Spring and Autumn borrow the names of two seasons, indicating a flow of time and a sense of continuity. The funding sources included the Beijing Yongyuan Foundation, the Zhejiang Dunhe Foundation, the My History NGO, the China Salvation Foundation, and the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center at the Communication University of China.

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formative, the Home Spring–Autumn projects have a wide appeal. However, despite the popularity of oral history with college students, academic settings in China rarely offer formal oral history courses or training. Why have historians and history educators lost their ground in the public history movement? I will return to this point below. Another starting point can be found in projects that explore difficult pasts. The recent waves of studies on the Cultural Revolution (1966–76; henceforth CR), for example, reveal professional energy and rigor, nuanced judgement, and intellectual complexity. The general attitude toward the CR shifted from an uncritically accusatory attitude in the 1980s to a more balanced approach in the 1990s. Those who were middle-school students during the CR have, with some distance, become more mature observers; some have published memoirs. In the new century, with the opening up of more sources, work on the CR has flourished. In 2006, a seminar to mark its fortieth anniversary took place in Beijing and was attended by many scholars and eyewitnesses. He Shu, a prominent local historian, collected oral history from CR witnesses from 2011 to 2013. The project was organized by the Culture and History committee of the Chongqing People’s Political Consultative Conference as a structured and systematic effort to collect oral histories of CR eyewitnesses. He’s dedication continued after he retired, when he founded Yesterday (Zuo Tian), an electronic magazine dedicated to CR studies.6 These unofficial works mostly comprise reflections and memoirs by those who lived through the CR. Most of them were from prestigious universities, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University. A few intellectuals managed to get into universities when the national entrance exam, known as the gao kao, was restored in 1977. The alumni of these top-ranking universities are now in different occupations, live in various places across the country, collaborate and form small-scale communities. The official archives of the CR remain closed and scholarly discussions are taboo, but new source materials, predominantly vernacular, have become available. For instance, two octogenarian historians spent decades collecting and editing historical materials about the CR and eventually published a series of studies totaling six million words, in Hong Kong in 2008.7 Individual collections have also become cherished, irreplaceable sources. Here we see history written by the losers, by those who were condemned as counter- revolutionaries. Though motive and quality vary widely, their collective memories, self-printed and Internet-transmitted, offer

 Yesterday (Zuotian), which is published electronically, is banned in China yet enjoys enormous popularity among Cultural Revolution researchers and witnesses. It is organized around different themes, for example, Truth and Reflection (2013) and Responsibility of Witnesses (2014). Yesterday is available online at http://prchistory.org/electronic-journals-archive/.  Private correspondence between Shu He and the author, July 7, 2015.

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perspectives that are missing from the official narratives and provide a belated but fitting recognition of their roles in the CR. Here we see that oral history plays a critical role in shaping difficult public memories. If every nation has its own indigestible historical narratives, in China, the voices remain scattered, largely underground, and not yet matured into an inclusive national dialogue, although there is a glimpse of hope on the horizon. History education offers another view of the public history landscape. In China the history of history education is much longer than that of history itself as an academic discipline. History education is responsible for constructing historical consciousness and civic morals. It also makes vernacular narratives accessible to the general public, especially to students. It blurs the often self-imposed boundaries between the professional and the public and enjoys its greatest currency during times of greatest fluidity. Zhao Yafu, a leading voice in history education, draws a connection between public history and history education: “history education should absorb and practice the basics of public history, transforming from the traditional sense of ‘learning history’ to a more advanced idea of ‘doing history’”.8 In 2015, the National Youth History Recording Competition first invited middle-school students to conduct family history.9 Li Yuanjiang, a young and innovative history teacher from an eminent middle school in Beijing, secured funds from a few nonprofit organizations.10 About a thousand schools participated, from nearly all of China’s provinces (except Tibet). Most students completed their fieldwork and wrote with passion and creativity, something that has long been missing from Chinese history education; the project seemed to have reanimated the historical imagination of the students. Family history, including that of the individual’s family, clan, and hometown, reconnects them emotionally and geographically to history. In these personal encounters, history becomes palpable and visible. Many students continued a journey of self-discovery after completing the project. The projects sparked a search for historical truth, not through text-

 Zhao, “From ‘Learning History’ to ‘Doing History,’” 23.  The basic procedures include advertising, training, submission, multiple rounds of evaluations, an awards ceremony, summer camp, and publishing. Submissions are evaluated by about 50 scholars specializing in history and culture from both within and outside the colleges and universities.  The competition was first funded by the Rainbow Foundation, a Beijing-based non-profit organization. From 2015 it was independently run by the Beijing Yiai Suyuan Cultural Company and financed by nonprofit organizations. Another charity, Dun He, has been involved in funding the competition for two years.

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book factoids but through engaging with history close at hand and writing about their discoveries in clear and accessible language. Methodologically, students got their feet wet through guided fieldwork: they learned how to interpret material cultures – photographs, memorabilia, houses, landscapes, and so on; they ventured into the local archives and libraries to do research to back up their suspicions; they engaged in a different writing style, one with literary tropes; and they built a community of sharing family stories, memories, and history. The new pedagogy challenged the dull rote memorization all too common in Chinese history education. Around 200 schools participated, and then, with the power of all types of media and word of mouth, more schools joined the competition, and the impact continued to grow. Unfortunately, the competition was terminated by the government in February 2017, due to its massive appeal. In one sense, the competition has cracked the official history edifice. Historical knowledge in this model does not filter down either from a central authority or from the chosen few. Instead, it takes place in specific locales; it subverts the traditional learning process. The memories and stories shared in the competition represented a deep yearning for personal and collective identity. Students were also encouraged to speculate, but to be meticulous in arguing, and to approach historical materials, analysis, and writing with sympathy.

Travelling Down Memory Lane History and memory often merge in public history projects, most of which address how national symbol systems work to build identity. The China Memory project, a documentary by China Central Television (CCTV) in 2006, falls into this category. While this type of project celebrates official historical narratives and often involves little actual public input, another type of project explores the idea of vernacular memory. The Canal Memory project, for example, collected oral histories of 45 boatmen from Jia Xin, Zhejiang Province who had worked on the Grand Canal. By recording boatmen’s memories and stories, struggles, and aspirations, the project preserves a disappearing profession. Oaring, paddling, sculling, towing, pulling, and sailing, along with other boat skills, are under threat due to the development of machines and technology. The fishing industry faces a similar dilemma: traditional skills are vanishing, with no inheritors. Deteriorating water quality and expanded freshwater fishing mean that traditional fishing skills are being lost, as are the sludge and silt dredgers, which were common along the Canal in the 1950s and 1960s. At stake here are not only the specific skills and labor but also the history and memory of boat-men, an increasingly marginalized group in an increasingly mechanical society.

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Unlike previous works on the history of the Canal, which unsurprisingly and dutifully studied the economic and political aspects of the Canal’s construction, this project captured a kaleidoscope of micro change. With attention to detail, an honest respect for grassroots expertise and knowledge, and a genuine sense of humanity and humility, the Canal Memory project demonstrates how individual stories, embedded in circuitous social relationships and cultural fabric, fostered an organic history of an occupation. It further shows how these stories reflect and represent the history of the Canal at the regional level. The Canal Memory: Oral History of the Jiaxin Boatmen,11 is interlaced with quotations incorporating micro perspectives and original research, duly footnoted and intermeshed with a different sense of history, a larger-than-life concern. In some cases, oral history, counterintuitively, can be elitist, yet here it ministers to its true purpose, to give voice to the voiceless from the very bottom of society. Readers encounter the shapes and colors of ordinary boatmen’s lives. In the process, official narratives are challenged by new questions about how everyday lives are shaped by infrastructure, how collective identities are formed through shared memories, and how working people figure in the story of national development.

Visuals as Public History Living in an increasingly image-conscious society, people become visually literate from a very young age. Images invite a different path of historical inquiry and challenge the evidentiary status of written documents. Most visual products come with very little interpretive analysis. Two examples, however, offer points of departure. One is a fascinating study of Nianhua by James Flath (Nian means “year” and Hua means “drawing”). This is a type of popular folk art expressing beatitude and luck, and used to decorate houses during the Chinese New Year. In exploring how the past is visualized through Nianhua, Flath argues: “There is more than one way to tell a tale through the graphic text. There have always been multiple ways in which the past could be read, and through their particular forms of representation, the theatre, finer arts and literature all offer unique interpretations of history. Each has its own logic.”12 Posters also recount history in a visually striking manner. The Shanghai Propaganda Posters Gallery, a private museum in Shanghai, exhibits posters from

 Jiaxin Literature and Arts Association, The Canal Memory: Oral History of the Jiaxin Boatmen (Yunhe Jiyi: Jiaxin Chuanmin Shenghuo Koushu Shilu) (Shanghai, 2016).  Flath, The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China, introduction.

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the Maoist period of communist China, a significant portion of them from the CR period. The gallery is located in the basement of an apartment building in Huashan Road, in the former French Concession area. It consists of only two rooms but has a rich collection of rare, unique posters. The owner of the museum, Yang Peiming, who started collecting the posters as a hobby in 1995, is keeping the posters as an art form, with the gallery as a story-telling space. While the gallery’s use of the word propaganda (xuan chuan) implies a pejorative take on history, the presentation of the posters nevertheless gives a very palpable access to the past, while also showing how state-appropriate mass-produced knowledge affects ordinary people’s lives. Visual materials not only have an edge over written texts in satisfying the popular appetite for immediacy, presenting history in lifelike detail, and more importantly, being accessible to the general public, they also open up history to a wider set of narratives beyond the official ones. This is probably why historical documentaries enjoy such popularity. To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Sino-Japanese war in 2015, a documentary, Behind the Frontline, was created for a local television station in the wartime capital Chongqing. Its makers trawled local, national, and international archives to present an iconography of the national past from 1937 to 1945. The project narrates China’s national interest, identity, history, and dream through stunning televisual landscapes. The tone is celebratory, glossing overdetail for a more generalized aura of pastness. Chronologically organized, with about 50 minutes devoted to each of the 12 episodes, it demonstrates both an honest respect and a reasonably objective approach to the internal conflicts, especially the tumultuous collaboration between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party. The filmmakers do not mince words, and the driving force behind Behind the Frontline is its service to the national interest, which affects material selection and screening, narration, and interpretation. A battery of archival images, covering mobilization, dealing with aerial bombs, and, more momentously, the psychology of the grassroots, tell the story of how, by force of necessity and urgency, the war shaped individual lives. The presentation, interspersed with oral histories of eyewitnesses and interviews with eminent historians, provides multiple glimpses into historical events, the details of which are either glossed over or silenced. Here, the visuals expand, if not subvert or challenge, the historically known, which is a momentous step in China. Wu Wenguang, a pioneer of independent documentary film in China, is known for his unflagging devotion to searching, recording, and preserving vernacular memory. His Vernacular Memory Plan and Grassroots Studio project represents a journey in public history. Its origin lies in recording the history of the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. The Plan takes a pro-active approach to history, an attempt to integrate images, art, and memory into rural villages. More perti-

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nent here is that the journey of recording and documenting individual stories and memories through visual agency often, and quite unwittingly, translates into a search for and reflection upon a renewed sense of citizenship, an alternative understanding of history. Around 20 participants – villagers, innovative documentary filmmakers, and young students – were involved in the first year of the project in 2011. Students returned to their own villages, conducting oral history with eye-witnesses of the Famine. Through a snowball effect, by 2012 the number grew into 60 people, who visited 300 villages and interviewed some 1,000 elderly people from 19 provinces. As the Plan evolves, the subjects have expanded to include land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and Wu is exploring the possibility of building an archive of these visual and oral materials. The documentaries provide a historical and imaginative space for active contemplation. Visuals acquire additional dimensions through a connection to material cultures of memorabilia and ephemera, such as family photographs, keepsakes, souvenirs, and tokens. In Chinese and the Pasts, a recent study on the historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese, the largest number of respondents (over 80 percent) reported taking photographs and videos (with examining family photographs as a subcategory); watching movies (including documentaries) and television programs and attending family reunions or other reunions were also popular.13 Collecting family photographs has organically restored and reaffirmed family roots.

Heritage: From an Enthusiasm to an Industry As an aesthetic, educational, pedagogical, ideological, political, and cultural hybrid, the idea of heritage travels between the tangible and intangible, the real and the imaginative, the material and the symbolic. It helps to create space for public history in museums, historical districts, and landscapes and contributes to tourism as a renewed source of soft power, an increasing priority in China.14 Museum development runs parallel with nation-building, and in 1949 the newly established government nationalized cultural institutions across the country, aligning the museums with the dominant ideology. Political upheaval dominated the historical landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the Cultural Revolution proved to be key stumbling blocks: the museum fever abated and most collec-

 For more on the “Chinese and the Pasts” project, refer to Chapter 1, Part II.  Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.

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tions were dispersed. With the rapid economic development and urbanization of the 1980s, the government refocused on museums as part of “spiritual civilization (jing shen wen min).” In the 1990s, a national patriotic education program drew on the pedagogical potential of museums, revamping old ones across the country. In 2009, a State Council meeting upgraded culture to the level of a strategic industry. Museumification had become a national pursuit. Alongside government efforts, rich Chinese collectors constructed private museums to show off their treasures. In many cases, private museums represent a different, more daring picture than public ones. Although most such institutions focus on art and culture, some deal with history. The Jianchuan Museum Cluster, funded by rich entrepreneur Fan Jianchuan, is located in the town of An Ren just outside Chengdu and epitomizes how private collections and public presentations attract educated minds beyond the tourist gaze. The Cluster challenges the idea that museums exist in isolation, with dusty objects standing inside glass boxes; instead, it connects small-scale museum halls focusing on exhibitions, education and research, tourism, collections and connoisseurs, art and history and filmmaking. All of these go beyond the traditional idea of a museum, earning the Cluster national and international recognition. The Cluster is organized around several themes presented as contradictions – collecting wars for peace; collecting lessons for the future; collecting disasters for peace; collecting folk culture for inheritance. These branch out into series – wartime history, folk culture, the red years, disaster prevention and salvage – with collections displayed in 30 sub-exhibition halls, 28 of which are open to the public and are further divided into different sub-themes, such as the Anti-Japanese War, Folk Cultures, and Earthquake Commemoration. Compared with written texts, material cultures that represent history in an oblique way remain relatively unthreatening to the authorities. French historian Pierre Nora argues that the discontinuity characterizing modernity led to a proliferation of collective memories, which put pressure on how history itself is written.15 Heritage, allied with memory, becomes a symbol of national identity. In many ways, the Jianchuan Museum Cluster fits into the ruling politics of preserving and revitalizing history and culture, part of Chinese civilization, for future generations. It also accommodates changing public demands for getting in touch with history, seeking historical truth beyond state-controlled narratives, or personal recollections. At the urban level, many cities are scrabbling for “historical” status, eyeing commercial possibilities. Turning from urban destruction to preservation, China is turning every trace of the past into a piece of heritage, with heritage tourism repre-

 Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, 1–20.

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senting a collective cultural and political identity that evokes revolutionary memory to build an imagined shared community. Initiated by the State Council and the Central Committee in 2004, Red Tourism has been a key front for patriotic education. The CCP uses the association of the color red with the revolution in nearly all symbols and rituals, for instance in the National Flag, the National Emblem, the CCP Emblem, and in the names of a range of revolutionary places. These sites have been revamped, restored and revived, with the HongYan (Red Crag) Circuit, which connects different revolutionary sites in the city of Chongqing, representing one such effort. The Circuit is based on two major museums: the Red Crag Revolutionary Memorial Hall Cluster (Figure 1), and the Gele Mountain Cluster. These places offer different perspectives: one tells the story of the Southern Bureau, the central office of the CCP from 1938 to 1946; the other centers on the Nationalist prisons and camps and the martyrs who died on November 27, 1949 when their prison was set on fire. For each place, material culture – original sites of massacres, museums, memorials, sculptures, and landscapes – is shaped to feed the Hong Yan spirit, the revolutionary spirit to sacrifice and to die for one’s country. The Red Crag Circuit merges these two narratives into an organic whole. Numerous original sites are scattered around two adjacent districts – Yuzhong and Shaping – including the Southern Bureau, the Guiyuan Signature Place for Collaboration between the CCP and the Nationalist Party on October 10, 1945, the residence of Premier Enlai Zhou and the original site of the Xin Hua News Daily. The Anti-Japanese War education museum and the Democratic Parties History Museum have been added to enhance the organic experience. The government has appropriated site selection and management to reinforce official revolutionary narratives. The Circuit foregrounds the memories of those who lived through the revolutions led by the CCP, by inviting visitors to walk the same route as their comrades once did, to eat the same food and sing the same songs. In foregrounding these memories, it also fosters “correct” historical understanding in younger generations. These historic sites are supplemented by various literary and artistic representations, including the novel HongYan, a national best-seller; the mural Baptism in Blood and Fire; a sculptural cluster called Long Live the Revolutionary Spirit; an oil painting of Premier Enlai Zhou and His Friends; a stage play; a night tour to Baigongguan and Zhazidong (former Nationalist concentration camps); and the large-scale artistic landscape painting, Soul of Red Crag. All connect material cultures and artistic interpretations, threading them with revolutionary narratives and illustrated with original objects, historical photographs, audiovisual materials, and sculptures. Modern media technology adds another layer of sensory experience for visitors to reflect and reminisce. The semi-panorama 11.27 Massacre at the Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum, for example, depicts war stories, creating a bodily engagement with history.

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Figure 1: Map of sites in the Revolutionary Memorial Hall Cluster, part of the HongYan (Red Crag) Circuit near Chongqing. Photo credit: the author.

Narrative representations of historical pasts in the public space are often multi-referential, contested, conflictual, political, and configurative. The reasons for the sudden surge in interest in the historical and the cultural are many, yet the message is clear: history is marketable. Different tourist routes package and sell revolutionary stories, and heritage is becoming an important local economic strategy. Different forms of representation work together to invent a tradition that connects to national identity. In Michael Kammen’s words, “the repression of memory can be a matter of state policy in totalitarian regimes, . . . museums and historic sites have been used by dominant groups in ‘free’ societies to rationalize

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and perpetuate their partisan vision of the nation’s evolution.”16 That these also have the capacity to convey authenticity and legitimize rulers is clear, as Donald Horne argues: “It really should not be news to anyone with a critical interest in modern industrial societies that monuments have a rhetorical function – more likely than not to serve certain prevailing interest – and that rhetorical function shifts, as society shifts.”17

Virtual History: Thousands of Invisible Hands Media technology enables and enfranchises, as Ludmilla Jordanova observes that the Internet “altered modes of learning and teaching, access to original sources and to information.”18 With the extensive use of the Internet, the public consumes history in its own fashion. In creative engagement with new material sources, tools, and archives, they start to “take control of historical information from the academic gatekeeper and develop their own narratives, stories and experience.”19 A diverse range of virtual re-enactment of history has flourished since 2000. Historical video games, for example, have attracted a steadily growing attention from ordinary Chinese people. Koei’s Romance of Three Kingdoms20 is set in one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history, the time of the Three Kingdoms (220–280 AD), when three emperors separately claimed to be the legitimate successors of the Han Dynasty. Affective, imaginative, playful, interactive, and immersive, video games in this well-designed series have created their own publics and shaped the historical consciousness of the players digitally and collectively. The thirteenth instalment was released across multiple platforms in 2016. A virtual, disembodied community – history aficionados, legions of practitioners, amateur historians – directly engages with its own history, develops skills related to information management and preservation and builds up its own archives. For Jerome de Groot, virtual history comes “with digitized information, sources and archives, revolutionizes how knowledge is accessed, evaluated, analyzed and transmitted among millions of audiences, regardless of physical and geographical boundaries.” He continues: “New media and new technology diffuse

 Kammen, Mystical Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, 691.  Horne, The Great Museum: The Re-presentation of History, 251.  Jordanova, History in Practice, 189.  Ibid.  The story is based on the classic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by Luo Guanzhong in the fourteenth century.

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identities and notions of self both in terms of mediation of culture and our definition of the past.”21 In a similar light, virtual history, as a new form of participatory public history, is born in this renewed and active sense of identity, ownership, and citizenship in China. When historical information goes online and becomes accessible to the public, the authoritative status of the professional historian is threatened. Born-digital historical documents also profoundly influence how people approach history, the types of knowledge that are accessed and created, and, ultimately, the authority of historical knowledge. The modes and style of mass communication have transformed traditional archival structures: virtual archives and digital literacy establish this trend. A parallel revolution occurs in public history institutions, especially museums. The challenge lies in how to demonstrate the intellectual complexity of good history in the digital and public environments. Sharon Leon stresses that “aspects of historical complexity should be central to drawing users in and convincing them to stay with content in a meaningful way. Thus, sites that raise issues of multiple causality, issues of multiple perspectives and influence of context in a particular time and space, questions of contingency, questions of historical significance and the role of changing interpretation have the greatest possibility of communicating the rich landscape of history to users.”22 Even with political censorship still in place, the technology revolution in China has seeped into the social fabric. We see a tug-of-war between censorship and creativity. On the one hand, the government is using big data in a massive social-credit system to control its citizens. This system aims to keep score not only of citizens’ credit ratings but also their social and, possibly political, behavior. The “digital dictatorship,” bold as it sounds, is an ambitious and systematic experiment in the digital revolution, though it faces two major technical hurdles – the quality of the data and the sensitivity of the instruments to analyze it.23 On the other hand, various historical simulation games, such as Great Voyage of Zheng He,24 are designed for use in educational settings to help students interact and experience history in an alternative space. Virtual heritage projects, such as the Forbidden City virtual heritage tour based on 3D modeling,25 also enjoy a renewed public interest in the ancient heritage. Digital technology in this way be-

 De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 90.  Leon, “Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in a Digital Environment,” 49.  “China’s Digital Dictatorship,” The Economist, December 17, 2016, 14–20.  The game was designed to celebrate one of the seven monumental voyages (1405–1433) led by Zheng He in the Ming Dynasty for exploration and cultural exchange.  See http://www.openculture.com/2008/10/virtual_tour_of_the_forbidden_city.html. See also Liu, Forbidden City: An Immersive Virtual Reality World.

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comes a cultural agency to build a creative interface, or to deliver a sense of empowerment. Digital history embodies a different type of public history, engaging the actual public, and with very little scholarly involvement. At the grassroots level, the public has not transformed its abundant information into knowledge; for example, writing history on social media, building local and community archives, and designing virtual museum exhibits remain messy and fragile. All require further intellectual skills of the trade. If digital technology implies the power of media, then language and style of transmission, as Gellner recognizes, also matter. He argues with eloquence, “only he who can understand them, or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and economic community.”26 Right now, dialogue between and among the government, intellectuals, and the public has begun, yet has not yet culminated in constructive partnerships for public history projects.

Tracing the Origins Genealogy The above sketch presents not a holistic but a prismatic view of the public history landscape in China. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the past remains very much a part of China’s present. Public histories, cosmopolitan and motley, develop from remarkably diverse origins. Unofficial sources and presentations prevail. Oral history enjoys enormous popularity. Memories on various scales emerge. Images speak boldly and challenge the authority of written documents. Heritage develops from an enthusiasm to an industry. And virtual history whets the public appetite for immediacy and efficiency. In this unregulated, undisciplined, and daring context, knowledge does not filter down from the top; instead, it is vernacular. The extraordinary stories of ordinary people are told, not in lofty intellectual prose, but in the language of the street. History, under various disguises as memory or heritage, is used for social cohesion and identity-building. This quest for national identity can also be fueled and sustained by popular nationalism. State-sponsored public history projects, such as commemorations, feature very little public input, yet enjoy widespread appeal. Three new national holidays were introduced in 2014: Memorial Day for the 1937 Nanjing massacre, Victory Day to mark Japan’s surrender at the end of

 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); Breuilly, Introduction to Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 122.

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the Second World War, and Martyrs’ Day dedicated to those who died fighting Japan. All represent a renewed attention to China’s wartime past. History, as Hobsbawm wrote, is used “as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.” Every revolutionary movement supports its innovations by reference to the “people’s past,” he continued: The element of invention is particularly clear here, since the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so.27

In the contemporary People’s Republic of China, recentering the history of Japan’s defeat is a priority for formulating Chinese national identity. Cultural identity is bound up with national identity in China. Rituals and symbols of every description help to hold a unified culture together. Oral traditions of myths, rituals – flags, holidays, tales of national heroes, villains, battles and standardized rites and unifying symbols – do not qualify to be dignified as history. As James Watson argues, the role of ordinary people is that of “farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, midwives, silkreelers and labourers – both male and female – of every conceivable description. It is these people, together with local elites, scholar-bureaucrats and even the emperor himself, who were engaged in the construction of a unified culture. People at all stations in life are perceived as actors rather than reactors.”28 While cultural traditions abound, the genesis of modern public history in China can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century: specifically, from the late Qing period to the People’s Republic era, under another name, New Cultural Movement, which broadly occupied the years 1895–1919. These cut-off dates are utterly arbitrary, but the time frame helps us give a broad brush of the social context – a growing sense of national crisis, the development of Marxism in China, and the May Fourth Movement in 1919 – accompanied by a collapse of the idealized version of national identity advocated through the ideas of the elites. In response to the national crisis and internal conflicts, Sun Yat-sen’s Alliance Society promoted the Han (the largest ethnic group in China) as a collective agent capable of seizing control of the historical process and bringing about China’s emancipation from feudalism and foreign control. Sun’s Three Principles of People – nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood – delegitimized the past in a way that laid it open to human transformation and offered a vision of the present opening the way to a bright future of national renewal. Sun’s vision became that of the Nationalist Party, established in 1912. When the intellectual idealists

 Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” 12–13.  Dittmer and Kim, China’s Quest for National Identity, 17–19, 81.

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began to change their attitudes toward the masses, they brought in Marxism and transformed a cultural shift into a revolutionary movement. Marxism was presented as a stimulating and progressive approach to the manifold problems of history that recognized the power of the working class and the growth of working-class consciousness. Li Dazhao, a nationally known revolutionary intellectual, pictured an ideal world of the working class and glorified “being a worker” in his The Victory of the Plebeian.29 Although this impulse should be applauded, its message was not shared by the working class in China, and its vision was mainly limited to the intellectuals themselves. Historically, the concept of class finds a particular expression in China. As Wang Hui writes, it is not merely a structural category centered on the nature of property ownership or relation to the means of production. It is rather a political concept based on the revolutionary party’s appeal for mobilization and self-renewal. Similarly, the concept was used within the CCP to stimulate debates and to avoid depoliticization under the conditions of the party’s ad- ministration of power: “The concept denoted the attitudes of social or political forces toward revolutionary politics.”30 In the dominant rhetoric the CCP, as a working-class party, represented the interests of the public. However, the CCP did not truly nor fully represent the grassroots, as it claimed, since the voices at the bottom had not found a place in top-down official narratives. Why? The groundswell of public opinion about populism and equality directly challenged the feudal culture based on Confucian thought, resulting in the collapse of both the outlook based on heavenly principles and efforts to construct a new worldview and a psychological yearning for roots. This helter-skelter approach led to changes in core social structures, penetrating Chinese society, animating its latent vitality and enthusiasm for new perspectives on the past. In this liberal climate, traditional culture, philosophy, law, political thought, education, art and literature, linguistics, natural science, journalism, library science, museums, and, of course, history breathed the air of freedom, and new ideas were exchanged and sparked. In the field of history, the slogan “turn to the West, and learn from the West” appeared in the early twentieth century, and New History flourished. Advocated by the eminent historian Liang Qichao (1873–1929), this New History challenged traditional history in fundamental ways. First, it emphasized the progression of history, which is not about a return to an ideal past, but about development and the prediction of the future based on the present. The idea of the world citizen, in this progression, injects a cosmopolitan perspective. History, it was said, should

 Li, “The Victory of the Plebeian.”  Wang, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, 10.

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record the living panorama of the entire society. Thus, history became endowed with new significance for the present. Second, it called for a humanistic return to the people and foregrounded historians’ social responsibility. As Liang argued: History is about using the past for directing the future. We, as contemporaries, shoulder the responsibility to communicate, propagate and pass down this civilization . . . the purpose of history lies in studying the intricate connections between the past and the present, in which history is part of, and closely related to, the present (to enrich the living present, to enjoy the rich heritage).31

In this light, history is not written for the powerful, nor for the intellectuals, but for the general public. Liang later expanded the point, “History, the most profound and critical of all scholarship, is the mirror of ordinary people’s lives, and the source of patriotism.”32 This challenged understandings of the connection between the past and the present, and between the general public and the educated elites. It also enlarged the scope of historical material sources to include oral transmission, material cultures, and archeological findings. Eventually, New History broadened the intellectual scope of history. Instead of being an inward-looking and isolated subject, history became associated with geography, geology, religion, ethnology, linguistics, sociology, law, economics, and many other disciplines.33 New History envisioned a moral ideal of collectivity, a society with “a high level of autonomy and freedom and a bottom-up structure, with the moral principles appropriate to this kind of civil society. Here, the collective, or society is . . . a mode of social construction.”34 The conception of history, the idea of source materials, historical research methods, a truth-seeking spirit and vernacular writing styles, all have a relationship, however fortuitous, to what we later called “public history.” In this light, the philosophy of New History prefigured the rise of modern public history a century or so later. In the search for national identity, the spirit of New History was revolutionary, humanistic, generously borrowing and constantly reinventing. What is different, however, is that a century ago, history from below, or grassroots history, was advocated by cultural elites. Those sitting at the top of the social and cultural hierarchy did not understand the actual stories of the people at the bottom, so they could not speak with confidence about the public’s thoughts and feelings, much less about writing their history. Today, modern public history enjoys massive appeal precisely because it meets a felt – though vaguely understood – need, and it fills an emotional – though not neces-

   

Liang, Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Bubian (Zhonghua Shuju), 4. Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 180, 224, 230–32, 191–92. Ibid., 163.

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sarily a historical – void, among various groups of people. It speaks directly, in a timely fashion, to the concerns of the public.

Past-in-the-Present: Issues and Challenges Probing deeper into the mobilizing effect of public history brings us closer to the ground, where we encounter the idea of revolution. The original meaning of “revolution” indicates a revolving movement in space or time. Its political implications evolved first as an action against established order and then developed from the literal renewal of war to the general sense of armed rising or opposition, and by extension to open resistance to authority. The circular meaning gave way to a rising one, implying fundamental change that is restorative and innovative and brings about a whole new social order.35 This suggests novelty, acceleration, transformation (above or below), alteration (of the future based on a changed view of the past), social emancipation, and the permanence of change.36 This helps to explain why and how public history leads us to ask new questions, to inquire into old issues in a new way, to uncover hidden, even shameful, historical chapters, and to articulate history differently. The past is chimerical, no longer a petrified fact with absolute objectivity waiting to be discovered and analyzed by a professionally trained few. Public history attempts either to bridge the “gap” in existing historical narratives, or to question, if not challenge, them, affecting both the style of historical writing and modes of dissemination. Despite some scattered and ambiguous successes, public histories have experienced their share of challenges. The grassroots impulse often epitomizes a celebratory mode backed by a sense of empowerment among the historically or culturally marginalized. Most projects in China fail either to pose bigger questions or to locate narratives within a specific historical context, much less to stimulate methodological thinking or present multiple perspectives. Take oral history, for example. Interviewing techniques and skills play an important role in extracting nuggets of information, such as how to animate interviewees to recount their years of experience and to share their lives and memories. This requires a solid grounding in the subject prior to the interviews, a rapport embedded in the emotional context and mutual respect for reminiscence during the interview process. In additon, appropriately framing and asking questions in oral history has a direct impact on the quality of the interviews; our basic social assumptions, prior

 Raymond Williams, Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 270–74.  Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.

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Part I: The Origin of Modern Public History in China

knowledge, experience, ideology and even hunches and instincts influence the kind of narrators we select and the questions we ask. The interpretation based on these sources may also be skewed. Gerald Strauss asks, Is it honest for those of us who do ‘history from below’ to extol popular mental habits and behavior when these are safely distanced from us in the past, while shunning, not to say recoiling from, the expressions of common belief and taste in our own time and place, many of which we find offensive and alienating? A question of professional discrimination is involved here.37

With no training, no ethical standards, and no systematic transcribing procedures and evaluations, most grassroots projects stop at the collecting phase. The appropriate way to interpret the facts remains unexplored. E. H. Carr reminds us in What is History that the facts of history never come to us “pure,” as they are always refracted through the minds of the recorder, and historians must engage in “imaginative understanding” of the minds of the people with whom they are dealing, for the thought behind their acts.38 Even if they do attempt this, the impact of their work seems limited to the scholarly context, and the stories elicited rarely travel beyond a small circle. Further concern arises from the field: for example, how far can the individual biography of the inheritor generate larger historiographical questions concerning the intangible heritage? The fallibility of memory poses a further question. Most oral history today is personal memory, which is a defective reservoir, a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts. At the most fundamental level, is this . . . history? The question may insult the moral and intellectual capacity of the majority, but it is worth pondering, and I am asking it with some genuine doubt. In the spirit of public history, the immaculate conception of knowledge, as Samuel quite poignantly criticizes, “with its insistence on keeping inquiry within the boundaries of the discipline, and its refusal to countenance any traffic between the imaginary and the real,”39 has already started to disintegrate. Nevertheless, the inquiry process leading toward knowledge, however generous, has not. Most public history activities in China have not gone beyond the data-collecting phase. Sometimes they have attempted to authenticate information, however very few draw connections, make inferences, analyze causal relationships, or, in simpler terms, take the time to locate information in a changing historical and social context. A very small number of such activities, such as reinterpreting a historical event in the light of newly found sources or rearranging the historical data, reach

 Strauss, “The Dilemma of Popular History,” 133.  Carr, What is History?, 24–25.  Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 431.

Tracing the Origins

39

Knowledge (various forms) Judging, inferring, and constructing

Writing & presenting Selecting, sifting, arranging, and analyzing

Locating & delimiting the problem (a problematic situation) Judging

Historical facts data (records, documents, oral evidence, material cultures, etc.) Judging

Graph 1: NAME OF THE GRAPH, source: the author.

the second phase outlined above, and then only partially. Few of those involved actually engage in writing history, and even fewer produce quality history writing or create historical knowledge. The ensemble of such activities in the name of public history represents, at its best, the phenomena, appearance, or fragments of historical inquiries. Despite these challenges, public history practices and inquiries, large or small, focus on either an official or an unofficial scale, ask new questions, utilize new and different materials, adopt a refreshed if not completely novel approach, reveal a different interpretation, follow a distinct line of inquiry, and, ultimately, lead to different products and, naturally, a different impact on historical conscience. They travel between the past and the present, or in John Dewey’s words, “it is a matter of elementary logic that the historian always studies the “past-ofthe-present” rather than the past in its own terms.”40 If, as Dewey explained, the past is of logical necessity to the past-of-the-present and the present will be the past-of-a-future-living present, history will always be rewritten. As the new present arises, the past is the past of a different present.41 We rearrange, combine, and permutate source materials to form a new understanding of the past. Herbert Butterfield rightly argues, “It is in this sense that history must always be written

 Dewey, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, 231–37.  Ibid., 238–299.

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Part I: The Origin of Modern Public History in China

from the point of view of the present. It is in this sense that every age will have to write its history over again”.42 Similarly, Francois Hartog reminds us that continuity, rather than change, is the interpretive framework of modern Chinese history: “Rather than making the rupture of a revolutionary moment in the midcentury the central turning point, there has been a move to suggest a longer, more undifferentiated continuity in the trajectory towards a still hazily defined modernity.”43 Public history could offer space for such interaction between the past and the present. ✶✶✶✶✶ If historical knowledge includes discovery and explanation, public history activities and practices in China have accomplished the first and fallen short on the second. To quote Hobsbawm, There is an enormous temptation in history simply to uncover what has hitherto been unknown and to enjoy what we find. In addition, since so much of the lives, and even more of the thoughts, of the common people have been quite unknown, this temptation is all the greater in grassroots history, all the more since many of us identify ourselves with the unknown common men and women – the even unknown women – of the past . . . curiosity, sentiment and the pleasure of antiquarianism are not enough. The best of such grassroots history makes wonderful reading, but that is all. What we want to know is why, as well as what.44

Identifying the silences and filling the gaps offers, at best, a start. Public history requires more, not less, from the academy.45 In the pages to follow, I will advance three propositions. First, we need to adopt an open attitude toward the materials with which and the people with whom historians are working. This will result in a different writing style that appeals to the public while retaining rigor and honesty. Public history writing calls for a return to the old tradition in which history was a branch of literature, albeit a different genre characterized by a different vocabulary, rhetoric, tropes, grammar, and style. Beneath the seemingly playful approach to historical subjects lies a serious search for historical truth, with a particular assiduity perhaps, but the same elementary rules of the trade. Historians need to speak directly to the minds and hearts of the public. What E. H. Carr calls an “imaginative understand-

 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 91.  Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, 9.  Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., Invention of Tradition, 214–15.  Some works exploring historians and their uses of the past include: Kean, Martin, and Morgan, eds., Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now; Kalela, Making History: The Historian and Uses of the Past.

Tracing the Origins

41

ing” of the thoughts, feelings, and stories behind their actions provides an appropriate direction that could facilitate this direct communication with the public. Second, it is important to have a broader and more liberal understanding of history. When academics proceed with a cramped sense of possession, they fail to understand the soul of public history, which is downright democratic, generous, and unrestrained. Jargon-sprouting writings rarely interact with the public whom they claim to service. When academics talk down to the public as though they are slow students, even if their intentions are perfectly pure, they cannot probe the minds and hearts of the public. A shared authority in a not-so-shared authoritative culture does not come easily. Historians need to become more charitable about their information, knowledge, and skills. Finally, rigorous inquiry lies at the heart of all public history projects. No public history survives by short-cutting this process. This is, I believe, where academic historians make the greatest contribution to public history. Their visions and crafts will push the movement forward with intellectual heft, and ultimately with staying power. After all, public history – if “the public” means grassroots in a genuine sense – represents a vision of reality.

Part II: Past Making in the Present: Presentations and Patterns

Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese In the first 20 years of the new millennium, information technology has fundamentally changed China. In 2015, with the launch of 5G technology and faster internet connection, the Chinese spend more time flipping through their smartphones, and start to access information that seemed impossible before. The number of social media users has increased dramatically, with a rough estimate of almost four hundred and fifty million, nearly one quarter of such users worldwide. That freer information flow represents an expanded public space for discussing many historical issues. When ordinary Chinese more critically reflect and react upon the dominant univocal narrative, a strange paradox looms large: when history seems to be thriving outside the academy in China, when old historical materials are re-interpreted for new use, when certain episodes of history invite for multiple interpretations, a wide lament from professional historians and history educators on the public ignorance of or indifference to the past becomes equally loud. Are ordinary Chinese truly disengaged from the past? All sorts of forces, largely from the grassroots, challenge the conventional wisdom that, first, formal history education – textbooks, mandatory history exams, and in-class instructions – systematically indoctrinated young minds, confirmed their knowledge about the past, and subsequently determined their historical consciousness; and that, second, historians and history educators play a primary role in shaping the historical consciousness of ordinary people. The term “public history” has appeared mostly outside, but also with some caveats, inside the Chinese academy. It epitomizes a field, an attitude, a movement, and a popular culture. With emergent social media and new technologies, the public consumption of history has grown more creatively. A proliferation of museums, re-vamped historical sites, memorials and monuments, historic districts and cities, for example, indicates an increasing occupation with the past. Chinese museums received over five hundred million more visitors in 2013 than in 2009.1 In 1949, there were 25 museums when the Communist Party took control. Many were burned down during the Cultural Revolution and their collections dispersed. Consequently, most of the public regard selected collections and banal presentations, accompanied with censored interpretations, as propaganda serving the party’s interest. With rapid economic growth, urbanization, and the “reform and opening up” policies since  The Economist, December 21, 2013, 4. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-003

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Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts

1978, China launched a museum-building boom. Every provincial capital is constructing a new museum, or renovating the ones it has already had. The National People’s Congress has named museum growth as a goal in both of its five-year plans since 2010. Private and industry-based art collectors often receive favorable government real estate deals for their museums.2 So, despite the mixed motivations for founding and lack of curatorial skills, private museums have also developed exponentially. Chinese officials and museum professionals are now faced with an increasingly demanding public that is hungry for staying in touch with the past. The expansion of public history in China, despite unearthing an uneasy relationship with some aspects of its past, can be seen as a search for citizenship and new contemporary Chinese identity. Public debates have begun to emerge over the place of the past in China, exploring the role of history in national culture and society, the role of historians and formal history education, and forms of participation in history. In turn, these discussions have raised further questions, such as: how should the past be re-interpreted? Who owes the past? How is history produced, disseminated, consumed, and shared in the public sphere? How can China create a historically based national culture? Yet the issue of how the scholarly world responds when history is increasingly produced and consumed by public audiences remains. A National Public History Seminar and the First National Conference on Public History that took place in 2013 demonstrated joint efforts from within and outside the academy. Both conferences confirmed that public history practices are far ahead of the academy: public history is thriving, and the public is passionate about the past. Yet the broader inquiries for historians and history educators remain largely unanswered. As primary guardians of the past, how are they to communicate the past if they do not understand historical sense and sensibility of the general public? How is an academic sense of history different from a public sense of history? What role should historians and history educators play in the growing public debates about the past? Which leads us, ultimately, to the question: how should ordinary Chinese think about, learn, and use the past?

 Source: China Museums Association. For detailed discussions about museums and the public, see Chapter 4, Part II.

History, Memory, and Historical Consciousness

47

History, Memory, and Historical Consciousness Historical consciousness is an understanding of the past, present, and future, and how this understanding converges to manifest in different genres in individuals’ sense-making process. The consciousness-building process breaks into three interconnected genres, i.e. collective memory, morality, and pedagogy. Though a comprehensive survey of theories about historical consciousness falls outside the scope of this chapter, the “Chinese and the Pasts” project forms a critical initial inquiry into historical consciousness. Hans-Georg Gadamer defines historical consciousness as a specific cultural development located in the modern era, in which contemporary societies have a full awareness of the historicity of present-day life. He further relates historical consciousness to “tradition,” where modern consciousness – precisely as “historical consciousness” – takes a reflexive position concerning all that is handed down by tradition.”3 Amos Funkenstein connects historical consciousness and collective memory, arguing that “historical consciousness is a developed and organized form of collective memory, both of which contribute to additional historical understanding.”4 Here individual and collective understanding of the past, the cognitive and cultural factors that shape those understandings, as well as the relations of historical understandings to those of the present and the future, all converge. Consciousness and memories both belong to realms of human collectives, as do their representational forms, or genres. If remembering is a mental activity, it has to happen within a certain social and cultural fame. Similarly, historical consciousness, expressed through narratives, makes sense only in a broader social and cultural context. The “Chinese and the Pasts” project assumes the connection between historical consciousness and collective memory, and focuses on understanding historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese through different genres;5 more precisely, it explores how “historical consciousness” is related to historical understanding, experience, memories, imagination, and the market-oriented quest for the past. As the Chinese generally still claim pride in their ancient origin and long history, this project also sheds light on historical consciousness at the national level, where collective memory morphs into national memory, and historical consciousness into national consciousness.

 Gadamer, “Epistemological Problems of The Human Sciences,” 8–52, esp. 9.  Funkenstein, “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,” 5–22, esp. 19.  Chris Lorenz observes that, in competition with other representational forms of history, such as myth, literary fiction, and mature history, for example, “the media of representation have had a profound influence on the content of representation of the past.” See Lorenz, “Towards a Theoretical Framework for Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations,” 27.

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Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts

Benedict Anderson poignantly expresses that the nation is “an imagined political community,” a product of an invented past that gives it esteem and a discrete narrative: “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship . . . for so many people . . . willing to die for such limited imaginings,” he wrote.6 While Anderson’s analysis focuses on the role of written and print material in laying the bases for national consciousness in profound ways, other narrative media for national consciousness, such as historic sites, monuments, museums, novels, movies, plays, and literary works, also emanate a powerful national discourse. In France, Pierre Nora’s monumental work on sites of national significance argues that an inventory of loci memoriae (including geographical place or locus, historical figures, monuments and buildings, literary and artistic objects, emblems, commemorations, and symbols) constitutes an imaginary process that codifies and represents the historical consciousness: “If memory places are symbolic in nature it is because they signify the context and totemic meaning from which collective identity emerges.”7 Various narrative media express in different ways how such traditions—an illusion of continuity—are translated into nationally acclaimed “tradition.” It is in this connection with national tradition that historical consciousness reveals its pedagogical and moral implications. Jörn Rüsen’s pioneering work attempts to understand the relationship between historical consciousness and moral values and reasoning, since it evokes the past as a mirror of experience within which life in the present is reflected and its temporal features revealed. Historical consciousness makes an essential contribution to moral-ethical consciousness: “For such a mediation between values and action-oriented actuality, historical consciousness is a necessary prerequisite.”8 One form of such morality-building is institutionalized history teaching. Built on these theoretical threads, the “Chinese and the Pasts” project explores the material, narrative, didactic, and moral genres of historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese.

 Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 6–7.  Nora and Kritzman, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, x. See also Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, 689–704; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition; Andreas Schönle. Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia; Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.  Rüsen, “Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development,” 63–85.

The Project: Chinese and the Pasts

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The Project: Chinese and the Pasts A vital inquiry from multiple perspectives, this project takes place in a social context marked by freer and unprecedented information flow, creative knowledge sharing, and a growing consumption of history in China’s first 20 years of the twenty-first century. Public history is contested and messy, yet boasts incredible energy. As ordinary Chinese pursue the past actively, and make it part of everyday life, historians and history educators seem reluctant to embrace the cacophonous noises from their rigidly defined disciplinary boundaries. Here are a series of signposts to the overall landscape: – History, tradition, and national memory/myth-making – Family history: private memory and public story – The visuals as public history – Struggling for authenticity: trustworthiness of source information – Places or sites of public history9 – Ethnic minorities: represented or suppressed? – Voices from Taiwan: a different sense of history – History and the media – Historical consciousness and history education Based on the above aspects, the survey breaks into six parts:10 1. Activities related to the past 2. Trustworthiness of sources of information about the past 3. How connected to the past people feel on certain occasions 4. The importance of various pasts 5. Importance of places or sites of public history 6. Biographical data The project draws on a series of national and regional survey projects in the United States, a few European countries, Australia, and Canada.11 While the proj-

 Places/ sites of public history refer to history museums (a collaborative project with Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum: to compare how museum professionals, volunteers, and the public experience history differently), archives, historic sites, memorials, and monuments, historic districts and cities.  The full survey is on line at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ChinesePasts.  Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998); Angvik and Borries, Youth and History: A Comparative European Survey on Historical Consciousness and Political Attitudes among Adolescents. Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past; Conrad et al., Canadians and Their Pasts.

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Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts

ect hopes to yield data that is comparable with those studies, it also realizes the limitations of that earlier work, in which nationally representative samples were collected, yet these studies lacked in-depth analysis into the attitudes of the crosssection of the populations. Furthermore, the quantitative approach taken in those projects poses a significant methodological challenge in terms of investigating people’s attitudes towards the past. Despite Rosenzweig and Thelen’s ambitious survey design, ensuring that it followed the highest professional standards of academic survey research, the “Presence of the Past” project had general biases in collecting the statistical samples, especially in its use of telephone interview surveys.12 Though the surveys in the US, Australia, and Canada used some methods employed by ethnographers and oral historians, they were neither ethnography nor oral history. All studies used computer software for coding the data, which required a certain level of uniformity in format and layout, and raised important methodological questions about coding people’s emotional attachment to the past. In attempting to overcome these methodological challenges, the “Chinese and the Pasts” project uses interview surveys as the basic methodology. This means a group of interviewers, with a similar background (college-level students) and having received the same interviewing skill training, work in a particular geographical region, in this case, the major historic sites in the city of Chongqing.13 As public history in China follows a different trajectory, the survey differs from the previous studies in the following ways. First, the project emphasizes on places or sites of public history. One section explores people’s attitudes towards these places, and evaluates how public history works or fails at these places. Second, the project engages new media and digital storytelling. As the digital revolution has impacted the venues of accessing historical information, sense of history, and sense of place, so the survey, in its online format, provides an open communicative interface. Third, the project adds oral history interviewing to selected questions in each section. Last, the 425 core sample is complemented with 30 subsamples from Taiwan, 40 subsamples from ethnic minorities, and 85 subsamples from one of the key museums in the city of Chongqing as a result of a year-long institutional collaboration.

 Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, vii, 228–31.  The training includes instruction of the project; familiarity the questionnaires; practice interviews both in class and in the field. Oral history interviewing workshop, including research on the specific site to add one or two probing questions, interview skills (process, smart tips, principles), recording techniques, ethical and legal concerns, etc.

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Initial Findings: A Statistical Overview

Initial Findings: A Statistical Overview The initial findings from Chongqing present a broad picture of what this project aims to achieve. A general statistical overview reveals some perspectives.

Historical Activities Participating in group activities

11.3%

Taking photographs or videos

87.4%

participating in public commemorations

27.7%

Attending family or other reunions

83.9%

Writing diaries Looking at family mementos

41.2% 10.8%

Looking at family photography Researching family-related dialects Researching family history Reading books Watching movies and TV programs including documentaries

73.7% 26.4% 21.2% 55.7% 86.2%

Graph 2: Historical activities.

Graph 2 shows the range of past related activities in which interviewees participated. The questions investigate some past related activities that respondents participated in during the past 12 months. A close-ended question is followed by open-ended requests for a more specific, and in-depth, probe. Follow-up questions aim to establish a wider social or historical context, or to dig out more specific information, or to understand more about motives, emotions, and other psychological implications. For example: Question 1.1.1 During the past 12 months, have you watched any movies or television programs about the past? Question 1.1.2 What kind of movies or television programs about the past do you like? What did you like about it? Or why did you think it was interesting? The activities fall into two main categories: one is about personal, familial, and local; and the other, public, political, and organizational. More specifically, the first category includes watching movies and television programs (including documentaries), reading books, researching family history, telling family stories, researching family-related dialects, looking at family photographs, looking at family

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Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts

mementos, writing dairies, attending family or other reunions, and taking photographs or videos. The second category includes participating in public anniversaries and commemorations and participating in past-related group activities. The most frequently identified activities (over 80 percent) were taking photographs and videos (with looking at family photographs as its sub-category), watching movies (including documentaries) and television programs, and attending family reunions or other reunions. This hardly came as a surprise, as mass media such as films, videos, and television programs are already an integral part of ordinary people’s daily life in China. The results also demonstrate how collective remembering and personal reminiscence often overlap: personal and family reminiscence are interwoven with nostalgic historical consumption, confirmed in the survey results by participants’ active engagement with the past. And, overall, public activities, such as participating in public commemoration and anniversaries, and organizations about preserving the pasts came as of secondary importance. However, a number of issues emerged during the research which complicated that primacy of family history and popular history that was emerging, and required thought from the design team. In the pilot survey,14 some respondents were confused about historical movies and documentaries. The word “mementos” also caused some confusion, as its Chinese equivalent, chuan jia bao, suggests something sacred, expensive, and invaluable. So, in the survey, we explained it as something worthy of passing down to the next generation, regardless of monetary values. Moreover, not all family-related activities were ranked high, such as researching family history/heirlooms, or family related dialects. This does not necessarily indicate a lack of interest in these activities. Instead, in traditional Chinese culture, keeping family histories are deemed as highly private, so it is difficult to “research” family history in cultural institutions such as public libraries, as most family keep their own heirlooms. Also, in a highly hierarchical culture, family history is usually left to the most senior ones in the family, and significant numbers of our participants do not belong to that age group.

 From August to September 2014, I sent out the draft survey to 50 historians, history educations, and public history practitioners for advice. The majority responded with constructive suggestions. From October 2014, the project started a pilot test. This includes 25 graduate students who enrolled in my Public History seminar at Chongqing University, and a national college students’ oral history program.

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Initial Findings: A Statistical Overview

Trustworthiness Archives (87.79 percent), museums (85.97 percent), historic sites or monuments (83.25 percent), personal or eyewitnesses’ accounts (81.2 percent) were ranked by far the most reliable source of history. The majority of respondents expressed that objects were more reliable than human interpretations, as people interpret things differently based on their motives, quality, and background. Materiality – concrete, touchable, first-hand – they agreed, means reliable: The objects in the museums, architecture in the historic districts, and etc. – I can touch and feel them. Even if they change over time, the traces still tell powerful stories about the pasts. Most eye-witnesses tell true stories, because they go through those events . . . therefore most authority. Even with some emotions, and memory deficiency, the source from the eyewitnesses is reliable.

Personal accounts or eye-witnesses University history lecturers or researchers

43.12%

37.24% 14.06%

45.69%

12.76%

44.79%

42.45% 13.77%

Media personalities

38.18% 19.22%

Radio programs

24.94% 32.47%

Historical movies and television documentaries

Museums

48.70%

44.13% 10.18%

Politicians

Historic sites or monuments

61.08%

33.25%

5.67%

Non-fiction books

Historic districts or cities

44.94%

11.95%

Newspaper History pages

Archives

67.89%

27.42%

4.70%

High school history teachers Family stories

81.20%

16.71%

2.09%

15.06% 1.82%

55.84%

52.47%

87.79%

10.39%

29.02%

4.92% 2.84% 2.08%

48.05%

13.92%

11.95%

Trustworthy 7-10 Trustworthy 4-6

Graph 3: Trustworthiness of source of information about the past.

66.06% 83.25% 85.97%

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Chapter 1 Chinese and the Pasts

Institutional authority counts heavily in the general Chinese mentality, since in China being official often equals to being reliable. This was echoed in the views of many respondents: National museums are most reliable, because the central government possessed the highest authority. If the source is related to our country or Chinese communist party, it cannot go wrong. Many cultural institutions, such as museums and memorials, they have the responsibility for cultural continuity, therefore authority, because they service the public. Educating the public about what happened in the past is their priority, and being trustworthy is highly critical in achieving this.

Professional authority follows. Once the material culture is interpreted by professionals, it seems more reliable. This implies that professional voices actually count in the public’s pursuit of reliable historical information, and scholarly authority plays an important part in shaping the public’s perceptions of the past. As one respondent acknowledged, “what displays in the museums are usually rigorously researched, and carefully, interpreted by professional historians, and protected by the government, therefore reliable.” University history lectures and researchers (67.89 percent) ranked higher than high school history teachers (43.12 percent), suggesting that people have a high respect for professional historians: History teachers and researchers help us understand the past better, and they pursue an authentic history College history professors, especially those with independent and critical thinking, are trained to disseminate reliable historical information. They will not lie. I believe in professional interpretations of historical events, because they are usually rigorously researched, and referenced. Professional historians usually do not fabricate facts, as they are trained for scholarly justice.

Family stories were ranked relatively high (61.08 percent), but for a different reason. People trust family stories simply because “how can my family members lie to me?” Most respondents felt that they could cup these family stories in their hands, and hold them to their heart. According to this view, the very familiarity of a family story creates a natural reliability. Here, similar to personal or eyewitnesses accounts, most respondents confused “motives” with “results”: the fact

Initial Findings: A Statistical Overview

55

that someone does not have a motive for lying does not mean they actually lie or that their interpretations are necessarily reliable. Unsurprisingly, politicians (12.76 percent) and media personalities (13.77 percent) were ranked the lowest. The data conveys an overwhelming mistrust about public figures. Most respondents viewed politicians and media personalities as subjective, politically biased, profit-driven, and, consequently, without any integrity, or lack of any long-term vision. Some even accused politicians of being “professional liars.”

Connection to the Past

Reading a book about the past Studying history at school

33.42% 52.25%

14.32%

Gathering with your family

Celebrating Public Anniversaries

42.33% 44.44%

13.23%

Watching a movie or TV program about the past

Visiting history museums, historic sites/monuments, historic districts/cities

60.48%

32.63%

6.90%

16.36%

40.90% 42.74% 75.59%

21.26%

3.15%

10.55%

34.30%

55.15%

Connectedness 7-10 Connectedness 4-6 Connectedness 1-3 (1 is the least connected and 10 is the most connected)

Graph 4: Connectedness to the past.

Graph 4 demonstrates how connected people feel when participating in certain history-related activities. Visiting history museums, historic sites/monuments, and historic districts/cities was ranked highest (75.59 percent). The majority of the respondents suggested that participating in these activities was a direct, authentic historical experience, characterized by a strong sense of participation and “beingthere” quality. These activities also shortened the distance from historical events, especially museums built on sites, historic districts with living history, and reliving historical experience through reenactment. The material culture spoke convincingly about what happened in the past, as one respondent said: “Monuments, for example, demonstrate how our countries come about, and some of survivors of the revolutions tell their own stories – which seems so true, and so powerful.” Celebrating public anniversaries (55.15 percent) and reading books about the past (60.48 percent) were also ranked high, but for divergent reasons. For public

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anniversaries, respondents cherished a sense of participation, and often felt proud of being part of collective remembering: These commemorations are usually planned out and organized by professionals, and come with certain authority Public commemorations are group activities, and I feel part of a collective remembering. The National Day, for example, the parade makes us feel proud, and reflective.

Quite a few respondents mentioned the National Day as an important occasion for personal and collective reminiscence of the national history. Sympathetic triggers included singing the national anthem, parade, and fireworks: “This year is the seventieth anniversary of WWII victory, public commemorations or pageantry evoke a strong sense of history.” In China, this link with milestone historical events possesses a kernel of truth. National consciousness finds resonance in the public ground; tradition, continuity, and patriotism are all interwoven into part of contemporary life. “If some events are commemorated by the public, it must be true history – the public cannot be easily fooled, right?” said one respondent. A high percentage of people felt connected when reading books about the past, probably because reading is easily accessible, and books are related to a certain sort of authority, so seem a “natural” way to cultivate a sensible and informative citizenship. That studying history at school (42.33 percent) was ranked close to the average of historical connectedness seems to indicate another venue for professional authority at work. Some respondents compare their experience of visiting history museums and studying history at school, suggesting the difference lies in approach, not the content. Instead of being contradictory, all approaches are complementary, conveying an equal sense of pride, and getting in touch with historical events or occasions.

Various Pasts Graph 5 indicates respondents’ attitude towards various pasts. The past of China (64.86 percent) and the past of one’s family (62.32 percent) were both ranked high. In fact, the majority of the respondents associated national history with family history. They identified with the nation as one unity, where their individual family was indistinguishable from the nation. Their commentaries are patriotic, possessive, and proud. These emotional vocabularies, built into the national fabric, are unsurprising as Chinese people are genuinely proud of their ancient origin, and an often quoted “five-thousand-year history.” Chinese government has, tactfully and

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successfully, inculcated young Chinese minds with its ideological values: from straightforward patriotic education which prizes Chinese revolutionary history towards a more subtle form of citizenship grounded in understanding the nation’s past, a patriotic spirit permeates every possible field, morals, language, history, heritage, geography, sport, and arts, to name but a few. The symbolic importance of history, in various representations, reflects new, albeit vagarious, directions in government thinking on how to use the past to create a future that serves its political agenda. We cannot separate our country (Guo) with our family (Jia). Everyone is responsible for his country. (Tian Xia Xing Wang, Pi Fu You Ze) Wherever we go, we will be Chinese, which lies in our roots of existence. I love my country, so I cherish its long and ancient history. National history needs certain continuity. China is a country with a long history, for which I am immensely proud.

The past of China

The past of the community in which you now live

64.86% 19.81% 15.34% 18.60% 27.02% 54.39% 29.56%

The past of your racial or ethnic group

48.18% 22.26% 23.97%

The past of your city

47.26% 28.77%

The past of your political affiliations

16.67% 32.67% 50.67% 62.32%

The past of your family

23.77% 13.91%

Graph 5: The importance of various pasts.

About family history, one respondent said, “Family is the closest to my life. It teaches me where I am from. Family history is concrete, close, and familiar.” Yet personal and family pasts are intimately connected with national consciousness.

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The majority of the respondents thought it important for their next generations to know about national and family pasts: For cultural continuity, national history and family history will be most important to pass down to the next generation. Modern Chinese history since the 1840s is filled with shame and poverty, but it is also a history of struggle, of change. So today, we still need to be grateful for generations of Chinese who sacrificed their individual lives to lead to where we are. These are key chapters in Chinese history, and should be remembered.

Certain qualities, usually acclaimed as national virtue and fine tradition, were frequently mentioned by most respondents, such as morality, diligence, etiquette, hard-working, plain living, unity, spiritual continuity, and historical memories as part of a collective, national consciousness. However, “collective” and “national” need to be qualified. The sub-sample from Taiwan seems to indicate a different understanding of “national history” due to historical reasons. “China is far, and I do not know much about Chinese history,” said one respondent. Long regarded as one province of China, and pressured by the “one China” idea, Taiwan has had a “very different” history since the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from 1945 to 1949, and, logically, a different historical consciousness follows. “Patriotic education,” counterintuitively, fuels nationalism on both side of the strait: “Yes, I love China, but MY China is different from YOURS.” Ethnicity is also central to China’s national identity. With 1.2 billion Han Chinese in mainland China alone, ethnicity and nationality seem interchangeable. Despite the government’s Han-central rhetoric and its uneasy relationship with ethnic groups both home and abroad, the ceremonious respect for ethnic groups finds expression in autonomous rule over major ethnic regions, in educational preferential policy, in an unabashed claim to create a harmonious and multicultural nationhood. Since Sun Yat-Sen, who founded China’s Nationalist Party, the idea of “common blood” has been integrated into the ruling logic: “blood is thicker than water” prioritizes unity over division. This may explain why, from the sub-sample of ethnic minorities, family past and national past were also ranked high. Yet, the statistics suggest a significant increase in importance of ethnic past. In all samples, family history was ranked high as part of cross-generational continuity. The concept of “community” has never been specified in the Chinese context, which may explain the low percentage of the past of one’s community (18.6 percent). The past of one’s political affiliation was ranked the lowest. This can be explained by that most respondents do not have any political affiliation in the first place. Even with the ones that do, they identify the affiliation as being merely nominal, superficial, or utilitarian.

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Places/Sites of Public History One section of this survey is dedicated to exploring places/sites of public history. Nearly 81 percent of the participants responded positively to the question, “Have you visited any place or site of public history in the past 12 months?” To probe further, the survey asks seven generic questions, and two additional site-specific questions, about people’s impressions of and attitudes towards some of the key places or sites of public history in the city of Chongqing. This part of the survey adopts focused, face-to-face oral history interviewing to generate more insights. The interviewers are all college-level students from different disciplines in Chongqing University. They all receive three training sessions and workshops about the survey, the interview skills, and on-site guidance. A subsample from an institutional collaboration with Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum was also collected.15 Though labor intensive, this part of the survey turns out to be the most rewarding part of the project. The textual analysis generates many rich perceptions with intrigue insights, and indicates a genuine effort to bring each site down to humane scale. The responses we collected demonstrate a critical understanding of how history is interpreted, displayed, and disseminated at a specific place. The majority responded that they learned some historical knowledge from visiting these historical places, and the experience was authentic. The reasons vary, but most suggested that they trusted the material cultures. Here we see a deeply ambivalent relationship between the official depiction of the past and its corresponding material, often popular, expressions: on the one hand, the fact that most of the sites are officially designated adds another layer of authority, and for some respondents this means being more trustworthy; however, on the other hand, with access to the previously inaccessible information, some respondents start to question the historical truth represented in these places, with a healthy skepticism prevailing. The negative voices largely focused on over-commercialization. For example, at one of the nationally-designated historic districts, the attitudes towards historic preservation seemed mixed. Some sympathized with government efforts to renovate the area, to improve the quality of living for the residents, while others felt history had actually disappeared under the pretext of preservation or the vaguely defined idea of heritage:

 This is a separately designed survey, focusing on how, exactly, the public interpret and learn about history through museum exhibits and how to integrate the public opinions to improving museum exhibits. Three groups of people, i.e., museum professionals, volunteers, and visitors, 85 in total, were interviewed from April to June 2016. See Chapter 4, Part II.

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Every detail tells you the whole place is fake, devoid of history. The area represented a selected version history. The government needs to balance the commercial and the historical

Preliminary Patterns of Public History Making The data from one city may not represent the national trend, but the project scratches the surface of historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese. The initial findings suggest that despite the censorship still largely in place, there is an expanding space for public consumption of the pasts. Historians and history educators are facing up a demanding public which has passion, interest, and capability to engage with the pasts in various ways. Some preliminary patterns of public history making emerge from the survey. First, material culture stands as a convincing way of engaging the public. Places or sites of public history are highly valued in people’s learning about the pasts. Functioning as narrative media for historical events, these places or sites possess material rhetoric and potential for public history activities. They impact the historical consciousness of ordinary people in a profound way. Second, there is a strong push towards personal, family, and local history. Family is a highly cherished place for making and doing history, and it intimately impacts people’s sense of the past. Third, the public respects institutional and professional authority. Public history does not contradict professional history. Instead, it welcomes professional intervention. What are the implications for history education in China? Historically, schools in China are public institutions that convey and disseminate historical knowledge, as indisputable places for shaping people’s historical consciousness and bolstering civic identity. The Chinese government has painstakingly tried to establish a feeling of continuity, a sense of security, however false, in “a civilization with five-thousand -year history,” a tradition that has been constructed and formally institutionalized in different ways. Thus, the past is constantly reinterpreted and rewritten to chart the future. The illusion of continuity not only confirms the past as the prologue to the present, but also a prophet for the present, and indicative of the future. However, evidence from our project finds particular faults with school-based history, which emphasizes rote learning based on a prescribed canon of historical facts, most of which are boring and irrelevant. On the other hand, it also demonstrates popular interest in intimate pasts and intimate uses of the past—firsthand, experiential, intimate, familial. As such, it is clear that Chinese historians, curriculum officials, and history educators would be wise to identify and work

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with the patterns of public history-making, and integrate them into the curriculum. By encouraging creative encounters with history at school, there remains the capacity for historians and history educators to bolster civic interest in the past and develop students’ historical thinking. On an optimistic note, the survey implies that, to better tap into the historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese, and for public history to evolve, we need well-trained public historians on the ground, to work with the public and to intervene responsibly.

Chapter 2 Oral History: History, Memory, and Identity As a distinctive field of inquiry, the value of oral history lies in its emancipatory and democratic nature. Michael Frisch observes that “while the bottom-up approach seems to promise generically different insights for oral history, by exploring, for example, common shared experiences in preference to individualized and unique actions – these have not yet generated a really clear sense of any special nature and role for oral history.”16 Whereas, as Frisch also explains, “in Western society, where culture is so penetrated by literacy, communication, and self-consciousness as to make such notions of oral tradition of dubious application,” the democratic, performative, and albeit disturbingly profound nature of oral history has made a visible impact on the landscape of China since the turn of the twenty-first century in three respects.17 First, the lives of ordinary people are now part of China’s larger social history instead of being simple reflections of the government’s political talking points. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, where oral history took root earlier than in the mainland, oral history has empowered the under- represented, the marginalized, and the silenced to speak up and speak out, telling their own histories beyond those that support the state.18 Even in mainland China, oral history has allowed for the open discussion of some contentious topics, such as the meaning and impact of the Cultural Revolution and how to remember the veterans of Anti-Japanese War, so long as one pays lip service to China’s historical materialism and does not challenge the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Second, a multiplicity of acceptable representations of historical events have flourished – representations that deviate from traditional state-sanctioned versions of history. Oral history, however articulated and defined, demonstrates a flow of energy, an emotional outburst, and, occasionally, a piercing honesty that has been readily embraced by the masses and even by the state, to a certain degree. Third, both the processes and the products of oral history have started to move beyond merely being corollaries to complement or supplement factual knowledge and are now seen as contributing to an understanding of the human experience, fleshing out the faceless,

 Frisch, “Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay,” 32.  Ibid.  Hu Shi, an eminent scholar, brought his experience working with the East-Asian Institute of Columbia University to Taiwan, and from 1958 to 1976 he recorded the life histories of 17 prominent Chinese from the People’s Republican period (1912–1949) to Taiwan. He also promoted oral history in Academia Sinica starting in 1959. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-004

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clinical, and statistical facts and materials of the past. Oral history has become a tool for searching for meaning, identity-building, and meaning-making. Since oral history has attracted steadily increasing scholarly and public attention in China, especially during the past two decades (Graphs 6–8), this chapter addresses two core questions: why has oral history become so popular in China with such scope and intensity? And how does oral history influence the historical consciousness of a cross-section of uncelebrated Chinese? After first discussing the history of oral history in China, I then look more closely at the ways in which modern China has been using oral history at the national, local, and personal levels. I follow that with an analysis of why I believe China has embraced oral his-

Graph 6: Numbers of oral history works (journals, newspapers, conference proceedings, theses, dissertations, and reports) in China showing that oral history has received steadily growing attention, especially since 2000. Data and graph generated by software at: www.cnki.net.

Graph 7: Numbers of theses (218) and dissertations (32) on oral history from 2004–2017 highlighting the rise of oral history as a scholarly discipline in China. Data and graph generated by software at: www.cnki.net.

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Graph 8: A variety of disciplines contribute to the growing field of oral history. Archival studies, broadcasting and television art, and ethno physical education are the top three, followed by music studies, history, and journalism. Data and graph generated by software at: www.cnki.net.

tory in so many facets of public life before critiquing the ways in which oral history has altered general historical consciousness in China.

Where We Were and Where We are Now: Oral History as a Source in Chinese History (A Concise Review of the First Three Thousand Years) Oral history, as a historical source, a historical fact (hereafter, data), or a tradition, is nothing new in China. Since ancient times, wu zhu, highly respected intellectuals or blind storytellers, have been a core component of Chinese culture, recording and disseminating its history. Oral communications, peppered with ballads and legends, have played an irreplaceable role in sustaining this culture and have created a lasting impact on its history.19 Take, for example, the classic Chinese text Discourses of the States, which consists of a collection of speeches attributed to rulers and other men from China’s Spring and Autumn period (roughly 771–476 BC), or Si Maqian, the “father of Chinese history” who lived during the Western Han dynasty (202 BC–25 AD) and collected many oral histories, ballads, local dialects, and folk music and stories. He included these in his masterpiece, Shiji or Historical Records of Twenty-Four Dynasties, one of the first systematic records of Chinese history that is still read and studied today. In that work he  Sinian Fu, Shi Xue Fang Fa Dao Lun (An Introduction to Historical Research Methods), 5.

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cited his conversations with local residents and the ordinary people whom he ran into on his research trips to elucidate certain historical events. Even with this embrace of orality and its role in preserving Chinese history, print culture – relying predominantly on the written word much more so than the spoken – ultimately acquired an authoritative status and dominated Chinese historiography starting in the Han Wei period (roughly 220–570), probably due to the invention of paper during the Western Han dynasty. Though not completely obliterated, as oral sources continued to be used as a methodology for collecting and understanding history, they did become marginalized compared to written documents. As such, many folk cultures, rituals, performances, and verbal arts that relied heavily on oral transmission were subsequently lost. But the active use of oral histories as primary historical sources in ancient times – and employing them to tease out larger historiographical issues – set examples and precedents for historians centuries later, encouraging them to incorporate oral sources into their own writing of official histories. For example, Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), a prominent scholar of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), devoted most of his life to listening to people’s stories and then writing large numbers of what came to be seen as critical intellectual works on social history, the economy, and Chinese customs.20 An equitable “Progressive Era” in China began in the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic era (1840–1911), when people began to think more deeply and progressively about the role of government and its relationship to the general public, pushing against the sterility of Qing dynasty and its imperial dominance in all aspects of life. The social turmoil of this Republic era generated enormous energy among visionary intellectuals, many of whom spent time studying abroad. These men then incorporated the ideas and practices they learned from Western democracies into their native Chinese culture and history. This, then, allowed for the reintroduction and embrace of oral history, ethnology, and other methodologies into Chinese history and enabled them to be seen as legitimate research methods. Along these lines, Liang Qichao, a prominent historian of the era, advocated for what he called “The New History” in order to reembrace China’s past. The New History promoted the use of vernacular Chinese characters and advocated for popular education, which broke the domination of educated elitists. This, in turn, disrupted beliefs about the authority of the traditionally educated elites and their “histories,” leading to the reintroduction of sociology and other disciplines and methodologies deemed unworthy from an imperial perspective. Liang him-

 Yang, “Oral History in China,” 22–25.

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self discussed orality in historiography in Research Methodology for the Study of Chinese History.21 In that book he argued that a systematic collection of the oral testimonies of those who had taken part in or witnessed important events in China was urgently needed. He believed that major historical events, such as the Boxer Rebellion, the Hundred Days’ Reform, the Sino-Japanese War, the May Fourth Movement, and the Revolution of 1911, had to be documented through the collection of oral testimonies.22 This push back toward documenting and capturing the voices of the masses in order to truly understand history continued well into the twentieth century. Upon the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) sponsored a mass collection of literary and historical materials.23 The then-premier Zhou Enlai believed in the need to preserve historical and literary materials on what he considered to be modern Chinese history (1898 and thereafter), after the Hundred Days’ Reform triggered a series of profound changes that eventually led to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Oral recollections and testimonies were an important part of this endeavor.24 An oral history of the Boxer Rebellion was one such early effort; an oral history of China, with Westerners interpreting Chinese history from different cultural perspectives, also appeared during this period.25 The Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, however, virtually crushed all the active oral history projects in China. During this political turbulence, the collection of oral testimonies that Mao Zedong promoted as a part of his “field investigations” (tianye diaocha – literally, go out to the field and investigate) were ultimately used to produce uncritical information that supported communist party rules: they were an attempt to manipulate memories of the past for the purpose of supporting present day beliefs and ways of life. The occasional oral recol-

 Kwong, “Oral History in China: A Preliminary Review,” 26.  Liang, Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa, 37–39.  The CPPCC itself was a patriotic, united front that brought together numerous democratic factions and people from all walks of life to participate in the political process.  Yang, “Oral History in China: Contemporary Topics and New Hurdles,” 137–46.  Paul Thompson wrote in 1987 that such work went back to Edgar Snow, whose story of the Communist long march, Red Star Over China (1938), included a full life story interview with Mao himself at his insurgent headquarters deep in the northern countryside. Thompson and Thompson, “Oral History in China,” 17–21. Other examples include: Hinton and Magdoff, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village; Jan Myrdal, Report from a Chinese Village (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); William Parish and Martin Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (University of Chicago Press, 1979); Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village (Berkeley: University of California, 1984); and Stephen Mosher, Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese (Macmillan, 1985).

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lections or biographies of the political elites that did appear apart from the field investigations – such as of philosopher, essayist, and diplomat Hu Shi – existed, but it was not until the early 1980s that a modern, more formalized oral history methodology started to be practiced in China. The principle theme of this (re)turn to oral history centered on the memory struggle between celebrating the revolution and its achievements on the one hand and hearing the usually silent or marginalized voices of ordinary people on the other. During this period, oral history, mostly uncontentious and celebratory, primarily hinged on the fluctuating attitudes of the CCP.26 But at roughly the same time, despite the personal risks under a repressive state, a series of non-academic writers sought to use oral history as a venue for freeing the voices of ordinary people to discuss openly and honestly what their lives were actually like. Even within this movement, though, political censors did not allow interviewers to record their sessions in order to prevent the creation of audio recordings that could be studied in the future. Instead, censors required interviewers simply to take notes during their interviews so that the resultant oral histories could be edited for content. In the twenty-first century, oral history has moved beyond the confines of academia and become wildly popular among ordinary Chinese people. When Paul Thompson visited China again in 2017, he noticed one key difference between oral history in China and in other locales was that “our [Western] work is still primarily based on audio recording, while [China’s is] at the cutting edge of audiovisual.”27 So why is China this way? What choices did we make to embrace the “audiovisual,” and how have peopled responded to it? What follows is an illustrative discussion. My categories are arbitrary, and some of my data is drawn from unconventional sources, such as novels, popular literary pieces, and digital and social media. When approaching such a diverse, dynamic, and complex landscape as that which exists in China in the twenty-first century, in the discussion that follows I have decided to focus on the role that oral history plays in national history, in women’s and local history and the history of professions, and in public history. In exploring oral history’s role in each of these, I ask three basic questions: first, how are the oral histories generated, funded, produced, archived, presented, and disseminated (I use the level of professionalism in each step to help me evaluate the quality of the projects)? Second, do the projects address some of the elemental needs of a society, such as who we are, what we have experienced, what we aspire to, and what we care about? Or are they merely an academic or governmental exercise? Third, how do the projects influence the historical con-

 Paul Thompson, “Changing Encounters with Chinese Oral History,” 96–105.  Ibid., 105.

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sciousness of narrators and the general public? These critiques and analyses allow me to situate oral history in China more clearly, and then permit a critical exploration of why oral history has become so popular in China and how it influences the historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese.

National History, Memory, and Tradition The largest and, not surprisingly, best funded oral history projects in China are those that focus on and celebrate significant historical events since the founding of the PRC in 1949. As a continuation of the oral history work that started when the CCP took power, the overarching themes of these oral history projects dovetail with China’s official history. The interviews testify to confirm and expand the official narratives in an expected, laudatory, and self-indulgent fashion; they enjoy a continued official blessing, generously funded by all levels of governmental bodies and other institutions, and are seen as being socially reassuring (Graphs 9 and 10).

1%1% 9%

2015-2018 46%

2010-2014 2005-2009 2000-2004 1995-1999

43%

Graph 9: Breakdown by date of the 68 oral history projects funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC) since 1995. As evidenced, most projects were funded after 2010. Data source: NSSFC. Graph created by author.

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Sociology 4%

Others 18%

Library science 12%

Regligious studies 6%

CCP History 6%

Chinese history 8% Journalism and Communications 11%

Chinese literature 14% Ethnology 17%

World history 4%

Sociology

Library science

Regligious studies

Chinese history

Chinese literature

World history

Ethnology

Journalism and Communications

CCP History

Others

Graph 10: Distribution of the NSSFC funded oral history projects. Ethnology ranks first, Chinese literature ranks second, and library science ranks third. Data source: NSSFC. Graph created by author.

One of the most “applauded” projects, by the government, not necessarily by scholars and the public, is a massive compilation of oral histories that celebrate the Open-Door Policy, or the Open-and-Reform policy, formally announced at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP in 1978. The goal of this policy was to transform China’s planned economy into a socialist market economy and to encourage some democracy, reinforce current laws, and separate the state from various business entities or industries. The government designated four coastal cities – Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Xiamen, and Shantou – as “special economic zones” with flexible market policies; 14 other coastal cities followed in 1984.28 The

 The fourteen coastal cities are Dalian, Qing Huangdao, Tianjin, Yantai, Qingdao, Lian Yungang, Nantong, Shanghai, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, Zhanjiang, Guangzhou, and Beihai.

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Open-Door Policy was an integral part of Deng Xiaoping’s theory about the growth of the Chinese state and aimed to improve the country’s production capacity, its Gross National Product (GNP), and living standards for its citizens. The purpose of the oral history project, then, according to the mission statement of The Oral History of the Open-Door Policy, was to “systematically collect materials on the open-door policy, to testify to its greatness and to complement the historical sources on the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”29 The project was designed to ensure the continuity of the CCP’s power: the agenda, the narrators, and the products were meticulously planned solely for the purpose of showcasing the greatness of this policy and without any critical reflection; the tone of the project is unquestionably celebratory. For the project, interviews were conducted with hundreds of key decision makers, powerful party elites, and prominent political and social figures, recording their memories, recollections, and reminiscences of how the policy came to be and was then implemented. There are a number of themes covered throughout all of the interviews: reforms in rural villages, the one-couple-per-child policy, Sino-US relations, the 1982 Constitution, the “Grand Debate,” science and technology, the macromanagement of the economy, the “soft-landing,” the Three Gorges Dam project, Hong Kong’s (1997) and Macau’s (1999) return to China, housing reforms in the 1990s, and many others – all of which the state deemed as direct consequences of the policy – and how they impacted people’s lives.30 The oral histories, with topdown governmental editing, are presented as a seemingly organic narrative, though clearly that is not the case. The final products from the project are mostly oral history-based print publications, with scant details about the interviews themselves, such as the questions asked, the places in which they were conducted, their length, and the decisions made about how to handle transcription; there is no corresponding oral history archive for interested individuals to consult the interviews themselves. The publications dutifully appear in milestone years; for example, The Oral Records of the Pioneers of the Open-Door Policy in Guangdong Province, Experiencing the Open-Door: Oral History of the Open-Door policy in Guangzhou during the Past Thirty Years, The Oral History of the Open-Door in China, Experiencing the Open-Door Policy in Shanghai during the Past Thirty Years, and Historical Changes of the Open-Door in the Rural Beijing were all published in

 Yangsong Qu and Gao Yongzhong, Gaige kaifang koushushi (Oral History of the Open-Door Policy).  The “soft landing” was a policy to stimulate economic growth without causing inflation.

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2008 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the policy.31 The Oral History of Open-Door Policy and Witnessing the Decision-Making: Oral History of the EyeWitnesses of the Open-Door Policy appeared in 2018 for the fortieth anniversary. Though the original project was focused on the national level, it spawned a series of regional oral history projects, such as in Shanghai, where the regional offices of party history conducted oral histories at the district level.32 These regional, theme-based oral histories appear to demonstrate the complexity of implementing policies on a local level but are in no way critical of those policies. Aside from edited transcripts that lack any critical analysis, many of these regional projects ultimately produced books praising the state in an expected manner, such as Ice-breaking: the Oral Testimonies of Open-Door Policy,33 or resulted in visual media like the grand-scale oral history documentary, Born in 1978, released in November 2018. A more recent interest in the Anti-Japanese War, or the War of Resistance against Japan (1931–1945), has given rise to a series of nationally-funded oral history projects as a part of a post-revolutionary historical materials collection. Recently the CCP changed the dates of the war from 1937, when the Lugou Bridge Incident occurred, to 1931 when the September 18th Incident occurred.34 All of a sudden, what had long been institutionalized as an eight-year war turned into a 14-year war, a sign of the government’s arbitrary changing of history for purely political reasons. The state selected which veterans were to be interviewed for the project; the narrators rehearsed what they were supposed to say before being recorded. This broad, Anti-Japanese War theme received national support and was also a key research tender of the National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC).35 In 2015, Professor Zhang Lianhong from the Propaganda Department of the CCP Committee at Nanjing Normal University received NSSFC funding to

 For the thirtieth year anniversary, the Guangdong Archives recorded a series of eyewitnesses accounts. The Oral History Center at Fudan University in Shanghai published Witnessing: 30 years of the Open Door Policy in Shanghai in 2008.  This includes many provinces and cities across China, such as Sichuan, Shanxi, Zhejiang, Chongqing, Shanghai, Wenzhou, Shenzhen, Jili, Inner Mogolia, Hainan, Kaifeng, Yunnan, Anhui, and others.  Han, Koushu: Pobin (Ice-Breaking: Oral history).  On July 7, 1937, after Japan claimed that one of their soldiers went missing in Wan Ping city in Beijing, they opened fire on the Chinese army based in Wan Ping. The incident was officially defined as the beginning of the Anti-Japanese war. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese army bombed Shenyang and quickly occupied three provinces in the northeast region. This signaled the Japanese invasion of China.  A tender is a competition for funding support. Scholars apply for funds, their projects are then evaluated, and only some receive financial support for their work.

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launch the project Salvaging and Organizing the Oral Sources of the Veterans of the Anti- Japanese War.36 Two other projects, Oral History and Images: the Survivors of the Chinese Expeditionary Force (2015) and The Anti-Japanese War: Salving, Organizing, and Researching the Oral Sources of Japanese Veterans During the Fourteen-Year Anti- Japanese War (2018), received NFSSC funds as well.37 This theme also inspired the general public to join the effort of documenting multiple perspectives of the war. The Nanjing Folk Museum of the Anti-Japanese War organized a contest called Salvage the Oral History of the Veterans, accompanied by a series of oral history workshops meant to educate the public about how to collect oral histories. Interestingly, the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) that immediately followed the Anti-Japanese War has received scant attention, due, probably, to the complicated political situation the veterans represent. Some veterans who fought on the Nationalist Party (KMT) side during the war settled back into China after the war, while others who chose to fight for the CCP then settled in Taiwan. In order to commemorate veterans of that war, some interviews would have been conducted with those who fought against the state or who fled it after the war, a difficult situation for a country concerned with how it presents its own history. An equally ambitious national-level project launched by the National Library of China in 2011 is China Memory. The project, based on developing and enhancing current collections at the National Library, is focused on what the library and the state have deemed key historical events and individuals in modern China; the project uses oral history to supplement the library’s current documentary collections. The topics covered with the interviews are: the Anti-Japanese Allied Forces in the North-Eastern Region; Arts and Science; the Daughters of Yan An; Our Words; Our Expeditionary Force; Contemporary Musicians; and recordings to document a range of traditional Chinese craft work – lacquer craftsmen, calligraphers, wooden block printers, folk singers, and storytellers.38 All of these topics are relatively uncontentious subjects politically and, as such, receive great support. The outcomes of these projects have been series of books, exhibitions, and public lectures. The China Memory project works out of the film and video production center of the library and reaches out to provincial and local libraries across the country to provide material for the National Library’s collections. To

 Source: National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC).  The Chinese Expeditionary Force refers to the period when the Chinese army went to Burma to fight against the Japanese from 1942 to 1945.  Our Words invites the public to talk about the origin, meaning, context, and stories of popular words that have appeared in China during the last 100 years. The selected words represent changes in Chinese society, thus influencing individual lives and destinies.

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date, the project has collected approximately 1,060 hours (41,215 GB) of oral history and has evolved into a nationwide call for memory building and sharing. In addition to these major projects across China, during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there has also been a push to use oral history to record intangible heritage – those parts of culture that often do not leave any documentary trace, like oral traditions, verbal arts, oral literature, rituals, performance, and other aspects of Chinese culture. China’s interest in capturing its heritage is directly connected to its proud claim of having a “five-thousand-year history.” Nearly 45 percent of all the oral history projects the NSSFC funded in recent years have focused on capturing this intangible heritage.39 Professionals from a variety of disciplines – including ethnology, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, literature, journalism, library science, and fine arts – are all involved in this work, capturing oral histories about the dance culture of the Hanju, traditional Chinese opera, the Beijing opera, the history and culture of ethnic minorities, woodwork, and folk musicians, just to name a few. The interviews are semi-structured, using different methodologies like biography, oral history, and memory studies, and then transcribed for additional preservation. The final type of oral history projects seen on a national level are those that deal with large-scale traumatic events in China’s history, both natural and manmade. While China is interested in constructing a specific national history, it is also fully aware that it is fruitless to ignore well-known historical events. When these well-known events support official government ideologies, dominant historical generalizations, and already-manufactured collective memories, they receive tremendous government support and are highly publicized; when they do not, they are still recorded but then hidden away for few, if any, to see. Oral history projects that focus on the Nanking Massacre (also known in the West as the Rape of Nanking), the Datong Coal Mine Massacre (1937–1945), and the air bombing of Chongqing (1938–1943) have received national attention and support, as has the devastating 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan (a small town in the southwest part of Sichuan Province, on May 12, 2008), whereas projects that have focused on, for example, the history of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine (1958–1961), and the KMT Veterans of the Anti-Japanese War are mostly classified as secret or access to them is highly restricted even to qualified researchers.40 Many of these latter projects are branded as “unlawful,” and so, if published, they  Source: NSSFC.  The oral history of the Wenchuan Earthquake won a special grant from NSSFC. Many survivors and eye-witness accounts/testimonies were published on the tenth anniversary of the earthquake. About the oral history of the Great Famine, see Xun Zhou, Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958–1962: An Oral History (Yale University Press, 2013).

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appear outside of mainland China in languages other than Chinese, and thus reach a very different type of audience. With a few exceptions, as noted, most national oral history work in China is framed within, or constrained by, a national ideology. Similar to CPPCC oral history projects immediately after 1949, the tone of this work is definitively celebratory. In a recent issue of the Oral History Review, Alexander Freund looked into the broad history of oral history in China and questioned how these national projects, then, have “shaped a generation’s approach to narrating their lives.”41 The answer is by no means straight-forward. An established version of the past already exists, and these oral history projects aim to confirm – to reinforce – this view of history, a national myth, or a combination of myth and ideology. Regardless of the type of historical source, whether documentary, testimonial, or anything else, the concern remains: what are these materials evidence of? Of generalizations, of social norms, of the controlled version of history, of factual knowledge? Even though these national-level oral history projects are meant to elicit expected, perhaps even rehearsed, answers that establish “what really happened,” if we analyze what is said and how it is being said closely enough, these interviews can show us the latent or subconscious dimension of the narrators. From this perspective, then, the mythic and factual past overlap, remaining in creative tension. Discrediting these oral histories as useless based on the particular ideological context of an authoritative regime would be a hasty decision. “Ideology is more than simply a political program,” argues Ronald Grele, building on Warren Susman and Louis Althusser’s observation that “it is ideology which structures the consciousness of individuals and their conceptions of their relations to the conditions of existence, and which governs their actions and practices through an array of apparatus.”42 Some of these oral histories reveal the deep structure of the narrators’ historical awareness, which helps to understand the dynamics of the history of China’s culture, particularly its hegemony. For example, oral histories of the Anti-Japanese War veterans who settled in Taiwan depict the deeply problematic psychological world of those veterans who served on the CCP side of the war and now live across the strait and, in a certain way, outside of the country for which they fought.43 If we are simply dismissive of the oral histories of these veterans, assuming they are merely state propaganda, we fail to understand why people died for an espoused, but often imagined, ideal. As Yael Zerubavel notes, the “invented traditions” are particularly significant for the legitimation of

 Freund, “Long Shadows over New Beginnings? Oral History in Contemporary China,” 9.  Grele, “Movement Without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” 150.  Zhao, Taiwan laobin koushu lishi (Oral History of Veterans from Taiwan).

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an emergent social and political order, and their success depends, to a large measure, on their ability to reconstruct an acceptable view of the past.44 The oral histories of the survivors of the Cultural Revolution reveal startling discrepancies. Some narrators talk in a candid and cathartic manner, as real people with memories, beliefs, and subconscious desires apart from the state-sanctioned and accepted version of history. It is not simply what they say that matters, but how they say it. We need to probe the traces of such thought to reconsider longheld assumptions used to establish China’s history by dictate, by consensus. Luisa Passerini writes poignantly, “The raw material of oral history consists not just in factual statements, but is preeminently an expression and representation of culture, and therefore includes not only literal narrations but also the dimension of memory, ideology and subconsciousness.”45 For her, subjectivity is “that area of symbolic activity which includes cognitive, cultural and psychological aspects.”46 Thus, we need to see the interviewee as a spontaneous, subjective being, and then we will care about how questions were formulated, informants identified, and answers crafted. In these nationalistic interviews we see myth and history seamlessly transform into ideology, and we see that people have their own way of restructuring their pasts. So, to answer Freund’s question, the interviewees narrate their own lives within a construct of the history they know they need to perform, but in telling that history, they still reveal a lot about themselves. The interviews are not simply the words recorded in a transcript, but the sound of voices echoing through the ages with their own layered and situated meaning.

Women’s History, Local History, and Histories of Professions Beyond the large, national projects, there has also been a marked increase in oral history work in China in the twenty-first century meant to give a voice to the underrepresented, the marginalized, the vulnerable, and the silenced. Much of this currently focuses on women’s history, local history, and histories of professions, all of which ultimately allow space for identity building within and among these groups and serve as a way to document and share what life is actually like for these often-ignored individuals.

 Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Also refer to Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition; Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  Passerini, “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” 54.  Ibid.

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In 2003, feminist historian Li Xiaojiang established an edited, themed book series, Let Women Speak for Themselves, which includes the volumes Tracing the Culture, Experiencing the War, Going Independent, and Narrating Ethnology.47 The series offers personal perspectives on life in China and the ways in which women have navigated, for example, traditional assumptions and perceptions about women’s roles in Chinese culture. Unlike in some of the national history projects, professional historians familiar with the subjects under study conducted the interviews in Li’s series. Interestingly, however, Li does not advertise the series as being “women’s history”; instead, as Li states in the Preface, “This is not a book series of women’s history; it expresses the history, memory, and feelings about some well-known historical events and offers ‘women’s interpretation’ about some cultural phenomenon, and thus, an alternative venue for historical interpretation.”48 The volumes consist mostly of transcriptions of interviews without annotation or interpretation. Given this, the series functions more like published primary sources than commentary on the topics under study (admittedly, the choice of who to interview, the transcripts’ order of presentation, etc., do craft meaning within the works, but because Li’s and others’ decision-making is not apparent, readers are left to guess what meaning was intended). Li Danke, a US-trained Chinese historian, published Echoes of Chongqing: Women in War Time China in 2010, which uses oral histories and private memoirs to study how women saw their role in the Anti-Japanese War and how that compared to what was expected of them culturally. As the title suggests, Li’s work focuses on women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing that the KMT held from 1938 to 1945. She uses her interviews to argue that the discourse about the war and the war itself was indeed gendered, and that with all the anguish experienced by those involved in the war, “there was a sexual division of suffering, including ailments that pertained solely to women in the Chongqing region.”49 A similar work on the oral history of Chinese women, Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory, explores the rural socialism of the 1950s through life stories from women who lived in four villages in the central Shannxi region. As she notes, Hershatter was not interested in the grand cultural and social scale of life in these villages, but in “the texture and nuance of life, the feel and meaning and local traces of the early years of state revolution.”50 Other works that focus on ethnic minority women – those

 Li, ed., Rang nvren ziji shuohua: wenhua xunzong, qinlin zhanzheng, duli de licheng, minzu xushi (Let Women Speak for Themselves).  Ibid.  Li, Echoes of Chongqing: Women in War Time China, 7.  Ibid.,19. Also refer to Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, 6.

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who are, essentially, doubly marginalized in Chinese culture, including studies of the She, Tibet, and Miao minorities – have also appeared in recent years, and most have strong, distinct ethnographic components.51 A number of cities and scholars throughout China have launched oral history projects aimed at capturing local history and the histories and genealogies of families who have been fixtures within those communities for generations. Ding Yizhuang’s edited Oral History from Beijing series documents a rapidly disappearing city using the stories of “ordinary” people in Beijing.52 Her work involves extensive oral history interviews and fieldwork among the crowds of those whose lives are fundamentally intertwined with the life of the city. She generated interview questions on the basis of archival documents. With a solid understanding of the people and various sites around the city, Ding established specific criteria to determine who to include in her interviews and who she believed did not qualify as real Beijing Ren (Beijing people). The oral histories she collected from the field are integrated into a larger historiographical analysis; the series is heavily footnoted and interspersed with archival annotations, which gives it a scholarly feel. While Ding’s arguments are downright grassroots, she uses oral history interviews as another type of a historical source instead of embracing the emotion contained within her narrators’ stories; her work emphasizes the intersection of her historical data, reducing the texture of the oral narratives to clinical evidence to support her research questions. Other projects that focus on the oral history of educated youth who were the product of the shang shan xia xiang policy (a call to go to the far and inaccessible parts of the country to bring modern thought and education to rural villages) have also become common, clearly filling gaps left in other textual primary sources.53 With life history as their core methodology, these works reveal many intimate details about this policy and the educated youth’s response to it that have never found their way into published macro histories of the movement. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, where everything is a bit freer and ordinary citizens can speak more openly about their lives, many grassroots organizations have started community oral history projects to complement their various interests. The  Zhu Dan, Shezu funv koushushi yanjiu (Oral History of She Women) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Industrial & Commercial Press, 2010); Zhang Xiao, Xijiang Miaozu funv koushushi (Oral History of Miao Women in Xijiang) (Guiyang: Guizhou Renmin Press, 1997); Hong’en Yang, Zangzu funv koushushi (Oral History of Tibetan Women), (Beijing: China Tibetan Studies Press, 2006).  Yizhuang Ding, Hutonglide gunainai (Old Women in Hongtong) (Beijing: Beijing Publishing House, 2017); Last Memory: Oral History of 16 Qi Women (Beijing: China Broadcasting & Television Press, 1999); The Oral History of Old Beijing People series (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2009).  Xiaomeng Liu, Zhongguo zhiqing kousushi (Oral History of China’s Educated Youths) (Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2004).

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Historical Memory Bank of Migration to Taiwan project, for example, seeks to preserve the history and memory of those who relocated to Taiwan since 1949; Long Yingtai, the first Director of the Cultural Bureau in Taiwan, invited every citizen to write his or her own life histories. In Hong Kong, an excellent study of the fishermen in the south Hong Kong Island uses twenty-eight oral history interviews to build a memoryscape of the region.54 These projects, and many others, are collaborations among scholars, local communities, and ordinary citizens. Also emerging in recent years are oral history projects that focus on preserving the history of professionals, craftsmen, and industries in China, with a hint toward redefining professional identity. Though some scholars (outsiders) are initiating these projects, many professionals (insiders) are working to preserve their own histories. Exemplar topics include the history of Hong Kong’s neon light industry, the newspaper industry in Hong Kong, craftwork in Macao, and an organizational history of Tong Ren Tang, one of the well-known large pharmacies with stores throughout China. Other projects document the rapidly disappearing urban landscapes, like Old Beijing People, which blends oral history and memory studies in relation to the cityscape. Some connect oral history with environmental history, such as projects on the West Lake in Hangzhou, on the evolution of the river in Hanghzhou, and on the Grand Canal and the boat-people from Wuxi. And there are projects that explore the intersection of oral history and business history: the China Eastern airline company, the Zhongguan Village (a tech-hub in Beijing), the Bank of Communication, the Futures Market, and new entrepreneurs. Other projects are connected to architectural history and urban planning, and many top-ranking universities have conducted systematic oral histories as a part of their efforts to archive their own university’s history. These oral histories, in all their various forms and depth, engage certain professional idealisms but largely remain archival and informational. Oral histories in these categories epitomize a revolutionary move in China in that they fulfill certain social purposes – like reinforcing community identity or offering legacies to future generations. As a methodology, various academic fields – including journalism, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, library science, archival studies, religion, and political science – embrace oral history, as the NSSFC data reveal.55 Though still not commonly used and marginalized among scholars, those that deploy the methodology use it to grapple with larger historiographical questions or issues, and they marshal methodological support from re-

 Huiling Wang and Luo Jiahui, Jiyi Jingguan: Xianggangzai yumin koushu lishi (Memoryscape: Oral History of Fishermen in Hong Kong Island) (Beijing: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd., 2015).  See Graph 5.

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lated disciplines or fields, such as family history, genealogy, social history, and women’s studies.56 These scholars also generously borrow and adopt Western theories in their practices. They use the material either to fill the chasm of what written documents gloss over or blatantly ignore or to offer alternative perspectives on seemingly static history. The scholars conducting these projects incorporate oral history as a tool for researching broader themes, and they do so to test and expand historical inquiry.

Family History and the Medical Humanities One final notable grouping of oral history work in China comes out of an interest in exploring the relationships within families and the ways in which the family unit and individual family members have contributed or been witness to important events in the shaping of modern life. Along these lines, several medical institutions and professionals have begun to use oral history to understand not just life, but the end of it, through the memories and reflections of the terminally ill. Concomitant with the renewed embrace of oral history and public history, medical professionals, non-medical supportive staff, and community workers have started to conduct oral histories with their terminally ill patients in hospices, hospitals, and community centers. As there is no palliative care system in China as of yet, the oral history of people approaching the end of their lives offers invaluable perspectives. Most oral histories take an unstructured approach, in the form of a life review or life history. For example, since 2016 Dr. Lin Xiaoji, from the second affiliated hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, has been collecting oral histories of his patients who have entered the terminal stages of their illnesses, capturing their stories while those patients can still remember their pasts and speak about them clearly and coherently. These interviews are physically and emotionally intense: the narrators find it difficult to tell their stories while the interviewers find it difficult to listen to them. In Lin’s interviews, the narrators reveal pains, regrets, hopes, fears, and the intimate details of their lives – namely self-discoveries, renewed insights, joys, failures, loves, and regrets.57 The academy has echoed this interest. The medical school of Peking University hosted an international conference in 2018 on narrating life, aging, and death that explored various aspects of medical humanities, themes related to death, and

 This marginalization has something to do with the value and the general status of orality in traditional historiography.  See Peter Coleman, Aging and Reminiscence Processes: Social and Clinical Implications.

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palliative care for the terminally ill under the umbrella of what was termed “narrative medical science.” Narrators and interviewers explored the past and the present, multicultural perspectives on palliative care, memory and aging, the specter of death, shame, dignity, etc. Though medical professionals rarely have a background in historical research – which affects the quality of these oral history interviews – the role that oral history now plays in hospice care has gradually captured public attention as more hospices have started offering these “reminiscence” services. The therapeutic value of recall in the later stage of life remains uncertain, but the psychological and emotional value seem difficult to ignore. In 2017, Pu Xuan published Fifty-Four Types of Loneliness, a book highlighting 60 oral histories from a collection of roughly 700 interviews with elders in hospices in the Hebei and Hunan provinces.58 The project interprets the oral histories in the context of China’s official history since 1949, situating the lives of these individuals within China’s broader history. The interviews explore numerous topics and themes, like people’s feelings toward the one-child-per- couple policy, the open-door policy, the Cultural Revolution, and the growth of urbanization, just to name but a few. Pu’s work shows with a startling clarity that these elders – who have no family and, as such, within Chinese culture are usually cast aside and seen as irrelevant – have much to contribute about China’s history and its culture. This work also demonstrates the ways in which elders’ memories and stories reveal, for example, the unbearable heaviness of facing the loss of a family member, the liveliness of youth, and the strength and fortitude of those who lived through tumultuous times during the rise of modern China. Pu’s and others’ works, at their core, are aimed at bringing China’s history and people’s history back to the public, to the masses, to enjoy, to understand, and to use in their own individual lives.

Going Public: The Past is not a Foreign Country Public history has evolved as an academic field, a social movement, and as part of popular culture in China. Core to this transformation is oral history, a methodology seen as “lending voices to the faces in the crowd.”59 This purposeful linking of public history and oral history has attracted a growing, engaged public to think more deeply about the past and its relevance to modern-day China. Both disci Xuan Pu, Wushisizhong gudan: Zhongguo gusu renqun koushu shilu (Fifty-four Types of Loniness: Oral Testimonies of the Living Alone Groups in China) (Nanjing: Jiangsu Fenghuang Wenxi Press, 2017).  Terkel, Touch and Go: A Memoir, xv.

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plines have long shared common ground in terms of their sensibilities and connection to multiple publics and audiences. To paraphrase Graham Smith, public history is the organized effort to bring accurate, meaningful history to a public audience, and oral history is a natural tool for reaching that goal. The oral history and public history movements share a natural affinity, both having attracted practitioners and audiences different from those of more traditional historical disciplines. Both oral and public history have experimented with video recordings; slide-tape (using audio recordings with photographs, archival pictures, and other visual aids); and even interactive videos in museum exhibits, dramatic performances, and other venues outside the classroom and in publications to bring people’s personal experiences, their knowledge, and their emotion back into historical storytelling – a storytelling that often elides the human aspect of historical events.60 But what does it really mean to merge oral history and public history? From David Dunaway’s perspective, public oral history should be thought of in the following way: “If historical understanding is to move beyond the library stacks, we must return it to those who created it. If history is to be more than a subject in classrooms and a few fine books, then those who practice history must find a way to share their enthusiasm with the public at large. That practice I’ll call “public oral history.”61 When oral history goes public, it finds expression in a variety of physical or virtual public spaces. In China, a diverse group of professionals, including journalists, museum curators, archivists, librarians, documentary filmmakers, etc., work with the socially-concerned public to produce historical pieces made for consumption in the public sphere. The expansion of the internet has fundamentally shortened the distances and altered the ways in which people communicate with each other. Freer access to information, massive amounts of digital materials, and dynamic representations by means of cutting-edge audio-visual media all have transformed the rigid, academic idea of history. Multi-media is the method that Chinese culture uses most often to attract, engage, and interest the public in their own history, and oral history is the mostly commonly deployed methodology to ensure that people hear and see the past. The work of the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center in Beijing represents the dynamic power of media and the role it plays in public engagements with China’s historical past. Their My Anti-Japanese War documentary narrates the war through

 Smith, “Toward a Public Oral History,” 431.  Ibid., 442.

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eyewitness accounts, civilian letters, and stories.62 The way in which the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center crafted this film gives the sense of a transfer of ownership, returning the history of the war from the state to the common people. Throughout, the film evokes the sense that everyone is entitled to write her or his own history beyond that which traditional historians have written or the state embraces as its one true narrative. The oral histories used in this project are sympathetic and emotional but, like many documentary projects, provide little context regarding what question the participants’ responses answer. It is also unclear whether the film’s producers cross-checked their narrators’ stories against other sources, as the phrases “according to,” “as [this person] recollects,” or “some think” are predominant throughout the work. Even though the historical, background research for the film overall appears weak, the graphic images and vivid journalistic descriptions easily enthrall all those who watch the film and push them to think about the past as it has been traditionally preserved and as it potentially could be seen. The documentary asks its audience how, for example, China and its people should deal with the conflicting interpretations of certain historical figures or events: like what would have happened if General Fang Xianjue had surrendered to the Japanese at the Heng Yang battle?63 Although it has its limitations, the Cui Yongyuan Oral History Center’s attempt at direct public engagement represents a major step forward in China given the dominance of national oral history projects.64 Projects from the Shanghai Audio Visual Archives (SAVA) try to preserve and present urban memories – stories from those who have lived in many of China’s major cities as those cities evolved. As part of the Shanghai Media Group and Shanghai propaganda system, SAVA is the first professional institution to implement a central management of radio and television program files in China, and it houses all the radio and television program files of the Shanghai Media Group (SMG) dating from 1949. With a strong focus on preserving urban history, it has collected approximately 100,000 pieces of news and documentary footage about Shanghai since 1898. These precious historical archives have proved invaluable for the presentation and preservation of the history and memory of Shanghai; a recent project, “Shanghai Story and Memory,” utilizes some oral history archives and presents a narrative history of Shanghai.

 Yongyuan Cui, Wo de kangzhan (My Anti-Japanese War: Oral History of 300 Eye-witnesses/China Legend), I & II (Beijing: China Friendship Press 2010, 2012).  Deng, “Jiang Kaishek’s Ruling of Fang Xianjue’s Surrender to the Japanese Army,” Historical Studies 5 (2006).  Cui, Wo de kangzhan, 99.

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Several other major institutions have taken up the call for the preservation and presentation of oral history and public history works. The Data Center for the Oral History of Guangzhou has one of the most ambitious oral history projects and databases in China; in order to further its endeavors, it set up a recording studio, an oral history editing lab, and a digital data processing center for the public to use. Though a number of oral history-based museum exhibits remain in the exploratory phase, there are a few urban museums taking the lead in presenting public oral history to their communities, such as the “Urban Landscape and Memory” project at the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, the “Changsha Ma Wang Dui tomb” excavation project, and the “Oral History of Dredging at the Museum of West Lake” project in Hangzhou.65 A community oral history theater project, A Tale of Two Cities, invited original residents of the Zhong Huan district on Hong Kong Island to reenact their pasts and memories. The writers and actors based their performance on the oral histories of the original residents; A Tale of Two Cities explored the traditional skills and crafts of the townspeople, the meaning of many of the urban landscapes in that district, family stories, and the joys and sadness of everyday life in Zhong Huan district. The performative, linguistic, and verbal arts aspects of oral history gave depth beyond what the traditional historical documents could provide.

The Popularity of Oral History It is clear that twenty-first century China has readily re-embraced oral history as both a scholarly and public form of historical engagement, but the question remains why? When oral history goes public, it plays on hunches, emotions, and memories – giving it a less academic but no less scholarly feel; it acquires a transient, ephemeral, and creative quality. It moves across disciplinary boundaries, involving people from all walks of life. Academics and the public alike have already developed a set of codes and rules to evaluate conventional modes of representing history in order to determine their veracity, but many do not yet know how to assess nonconventional modes – like audio, video, or digital content. As such, there is no methodology readily available, no generally-accepted belief system within which to analyze the massive public oral history data confronting the Chinese public on a regular basis. Prior to the digital turn in oral history, when historians worked with analog media, the principal mode of conveying what was

 Lai, “Research on the Application of Oral History in Museums: With the Example of the Oral History of Han Tombs at Mawangdui”; See Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, Part II.

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learned in an oral history interview was through a transcript, the traditional representation of orality that lacked the intonations, inflections, and cadence of actual orality – that is oral history’s true power. Transcripts turn aural objects into visual ones, and something elemental is lost in this process: the tone, volume range, and rhythm of speech carry implicit meanings and social connotations that are not reproducible in writing, except maybe in the still inadequate and hardly accessible form of musical notation.66 Now that there are lower-cost means to reinsert the personal into public presentations of oral history using digital media, the power of the spoken word, the power of oral history, is something that can affect anyone who can hear it. When programs, projects, researchers, and others focus on the cognitive, emotional, and performative aspects of the methodology, oral histories can make a direct connection between one’s own personal reflections on her or his history and memory and that which is being presented in a public format. It provides circular validation: those memories and stories are significant because my memories and stories are significant, and my memories and stories are significant because those presented memories and stories are significant. Luisa Passerini argued 40 years ago that oral histories could provide historians with new ways of understanding the past, not just in terms of what was recalled but also with regard to continuity and change in the meaning given to events, with the recognition of “a subjective reality which enables us to write history from a novel dimension undiscovered by traditional historiography.”67 David Glassberg further discusses the issue of scale and distinguishes the new scholarship on memory that had emerged by the mid-1990s among public historians not as a subject matter but as an “approach.” Instead of examining a single social group’s understanding of its own past, this new approach has been to understand “how various versions of the past are communicated in society through a multiplicity of institutions and media” and why some memories are more widely shared, while others silenced.68 This is precisely what makes oral history different in the first place compared to traditional written sources and why so many in China embrace it. Another reason behind this embrace of public oral history lies in the seemingly raw, visceral, and unrefined nature of the medium – it appears on the surface to be a representation of history without manipulation, without a profession,

 Grele, “Movement Without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” 126–54.  Ibid.  Glassberg, “Public History and the Study of Memory,” 7–23.

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a state, or some other group imposing beliefs onto that history.69 Oral sources are testimony, are evidence, and, in most cases, are available to the general public to study and interpret on their own. While some of China’s own oral history archives remain closed to “outsiders,” or the original recordings are no longer available because they were erased to re-use the tapes or for purely political purposes, the value of hearing the interviews – of being able to hear what was said and why – is critical for the public, and researchers generally, to validate the material as a legitimate source. This validation then extends to the overall research project based on those sources. As Jean-Pierre Wallot and Normand Fortier note, “Research findings can only be critiqued fully when the sources used in the research are available to other researchers. Transparency is needed for any public debate or scientific undertaking.”70 And transparency is needed for people to believe what was argued. Is the public embrace of oral history understandable? Certainly. Is it problematic? Certainly. Among the noise of writing history from the bottom lies the tendency to transform history into a form of populism: “to replace certain of the essential tenets of scholarship with facile democratization, and an open mind with demagogy. Such an approach runs the risk of constructing oral history as merely an alternative ghetto, where at last the oppressed may be allowed to speak.”71 Some conduct oral history without sufficient methodological rigor and professionalism, so what people hear in public oral history pieces may skew toward propaganda without anyone fully realizing that stories from individuals only hold as much truth as other corroborating stories told. Popular populism, taken to the extreme, also runs the risk of the superficial or uncritical use of oral sources, and a further confusion between a sympathetic story and a historical one. Factually incorrect statements may still be psychologically or emotionally true, but the narrators – including the victimized, the vulnerable, and the marginalized – all have their own agenda for telling a story in a certain way, as do the interviewers when asking their questions.72 Oral history represents a multitude of points of view, and the impartiality that historians traditionally claimed is replaced by partiality, which stands for both “unfinishedness” and “taking sides.”73

 While this is clearly not the case, since people construct media presentations for a purpose, there are specific questions that are asked, not asked, etc. The interpretation of history is not so readily apparent to those unfamiliar with the discipline.  Wallot and Fortier, “Archival Science and Oral Sources,” 370.  Passerini, “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” 53.  Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” 596–606.  Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 12, 41.

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Though certainly not true of most public oral history work, when content creators – whether they be historians, museum professionals, journalists, or others – do not think critically about the stories they are constructing, the narrators and their stories can easily be reduced to something much less complex than what they truly are. No matter how rigorously collected, the interview itself has multiple shades of meaning that transcend the positivistic, factual level since narrators are living subjects and not just information providers.74 Ultimately, oral history is not a one-and-done process but involves constant fieldwork with multiple narrators: it is always a work in progress, and so is history itself. The “Chinese and the Pasts” project discussed in Chapter 1 has shown how ordinary Chinese “forgot” what they learned from history textbooks and rarely consulted scholarly works for the kind of history about which they cared to know more. When Freund surveyed the history of oral history in China, he realized that oral history never entered a broader academic, let alone public, consciousness in terms of being a type of source that could (and should) be used to validate historical events.75 Freund was right that the deafening “silence” of oral history in academia in China could not be explained by “a general amnesia,” a forgetting of traditional Chinese beliefs in and about the relevancy of the spoken word in their own long history. Then why do few scholarly works of oral history ignite the public interest in the way that public oral history pieces do? I believe there are three reasons. First, most historians in China are not trained with oral history methodology, so when they go into the field to talk to people, they do so mainly to confirm what they had already been expecting. While they may be authorities in their chosen fields, they lack sufficient skills in sympathetic listening or lack a gorilla-style poking, prodding, and probing when speaking to their narrators. They ask questions academically, not idiomatically. Their work rarely brings them on a journey into the human soul to hear the ways in which joy and sadness, fears and hopes contribute to beliefs about and an understanding of facts; nor does their work lead people to contemplate the complexity of our social fabric, much less to understand the dissonant, the contentious, and the unfolding part of society. They transform people back into generators of facts instead of drawing on the humanness that attracts the public to historical stories. Second, most scholarly oral history works are banal, mediocre, and sometimes irrelevant. Many historians select less provocative, safer subjects that cater to what China’s political climate welcomes. Unlike their counterparts in Western

 For example, while some interviewees provide yes or no answers to questions when asked, yes and no are rarely the complete answers to questions.  Freund, “Long Shadows over New Beginnings? Oral History in Contemporary China,” 12.

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democracies who enjoy full academic freedom, academics in China do not have a license to study any subject they want and thus they shy away from what could be seen as a contentious argument within the state. Data from the NSSFC reveals how many of the nationally-funded oral history projects are self-indulgent – celebratory – reiterating all that the government has approved as true and how the ordinary, or in Studs Terkel’s phrase, the etc. of the world, still matters very little to China’s official governmental gaze. Third, the final products of these scholarly works are exactly like most other scholarly work: print-based, and therefore devoid of the richness of the human voice. These works find comfortable homes on shelves in library stacks or archives and serve a limited, expected audience of other academics. The orality and aurality are missing. As Raphael Samuel has eloquently expressed, People do not usually speak in paragraphs, and what they have to say does not usually follow an ordered sequence of comma, semi-colon, and full stop; yet very often this is the way in which their speech is reproduced. Continuity, and the effort to impose it even when it violates the twists and turns of speech, is another insidious influence . . . In the [transcription] process, weight and balance can easily be upset. A much more serious distortion arises when the spoken word is boxed into the categories of written prose. The imposition of grammatical forms, when it is attempted, creates its own rhythms and cadences, and they have little in common with those of the human tongue.76

The most critical piece of the whole oral history puzzle is missing from these scholarly works; the people – often the ordinary people who share their lives, histories, and memories with us – recede into the background, thereby losing interest among the broader public. As is clear throughout China, the real energy of oral history comes from the voices of those who have chosen to share their histories, which is why public oral history has become so popular. Untethered to the restrictions of traditional academic publishing, it makes history more personal and more social – and therefore more relevant. Oral history, in its various forms, presents a viable alternative for fresh and creative, if not altogether different, interpretations of historical events which many Chinese crave.

Historical Consciousness: Doing Deeper Oral history in China is informational, archival, and reactive. Freund’s recent reflections on oral history in China, largely based on secondary literature, conflate several different terms – oral tradition, oral history, oral information (evidence),

 Samuel, “Perils of the Transcript,” 389–91.

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and orally-transmitted knowledge (data) – that have distinct meanings and uses in the Chinese language and become murky when mapped onto the use of those same terms in English.77 To better understand the myriad forms of engagement with oral sources, and before addressing China’s historical consciousness, the first question that we must ask is: oral what? Oral history (口述历史) is different from its close allies oral tradition (口头传统), oral literature (口述文学), oral data or material (口述史料), and oral testimony or evidence (口述证词或证据). Oral tradition emphasizes a focus on recollections of the past that extend beyond one’s own lifetime. Paraphrasing Jan Vansina’s definition of oral traditions,78 they are verbal communications that report on the past as recalled by those in the present. While they are personal memories, they are someone else’s memories – a parent, a grandparent, an elder – passed down through oral statements, sung, or played on musical instruments. These traditions are part of an intangible heritage that cannot be captured in any other way since those who had first-hand knowledge about or participated in a historical event or way of life are no longer living. In a similar vein is oral literature – oral sources captured in written form and then passed down for generations – the preservation of which has always been problematic. As each successive generation retells stories and then adds new ones, they discard the works of their predecessors, believing those documentary records to be superfluous. The stories themselves are what is important and since they are regularly retold, in this worldview there is no need to keep the previous documents on which the stories were originally recorded. For example, the China Memory project aims to recapture some of what was lost from oral traditions and oral literature over the centuries.79 Oral data is a term used to describe information collected from oral sources that represent simple, “factual” information gleaned from those works – things like dates, names, and broad descriptions. While new questions may arise and interpretations emerge during this process, oral data is mostly seen through a noncritical lens, lacking any analysis beyond what is directly in, for example, a verbatim transcription. The data is predominantly informational and archival and devoid of the personal nature of those who conveyed that knowledge. A major portion of oral histories in China fall into this category. They are not often used as part of broader historical studies nor historiography, even in the more scholarly and methodologically driven works on women’s history and profes-

 Freund, “Long Shadows over New Beginnings? Oral History in Contemporary China,” 2, 6.  Vansina, Oral Tradition as History.  A special issue of the journal Oral Tradition explores the dynamic genres of oral tradition in China, ranging across poetry, epics, mythology, bard songs, folk songs, etc. Oral Tradition 16, no. 2 (2001).

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sional and industrial oral history. These oral materials are seen simply as supplementing written documents and are merely another source. Oral evidence, as defined by Trevor Lummis, is “an account of first-hand experience recalled retrospectively, communicated to an interviewer for historical purposes and preserved on a system of reproducible sound.”80 Oral evidence and oral data in China are both employed to support certain propositions; the difference between them lies in how each is used. As we see from series of projects meant to reinforce state-sanctioned versions of history, oral evidence – like in the Oral History of the Open-Door Policy, the Anti-Japanese War, the Datong Coal Mine Massacre, the Nanjing Massacre, the Wenchuan earthquake, the Three-Line construction (1964–1980), the national Labor Models, and prominent figures in the history of PRC projects – is used to buttress the consensus of official narratives in China directly.81 Oral evidence is not just simple facts like oral data but facts put to use to support official history. When Michael Frisch coined the evocative phrase “a shared authority” to describe the oral history relationship, he pushed us to think more deeply about the interviewer’s and the interviewee’s roles in crafting an oral history. As Frisch writes, “At its best, the interview is a dynamic, dialogical relationship that encourages active remembering and meaning-making. The interviewee may start by performing fixed or rehearsed stories, but in the process of remembering, and with the careful encouragement and gentle probing of the interviewer, more complex and unexpected memories may emerge.”82 The interview is a site in which a historian becomes part of history-making, a contributor to the nature of a primary source that can be used in her own work or the work of future historians.83 Oral histories ultimately can be used to understand broader strokes in social and cultural history better in ways that oral tradition, oral literature, oral data, and oral evidence cannot. From an anthropological perspective, oral history is a method of qualitative interviewing that emphasizes participants’ perspectives and the experiential knowledge of people living through the events. Epistemologically, oral history positions the researcher and the participant in a collaborative and reciprocal relationship. Oral history interviewing, in this way, is a distinctive type of performance and a particular genre of storytelling. Given this understanding of oral history, only a handful of cases I have presented in this manuscript would fully fall under the rubric of oral histories. Among them are the oral history-

 Lummis, Listening to History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence, 27 (emphasis added).  The Three-Line construction refers to the massive resource relocation and industrial migration from the east to the west part of China from 1964 to 1980.  Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.  Leavy, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research, Introduction.

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based historical works, like Oral History from Beijing series, Echoes of Chongqing: Women in War Time China, and Memoryscape: Oral History of the Fishermen in Hong Kong Island. So how do these terms – oral tradition, oral literature, oral data, oral testimony, and oral history – relate to each other? In Chinese culture, can oral data ever become a piece of evidence or testimony? If so, how does it acquire its evidentiary value? Can any of these terms be considered oral history? Memory can work, for example, as an agent to transform oral data into oral evidence and then further into oral history. As Paul Thompson eloquently notes, oral evidence, when it exists in the form of life stories, can bring to the surface the dilemma that underlies any historical interpretation. An individual life is the actual vehicle of historical experience: “to make generalization possible, we must wrench the evidence on each issue from a whole series of interviews, reassembling it to view it from a new angle, as if horizontally rather than vertically; and in doing so, place a new meaning on it.”84 Most of the public oral history projects in China try to reintroduce memory into constructed public spaces in order to craft a new form of public history making, to merge all of these different forms of orality – oral tradition, oral literature, oral data, oral testimony, and oral history – into a comprehensive and detailed history of China and its culture. How is oral history generally being received in China today? Despite the long genealogy of using oral history either as a source or as a method, there was no established oral history program or course at the college or university level until approximately 2010.85 This means that a majority of those individuals and organizations that took on oral history projects in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries did so without proper training. This has allowed critics to attack the methodological rigor, broadly, of oral history work in China. They argue that many “practitioners” did not have an adequate grasp of the field and that they rushed into oral history work without a thorough understanding of methodology, thereby tainting the work produced. This, of course, also affected how interviewers formulated questions, how they asked questions, and whether they were able to listen sympathetically to ensure appropriate and timely follow-up questions. While this critique is certainly valid – and explains much about the type of oral history work in China – it is a problem with a relatively simple solution: training. As is clear from the sheer number of college students who enter the national oral history competition, oral history is foremost on their historical minds, and they are clearly interested in learning more about the field and its methodology.

 Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 269.  Source: The Center for Public History, Zhejiang University.

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A greater challenge lies in how practitioners and the public alike interpret and evaluate oral history, skills that are not so easily trained in a structured environment. Oral history is first and foremost a conversational narrative, with social and psychological relationships layered in verbal expressions with specific meanings, biases, and unintentional distortions about events that happened in the past. If we interpret an oral history superficially, if we are impatient with the deepthinking process beneath the spoken words, or if we look for purely factual information, then we miss the very purpose, the charm, and the power of oral history. In what forms have people in China traditionally engaged with oral history up through the early twenty-first century? Mainly as transcripts – including single life-story narratives, collections of interviews broken up and reassembled to tell specific stories as part of a narrative analysis, or as a reconstructive crossanalysis.86 Those in China, then, had been experiencing the unfinished nature of oral history, assuming that it was just another kind of a written document and not recognizing its inherent incompleteness. How much was missing when you could not hear how someone told their history? Oral evidence is – in many respects – artificial, variable, partial, and inherently incomplete. Given the very nature and process of oral history, its reliability seems questionable. What does it mean if an interviewee is inconsistent in her or his retelling of a story about the same event during different interviews or interview sessions?87 How can people interpret the validity of stories told if multiple narrators provide reports of an event that do not conform or their stories do not match what was recorded in other primary source materials, such as documents, diaries, and letters? Sometimes people are self-deluded, narrators can be reticent to tell a story for fear of reprisal, interviewees are biased, and human memory is inaccurate.88 As Paul Thompson argues, recollection is inconsistent, as recalling is an active and constructive process – a social process – that is bound to multiple temporalities.89 And as psychologists note in various studies, retrospective bias, misattribution, and suggestibility are the regular sins of memory.90 However, while some scholars may see the unreliability of memory as a problem, more people in China actually see

 Leavy, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research, 21–25.  Hoffman and Hoffman, “Reliability and Validity in Oral History: The Case for Memory,” 109.  Cutler, “Accuracy in Oral History Interviewing,” 2.  Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 4.  Refer to Schacter, “The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights From Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience,” 182–203; Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers; Loftus and Hoffman, “Misinformation and Memory: The Creation of New Memories,” 100–104; Loftus and Pickrell, “The Formation of False Memories,” 720–25; Loftus, “Creating False Memories,” 70–77.

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that as its strength. “The peculiarities of oral history” – orality, narrative form, subjectivity, and the “different credibility” of memory – provide clues not only about the meanings of historical experience, but also about the relationships between the past and the present, between memory and personal identity, and between individual and collective memory, relationships that the state with its traditional, official narratives has only recently started to embrace.91 Putting aside the fact that it is impossible to exhaust the entire memory of a single informant in one interview or in a series of interviews and the fact that the interviewer and her or his questions frame what an interviewee says, until the present day most people did not know what oral history could mean for an understanding of their own personal, local, regional, and national histories. But with the advent of digital and multimedia technologies, they are then able to hear it, to see it, to embrace the orality of oral history work, and to understand the value of human speech to convey more information than simply the words that were spoken. And that is why oral history has become so prevalent in China today: oral history allows people to think more deeply about their own place at a much broader scale. They want to hear the stories that other people like themselves tell, and they take history to their hearts. So what has oral history done for historical consciousness in China? The very public aspect of oral history has allowed people to rethink and sometimes question the histories they had learned, placing themselves, their friends, their family, and their colleagues within history itself as active participants. Oral history has allowed a new awakening of historical consciousness that allows people to see, to understand, and to embrace people’s roles in historical events, even though those histories may be as messy and incomplete as the ones told in books, articles, and newspapers. ✶✶✶✶✶ Oral history in China has a very long history and has always been intricately connected to its memory and identity. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, with media technology revolutionizing the way people engage with history and that same technology becoming a core component of the lives of ordinary Chinese, oral history, in some respects, has become a participatory sport with a genuine sense of a grassroots impulse. A survey of the landscape shows that when oral history goes public, the energy it exudes and the interest it draws, while not unproblematic, encourages people to see their own role in history and to embrace it. Just like a shared authority that lies at the heart of oral history itself, I invite other scholars to undertake a more critical analysis of the diverse and dynamic oral histories.

 Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” 96–107.

Chapter 3 Family Narrative, Personal Memory, and Public History In China, state control has been a persistent pattern for more than 2,000 years. Family (jia) and the state (guo) seem inseparable. While Westerners view topdown decision-making as undemocratic, the Chinese interpret the power of the state differently. For centuries, the idea of kinship, regardless of whether it is real or fictive, has been intricately evolved with the state and the nation. As we have discussed in Chapter 1, The “Chinese and the Pasts” project, a recent study investigating the historical consciousness of ordinary people, reveals that most ordinary Chinese associate the national history with their family history. In evaluating attitudes toward various pasts, the past of China and the past of one’s family were both ranked high.92 For most respondents, their individual families were indistinguishable from their nation’s history. The commentaries, which were filled with emotional, patriotic, possessive, and proud vocabularies, along with the often quoted “five-thousand-year history,” are unsurprising, as Chinese people are genuinely proud of their ancient origins.93 The Chinese government has, tactfully and quite successfully, inculcated young Chinese minds with its ideological values. From straightforward patriotic education that praises Chinese revolutionary history to a more subtle form of citizenship grounded in an understanding of the nation’s past, a patriotic spirit permeates every possible field including language, history, heritage, geography, sport, and the arts. The symbolic importance of history, in all its varied manifestations, reflects new, albeit vagarious, directions in government thinking regarding how to use the past to create a future that serves its political agenda. The leadership brilliantly plays on the distant memories of an ancient civilization and the more recent fear of an uncertain future. Family traditions, customs, rituals, and moral instructions are all provoked to solidify the governing power. However, during the twenty-first century, media technology, freer access to information, and increasing mobility have tilted this delicate balance. At a massive scale and in various forms and genres, family history and genealogy are flourishing. Why has family history had such a mobilizing effect on ordinary people over the last two decades? How does family history contribute to our understanding of historical and societal changes? This chapter traces the his-

 About 64.86 percent for national history; 62.32 percent for family history.  See Chapter 1, Part II. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-005

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tory of family history and pinpoints where the traditional family history fails. With a critical analysis of the emerging family history practices, it argues for a more practical-oriented approach, with which family history can connect personal narratives, family memories, and public history.

Family History in China: A Brief History A family (jia ting) is defined as a basic social and economic unit bonded by a specific form of marriage and is characterized by individuals living, working on the property, and eating together. The family’s collective cousin, that is, a clan (jia zu), is a social organization characterized by the descendants of the male ancestors with the same family name, who are united by blood relations, abide by certain rules and regulations, and live together in a specific place for generations. Zu, which originally means many arrows in the same bag, has acquired a connotation of coming together in the Chinese language. A strong sense of kinship lies at the core of both the family and the clan. Four types of families have existed throughout the Chinese ancient history. The first type is the patrilineal system in primitive societies. These families were united by blood relations, and managed through the male lineage, with no class differentiation. The second type is the patriarchal clan system, which emerged during the Yin and Zhou periods (1046 BC–221 BC). These families centered on blood relationships, with slave holders and slaves at the opposite ends of the class spectrum. With a shared family name, a leader (zong zhu), and a set of regulations, this family represented a much more organized and closely-knit social system. The word zong, that is, the radical on the top side of the Chinese character, symbolizes sacrifice, and the original meaning of the word was the house of worship and sacrifice. The system functioned on relative inheritance to maintain clan continuity. Ancestor worship spiritually bonded the clan members, and the leader led the worship and sacrifice and indoctrinated the members with ethics and ideas of kinship love, thus enhancing their bonds. The patrilineal temple, that is, zong miao, was built to accommodate such collective rituals. The architectural plans often revealed class and social hierarchy. Public burial grounds and clan tombs were popular. Family genealogy, in which a family tree recorded the intricate relationships among the clan members, appeared and developed following the invention of the written word. Previously, oral tradition was the only way to trace the family tree. The third type, that is, the aristocratic clan system, existed from the Weijin period (220 AD–420 AD) to the Tang dynasty (618 AD–907 AD) and was a combination of the manor system and clans. This type referred to families and clans who

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lived, migrated, and buried together. Ancestor worship remained an important collective ritual. Family genealogy became more popular in three forms. The first form was the family biography, which was usually written to glorify the family name. The second form was the family tree (jia pu), or clan genealogy (zupu), which was a skeleton type of tree that documented names and delineated blood relationships. The third form was official genealogical records, which were recognized by the imperial government and used to classify nobles and common people. Around the mid-Tang dynasty, the aristocratic clan system along with the official genealogies that compiled and recorded these prominent lineages started to decline. The primary purpose of the family genealogy was to confirm the social hierarchy. The rigidity impacted both individuals and family relationships and further differentiated the haves from the have-nots. Wars, massive migrations, and tumultuous political struggles led to the disappearance of the genealogical records. Since the Song dynasty (960 AD–1276 AD), the patrilineal system evolved. This type of system was a social organization based on a blood relationship with common properties. The beliefs and sacrificial activities were an integral part of a family’s cultural and spiritual lives. Some beliefs, such as totem worship, practiced by the clans were also practiced by the whole tribe. Ancestor worship and sacrifice appeared later. Each clan had a public burial ground, which was usually located near the village or the common property, allowing members of the same clan to be conveniently be buried together. Two types of clan systems supported the patrilineal system. One system was vertical, with a tight-knit clan system, and the other system was horizontal, with large families living together for generations. The former often broke into scattered, individual families who shared the same ancestors and remained connected through a lineage hall, family genealogy, and the clan field. Thus, the clan system has had a profound impact on family patterns.94 The traditional family or clan records, which were usually kept in ancestral shines and updated by the elders of a family, record the genealogy from the father’s side centering on key persons. Family genealogies evolved from the aristocratic families and events of the imperial time. The earliest work, Shi Ben, was compiled by official historians, who recorded the names and relationships of prominent lineages. Used to promoted and serve political interests, genealogies became a specialized field starting during the Liu-chao period (222 AD–589 AD) until the Tang dynasty. During the Song dynasty, private genealogies appeared, marking a fundamental difference from the previous dynasties.

 The clan system established in the Song dynasty was further developed during the following dynasties and reached its apogee during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).

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The idea that the family has always been an integral part of personal identity, national interests, and cosmopolitan aspirations runs through the above four types of families. The individual, the family, the nation, and the world blend into a seamless whole. Family histories rest upon such quintessentially Chinese cultural assumptions and have evolved with the changing idea of kinship and family. While David Schneider originates the classic anthropological conception of kinship,95 Marshall Sahlins gracefully defines it as “mutuality of being,”96 and it “covers the variety of ethnographically documented ways kinship is locally constituted.”97 If kinship is the relationship that reveals and reinforces certain dimensions of the cultural order, it moves beyond a pure and simple commensality into a more culturally sophisticated “relatedness.” The classic text of the Da xue connects moral self-cultivation with general harmony in the state and society.98 The objective of building up a moral character is to “enlighten the lucid virtue” (ming ming de), to “approach the people” (qin min), and “to stop at the utmost goodness” (zhi yu zhi shan). Family plays a part in this grand equation. The regulation of one’s family depends on the cultivation of his personal moral character building, according to the adage. If regulating one’s family manifests harmony with the state, those at the higher levels of the ruling hierarchy play a critical role. A benevolent ruler is nevertheless not sufficient for the welfare of the people. It is necessary for everybody to study the world (ge wu) before they can reach perfect knowledge (zhi zhi), and only with perfect knowledge can people accomplish sincerity (cheng yi). Only with sincerity can one can rectify one’s heart (zheng xin), and only in this way can man practice self-cultivation (xiu shen). Once cultivated, one’s own family is united (qi jia), and only families that are in a state of unison can be governed (zhi guo) in the right way. If all these steps are achieved, there will be peace on earth (ping tian xia). This fairly cosmopolitan view of the relationships among the individual, the family, and the state explains how family history and national history have mutually evolved and indicates a relational rather than a structural understanding of kinship and family.99 The linkage between the family and the nation is further sustained through material cultures, clan rules, rituals, such as ancestor worship, and a strong attachment to the patriarchal system. The classic ritual Liji says that one should respect

 Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship.  Sahlins, “What Kinship Is (Part One),” 2.  Ibid., 2–3.  Da xue, The Great Learning, is a Confucian Classic that is a part of the canon of the Four Books, Si shu, to which it was added as an integral Confucian writing on order and harmony in society.  Brandtstädter and Santos, Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives.

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the ancestors and that the clans should stay together (jin zong shou zu). Those who are connected by blood relationships should love each other and remain together all the time, which is borrowed and interpreted as the key rationale for the ancient kinship governing structure, and the institutional reconstruction of the clan system under a range of historical circumstances. More specifically, the ancient connection to the ancestors reinforces the family ideal of connection and symbolizes a blessing for future generations. For example, the lineage hall, in its historical variations,100 represents an architectural expression of the unity and continuity of the clan; this hall is a place for ancestor worship, for lectures on the clan rules or laws and for discussions related to clan affairs. Second, burial practices, sacrificial ceremonies, and rituals have been faithfully performed for centuries. The practices that satisfy both ethical and emotional ends reflect a deep connection to the land. Agricultural civilizations believe that the best way for a dead person to rest permanently is to be returned to the land, thus burial grounds are sacred as follows: one finds eternal peace when laid to rest in the land. This belief is also infused with the following circular interpretation of life: as life originates from the earth, life returns back to the earth. Falling leaves return to their roots, as the Chinese saying goes. Yellow, the color of the earth, is deemed holy. Among the five xing of Ying and Yang, the earth, or tu, lies in the middle, suggesting that it is the most stable, reliable, and fundamental of all. Ideally, the clan should be buried together in an eternal family reunion; according to the saying in Zhou li, “Live closely, and die closely” (Zhouli, Dasitu). The judicial and ritual aspects and material culture have been strongly privileged and dutifully performed and preserved throughout all dynasties, although how these components actually impact individual families remains a mystery. The decline of the traditional family and clan101 began at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century. With the political turmoil and radical changes of the time, the “family revolution” in 1919 clearly connected the family to the traditional values and ethics that the public intellectuals were trying to break. In 1931, the Civil Code of the Republic of China represented an ideal.102 At approximately the same time, the New History emerged, which introduced Darwin’s theory of evolution into historical studies, emphasizing that historical research should focus on groups, not individuals, as history should be treated as an

 Kinship temple, zong miao, of Shang and Zhou; Civilian temple, jun guo miao, of Han as burial architecture; Kinship temple system of Weijin; Ancestral temple, jia miao, of Tang and Song; and the lineage hall, ci tang, since Song.  Generally referred to as pre-twentieth-century families.  Hames L. E. Chow, Yukon Chang, and Ping-sheung Foo, The Civil Code of the Republic of China.

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interrelated and organic whole; historical studies should utilize theories and methods from other disciplines including geography, anthropology, religion, political science, and law. This cosmopolitan outlook has pushed the boundaries of curiosity and expanded the field of history. History stopped referring only to the activities and power struggles of the ruling elites and extended into all aspects of social life, including most mundane phenomena such as marriage and family. If human evolution is a collective endeavor, one has to trace its roots to the most basic unit, that is, the family and the clan.103 Around the same time, sociology and other closely related disciplines such as ethnology, anthropology, and folklore studies made their way into China. Family history became an important part of research crossing these disciplinary boundaries. One of the founding works in ethnology, On Ethnology, uses the ethnology theories to analyze ancient matriarchy systems.104 The receptive mood during the early twentieth century provided a welcoming energy for developing family history studies. Thus, during the 1940s, family history was systematically revived, and the scope of the field expanded to include ordinary people. However, the newly established government of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 proscribed the development of sociology as a discipline, and family history was degraded as being a vestige of the feudal (another word for evil under the communist rule) age. This hostile political climate, filled with leftism and anti-capitalism, continued until the end of the Cultural Revolution. Sociology, with which family history was associated, was criticized and marginalized. From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, family history studies in mainland China were disrupted. Very few works were based on field research largely due to the political constraints, although a few scattered studies appeared in Hong Kong and Taiwai, which were more liberal at the time.105 Since the 1980s, family history studies have experienced another revival. The studies mainly fall into the following four categories:106 (a) the feudal family/clan system which has always been an integral and nicely complementary part of the

 Liang, Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Bubian.  By the eminent public intellectual Cai Yuanpei.  Charlotte Ikels analyzes the following three books in a review essay entitled The Family Past: Contemporary Studies and the Traditional Family; Baker, Chinese Family and Kinship; Cohen, House United House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan; Wolf and Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945. See Ikels, “The Family Past: Contemporary Studies and the Traditional Family,” 334–40.  A few important works on the family historiography include Zhu, The Study of Family Forms in the Shang and Zhou Dynasty; Xie, The Family Forms in the Zhou Dynasty; Wang, The History of the Patriarchy and Families in China; Yu, The Family History of China; Zhang, Clan Fields and the Basic Social Structures in the Qing Dynasty (Renmin University Press, 1991); Wang, “Origin, Disruption, Revival: Commentary on Family History Studies in China,” 175–84.

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Chinese feudal system and was characterized by male patriarchy and entrenched autocracy for almost two thousand years; (b) the internal structures, activities, and relationships of the family/clan; (c) the social function and role of the family as an organization and institution, especially its double-edged role in slowing down productivity and societal development while simultaneously promoting a social morale and interpersonal relationships at the grassroots level; and (d) family history studies with a geographical focus or a particular theme, such as the clan system during the Shang and Zhou periods, the clan structures in Fujian Province, the relationship between businessman and the clan system in Anhui Province, and the clan field studies.107 Where did these studies fail? The problems are related more to the approach than the subjects. Despite the rise and fall largely associated with political whims and wills, family history remains predominantly private, and family history studies, which are mostly of official and scholarly interest, adopt a structural approach. Such an approach believes that social and cultural phenomena can be explained by being referred to as systemic mechanisms, as Levi-Straussian structuralists believe that “A deeper unity and systematicity lie behind the seemingly bewildering variety of social and cultural phenomena.”108 In this vein, the family and clan are both parts of a patriarchal system; their existence, development, and decline all function within this system, and such an analysis focuses on these structural features. The concepts such as “relationality, memory, biography, em-

 Excellent works include Zheng, The Family Structure and Social Changes in Fu Jian Province in the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty; Chen, The Family Society and Culture of Fu Jian Province in the Past Five Hundred Years; Tang, “A Study on the Businessman in An Hui Province and the Feudal Social Forces,” 144–60; Tang, “The Family and Clan Structures of Hui Zhou in the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty,” 147–59; Zhang, “A Study of Clan Fields of Jiang Su Province in the Qing Dynasty,” 49–66.  Levi-Straussian structuralism relies on the perception that luxuriant variety, even apparent randomness, may have a deeper unity and systematicity that can be derived from the operation of a small number of underlying principles. Levi-Strauss argued that the seemingly bewildering variety of social and cultural phenomena could be rendered intelligible by demonstrating the shared relationships between these phenomena and a few simple underlying principles. In practice, structural analysis consists of sifting out the basic sets of opposites underlying some complex cultural phenomena, that is, a myth, a ritual, or a marriage system, and showing how the phenomenon in question is both an expression and a reworking of these contrasts, thereby producing a culturally meaningful statement of or reflection upon order. See Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” 135–36.

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beddedness, and imaginary,” which are integral to a relational interpretation of kinship,109 are inadvertently eschewed. Consequently, the understanding of “relatedness” is far too limited and limiting.110 First, compiling genealogies of prominent lineages center almost entirely on the male patriline. Such a family genealogy, written with selective coverage in a largely self-fashioning manner, strives to glorify the family name or find an association with an aristocratic lineage and often testifies and justifies the very power structure. Methodologically, these studies rarely question the assumptions and the sources.111 The fact that very minimal private correspondence between family members either exists or survives also poses further limits. Second, such works are kept to a chosen few and remain exclusively accessed by scholars. However, rigorously carried out, the works seem incapable of recognizing the creative psychology embedded deep in family histories, much less drawing a logical connection between family histories and their accumulative effects following changes on a larger scale. The seemingly legitimate and authoritative sources offer an incomplete picture at best. Historians approach these works faithfully and with assiduity, but they rarely question or criticize the established categories of analysis. The documents they cull from the archives are official records, and the units of analysis, such as families, households, ancestral temples, and clan fields, are embedded in the institutional assumptions; but who has the right to claim that the family or clan should be interpreted as an institution? Who defines the concept of family? Why is the nuclear, heterosexual family automatically assumed, while the nonheterosexual family is silenced? Why do certain issues take priority? The synthesis of these concepts simply cannot explain the exigencies and chance events that fall outside of the established categories. The family genealogy left the imperial offices and has been embraced by the masses since the Song dynasty, but it was compiled, interpreted, and preserved largely in the same manner as before when the family historians and genealogists were employed by the imperial government. Elite scholars and philosophers, such  Smart, “Relationality and Socio-cultural Theories of Family Life,” 13–28. Also see Miller, “What Is a Relationship? Kinship as Negotiated Experience,” 535–54; Strathern, “Kinship as a Relation,” 43–61.  The idea of “relatedness” is explored from a variety of cases; see Brandtstädter and Santos, Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives.  Traditional family studies utilize the following three types of sources: first, the archaeological findings: written documents, such as Confucian classics including Zhou Qin Schools of Thought, The Twenty-four Histories, and History of Qing Dynasty; second, local chronicles; family trees and genealogy; folklore materials; and random notes, essays, and manuscripts from different dynasties; and third, the material cultures such as ancestral temples, clan fields, and family genealogy.

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as Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao, and Zhu Xi, among other neo-Confucianists, sought to redefine the idea and structure of the family. These writers advocated for a very specific design for the family and the clan as a part of a strictly controlled, blood-related, and tight-knit patriarchal system. The clan rules, moral and ethical obligations, lineage halls, and clan fields tied each clan together. This approach fit the overall governing structure and expectations of the imperial government well and was thus strongly supported by the state power. However, the lives of the ordinary people were missing. Their values, characters, and life trajectories slipped into the nameless masses. Genealogical records either ignored or misconstrued the actual lives of the ordinary people, as if they were not a part of the national history, and the ordinary people became one of the nameless nonvariables in the grand historical synthesis. Both the assumption upon which the systematic approach is based and the incomplete sources lead to an additional question. The ritual and judicial dimensions of kinship, clan rules, and ancestor worship often dominate the analyses of family histories, and few fieldwork data are collected to understand the actual impact of these rituals and rules.112 Last, even though census, birth, death, marriage, and migration data have become more available, these sources provide very minimal insight into the psychology, attitudes, and emotions of ordinary people. Here, the contest between history and memory surfaces. Beneath personal narratives and family memories lies the intersection of history and memory. In competing over the same terrain of the past, history sometimes works with memory, while other times there are certain places of the past that only memory knows and preserves, and memory works as a guide to our understanding of the past. However, historians are slow to embrace the fact that, along with archives and libraries, a separate and parallel line of private accounts exists, where stories, memories, and histories intertwine. Therefore, we encounter the following fundamental problem with these works based on a referred system or structural mechanism: these accounts lack the adequate explanatory power in analyzing the microprocedural development of the emerging dynamic practices of family history.

 Rituals are, in fact, a form of practice, that is, people do it, and to study the reproduction of consciousness, mystified or otherwise, in the processes of ritual behavior is to study at least one way in which the practice reproduces the system. Clifford Greetz defines a ritual as not only a pattern of meaning but also a form of social interaction. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 168.

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A Changing Landscape: Family History from Below On January 13, 2018, The Economist published an article about family trees and ancestral belongings in China. The article observes that over the past couple of decades, clan associations have reestablished themselves and worked to recompile zu pu. The article also notes that websites are helping to make the search for family trees easier and even predicts that “with luck, searching for ancestors will someday be as easy as online shopping.”113 In Western democracies, family data and census records have been stored and shared through libraries, church registers, and consequently websites, whereas in China, constructing an accurate genealogy poses a notable challenge precisely because of the patchy and sometimes falsified family or clan records. Conventional wisdom runs as follows: there is very limited genealogical data in the official record, and much less data are available for public use. In fact, “local gazettes often provided information about members of prominent families but were silent about the masses.”114 Not anymore. During the twenty-first century, technology, especially new media, has changed and challenged the status quo. Digitalized historical sources enhance access to family histories; thus, family history research has become dynamic, diverse, and fluid. While constructing an accurate family genealogy remains challenging, The Economist article strikes home the following point: family history has taken a populist turn in China. Ordinary people build their family trees and meticulously trace their genealogies. Previously, strictly personal, private, and intimate stories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and family ephemera have become available, representing a shifting combination of history and memory and the private and the public. As Hilda Kean writes in her wonderful study on creating personal and public histories of the working class in London, “The bits and pieces of personal lives can also be the subject matter of public histories, histories outside university rooms and libraries, that emphasize the engagement with history now.”115 Tracing and researching one’s family history and constructing one’s genealogy is relevant, fun, and accessible. What follows is an illustrative discussion that sketches the landscape; the cited cases are by no means exhaustive but provide hints for understanding the changes.

 “Ancestral Longings.” The Economist, January 13, 2018, 40.  Ibid.  Kean, London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories, 15.

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A Blurring Boundary between the Private and the Public Since the 1990s, family genealogy, as a part of the local chronicles that used to be strictly kept in the private sphere, are currently organized, catalogued, and sometimes even digitized as archival sources and are available to the public. As a result, more diverse and expansive family archives are emerging. “Amateur” and mundane sources that were traditionally scorned by professional historians, ranging from letters, diaries, ephemera, and oral histories to collective biographies, have triggered a revived interest in compiling, collecting, researching, and preserving family genealogies. A renewed passion for restoring lineage halls, especially in the rural villages where land remains a critical part of people’s everyday lives, has also appeared. Two examples illustrate that what used to be private and personal has become public and actively consumed by ordinary Chinese people. My China Roots, which is one of the first professional genealogy companies in China, was established in Beijing in 2012 to help people of Chinese descent overseas search for their Chinese roots as well as preserve their family records, lineage halls, ancestral temples, and other family history-related cultural heritage. Working with scholars, clan associations, fellow societies, and a few government agencies, My China Roots has successfully helped more than 100 overseas Chinese search for their relatives and connections in China. However, its service extends beyond seeking for traces of the family past and moves into contextualizing “ancestories” within the large picture. In detailed reports, customers’ family stories are narrated within a broader social history and are richly illustrated with photos and pictures. The company also organizes and tailors root trips for its customers to travel to places that are of specific interest to their family history, such as clan associations and ancestral villages. The company targets people of Chinese descent who were born overseas and are seeking for long-lost family ties in China. Although waves of Chinese migration have occurred throughout history, there was a huge surge of Chinese laborers leaving for the Americas, Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia from the middle of the nineteenth century up to 1949. The first group of Chinese immigrants to the United States departed from Guangdong Province, which was an international trading port. In 1848, news of gold in California spread like wildfire throughout Southern China and many people emigrated. There were also other early Chinese migrants with a variety of professions, from seamen to diplomats. The motivations for tracing such a family genealogy are mixed, but the search for long-lost family ties and connections is tangentially related to ethnicity or aristocratic affiliation, according Lie Huihan, the founder of My China Roots comments: “For people in their twenties, finding one’s genealogical roots is often

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part of their journey of self-discovery. Customers who are in their thirties or forties often have children or are in mixed marriages, and they want to know what family history to pass on to their children. For the older generations, it is often about unanswered questions and self-reflection. No matter the reason, it is all about identity in the end—a search for who they are.”116 As Simone Weil writes beautifully in The Need for Roots, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”117 The driving force behind this craze is a universal and elemental need for roots, for identity, and for connection. The growing popularity of family history simply testifies to the presence of a void that needs to be filled.

Figure 2: Online Roots Quest; www.mychinaroots.com.

What are the possibilities and obstacles? Pivotal to the research process are jia pu and zu pu, which contain records of generational relationships, clan histories, origins, renowned members, and so on. These primary sources are kept in the lineage halls and ancestral temples or are scattered around family homes in the villages, and most of these are not archived in public institutions or maintained by any public authority. Some family records have vanished due to natural disasters, wars, or intentional destruction. Human-induced destruction has left uneven

 Private correspondence between Lie Huihan and Na Li on December 6, 2018.  Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, 43.

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genealogical records across China. For example, family records are preserved far better in the south, as this area is geographically farther from the political center and thus suffered less destruction during the CR. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was also a revival of genealogical research, especially in the south. People started working together to preserve their local heritage and update their family records, and they were especially actively in doing so in Southern China. This movement led to new editions of old genealogical records, which was the result of collective village efforts to restore family histories. Influenced by its Western counterparts, My China Roots has started to construct an online database that includes jia pu or zu pu, cemetery records, altar tablets, Chinese Overseas Association membership records, gazetteers, and remittance letters (Figure 2). The company has also started building (sur)name and village databases, focusing on Fujian Province and Guangdong Province, and allowing overseas Chinese to start tracing their roots online. Most databases will be available to the public in some form unless there are specific requirements related to copyrights or privacy issues. The goal is for most databases to be freely available to the public, although the management of data (i.e., saving, sharing, curating, and expanding the data) will require some form of payment. This goal, that is, to allow the overseas Chinese individuals worldwide to connect with their roots and to make China’s rich culture and history come alive through an online platform that is specifically designed for people who were not born and raised in China, is ambitious. The estimated primary target market, which is approximately two million people, is located in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, with ancestral origins in Guangdong and Fujian. The database construction and the corresponding app building are privately funded.118 This work extends beyond digitizing and archiving current family records, as many libraries and archives are already working on this task across China. The online database, the app, and a virtual interface developed by My China Roots boast further potential for curating a public space for family genealogy in China. The Museum of Family Letters represents another impressive case. The family letter, jiashu, appeared approximately during the West Han period (206 BC– 25 AD), with the meaning of letters stored in the family instead of family letters. It was in the Three Kingdom period (220 AD–280 AD) that the family letter acquired its modern implication, referring to correspondence among family members. jia

 My China Roots has secured the seed money and is currently working to raise a follow-up angel round of funding. The business model comprises freemium, subscription, and custom packages, with an average annual spending of approximately US$315 per subscriber.

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xin, iia yan, jia xun, zhu bao, jia bao, and yu han, and so on are all associated with this private and emotional connotation. The Commentary of Zuo recorded the earliest family letters. As parts of official correspondence, these letters had very little similar implications to modern family letters. During the Warring State period (475 BC–221 BC), family letters became a tool for communicating among family members and moved from the public to the private sphere. The invention of paper during the West Han period had a profound impact on the evolution of family letters. The literary elites attached great importance to writing family letters as literary creations.119 Family letter writing has developed in both content and style since the Weijin period. The letters discuss a wide range of matters from significant national events to quotidian happenings. A new rhythmic and orate prose style characterized by parallelism and allusions, pian wen, appeared and influenced family letter writing. Family letters acquired an aesthetic dimension and became a form of art. The Tang and Song periods witnessed the apogee of prose writing, gradually leaning toward, or returning to, a style of simplicity, that is, expression in the most concise and precise yet lyrical prose. Family letters have matured into a delicate combination of history, literature, archives, communication, etiquette, calligraphy, and art; family letters are the precious material culture of traditional Chinese philosophy, morality, ethics, and rituals.120 During the Ming and Qing periods (1368 AD–1840 AD), with the tightening control of the autocratic regime, family letters provided space for intimate and private correspondence. During the People’s Republic era (1912–1949), the political use of family letters often led the government to continue drawing upon the ancient glory, including memories of traditional ethics, patriotism, and family education and communication. After 1949, most known family letters were restricted to the most powerful and the most educated and currently remain largely in private hands. Civilian family letters, or family letters written by ordinary people, are generally dismissed as having a “lack of historical significance.” When the Museum of Family Letters was established at Renmin University in Beijing in 2016, the founder broke the ground. His vision was simple and elegant as follows: “The authors of many family letters are witnesses to a particular time,

 Many well-known family letters, such as Liu Bang’s Letter to the Crown Prince, emphasized the importance of education and humility. Si Matan’s Letter to Zi Qian urged Si Maqian, his son, to continue his work and finish Shiji, a monumental work in Chinese history.  For example, Spring View, written by Li Bai, one of the most well-known poets of the Tang dynasty: on war-torn land streams flow and mountains stand; in vernal town grass and weeds are o’ergrown. Grieved o’er the years, flowers make us shed tears; hating to part, hearing birds singing breaks our heart. The beacon fire has gone higher and higher; family letters are previous as gold. I cannot bear to scratch my grizzling hair; it grows too thin to hold a light hairpin.

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and their perspectives are often missing in official historical records. Civilian family letters primarily concern lives of ordinary people and history of ordinary families.”121 Starting in 2005 as an outcome of a national effort by a group of cultural elites to salvage family letters scattered outside the official archives, the museum since has acquired a populist tone dovetailing with its humble origin. After going through waves of financial stresses and rounds of negotiations, the museum finally found a home in one of the most prestigious universities in China. The first exhibit, “Open the Sealed Memory: The Civilian Family Letters in China,” opened in 2009, and some 40,000 family letters entered Renmin University, their institutional home. In 2012, another exhibit, “The Beauty of Family Letters,” followed and presented approximately 1,000 family letters in the newly established museum space at the university (Figure 3). While family letters are not new to Chinese culture, in this case, it is extraordinary that what used to belong to the private space now resides in the public domain.

Figure 3: An Exibit of Chinese Family Letters. Photo credit: the author October 19, 2018.

These letters record personal narratives and family stories. Analyzed collectively, the letters provide fresh insights into broader social changes. For example, Han Rongzhang, a businessman from Shanxi Province, wrote on June 30, 1900, about the Boxer uprising in Beijing from a civilian perspective, complementing the offi-

 Zhang Ding Zhang, “Analysis of Family Letters: Conception and Classification,” 64–69.

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cial records. Another series of letters written by a businessman from Maolin County in Anhui Province and dated around 1940 described how the war afflicted their tea business and everyday lives. Another example is the family letters written by Zhang Faxu, a peasant from south Shanxi Province with merely half a year of formal education. In his family letter dated on December 17, 1989, he described his first flying experience with a somewhat choppy and humorous tone in which the thrilling joy of gratification mingles with a sanguine expectation for a brighter future and surfaces so naturally. He sent a telegram upon his arrival to his son with the following six words: “Arrived safe and happily” (Figures 4 and 5). What an appropriate and emotional six words! We catch a glimpse of how Chinese peasants enjoyed an improved living standard after the reform-and-open policy beginning in the early 1980s.

Figures 4 and 5: Family letter of Zhang Faxu, dated December 17, 1989. Source: The Museum of Family Letters archive.

With a strong focus on civilian family letters, the museum demonstrated the power of storytelling in ordinary families. In the museum, personal narratives and family memories became a type of public history, for example, the anti-Japanese war family letter series showcases how family letters can carry a strong hint of national memory. A letter dated December 27, 1941, when the Japanese initiated another fierce attack on the city of Changsha in Hunan Province immediately after the Pearl Harbor strike, was written by Sergeant Chu Dinghou, who led the Communist platoon to

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fight against the Japanese army. The handwriting revealed an unflinching determination to die for his country. He quoted inspirations from ancient role models as follows: “Rarely has one returned from the battles since ancient times”122 (Figures 6). Inspired by the sergeant, some 15,000 family letters were written expressing the writers’ strong determination to die for their country. The letters were laced with some intimate details such as how much they would love to stay with their wives and raise their young children, yet all were driven by a noble cause, and some encouraged their wives to join the communist party and contribute to the war. The boundary between one’s family and one’s nation blurred. The national history was melted into intimate family letters by many ordinary Chinese, even though these ordinary people became nameless and were never mentioned in any of the official history textbooks.

Figure 6: The letter from Chu Dinghou, stating “rarely one returns from the battles since the ancient times (gu lai zheng zhan ji ren hui).”.

For a public institution to survive censorship, it has to work with rather than against the political climate. Both selection and presentation are managed carefully. Even the current communist regime takes advantage of such lofty endeavors as sacrificing one’s family for a grander national goal. The regime reinterprets ancient historical  Gu lai zheng zhan ji ren hui?.

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Figure 7: The envelope used by Chu Dinghou to his brother Chu Dinghao. Source: The Museum of Family Letters archive.

traditions for its own contemporary use; for example, the exhibitions at the Museum of Family Letters blend pride about the ancient civilization into a patriotic dream of China, which seems another banal attempt. However, if one reads close enough, the lofty ideals, expressed in the crafted letterheads, envelopes, and dutifully repeated slogans such as “long live Chairman Mao” fade into the background, while intimate conversations about quotidian life reveal very raw human emotions. Despite the impressive scale of the collections at the museum, most letters are presented with scant interpretation, and visitors must probe, question, and interpret. The question of how family letters work in a carefully crafted, dialogic space remains vague. How to work with the vast amount of family letter data offering some exciting glimpses into the past and produce works with intellectual weight that satisfy the popular thirst for the past poses another challenge. The next logical step seems to be acquiring funds to digitize the collections, build a digital database, and more promisingly generate archives available to the inspired public.

A Professional and Amateur Divide Biographies, as type of family history, have become one of many tools used for self-awakening: everyone is entitled to have equal access. For example, junior and senior high students interview or conduct an oral history project with their

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grandparents to collect firsthand information and build a family history. Another example is entrepreneurs who are enthusiastic about documenting their personal and family histories, which are often intertwined with the business histories. In both cases, oral history, which is the key methodology, challenges both the source and the method used in traditional family history research. As a result, a more secular writing style that blends emotion with research is flourishing. The National Youth History Recording Competition, discussed in Part I, exemplifies the increasingly divide between the professionals and the amateurs. Many private sources such as personal memoirs and family biographies have started to be introduced in the public sphere. The collective biography of the Cultural Revolution is one such example of venturing into a difficult history. Despite some 60-years lapse, the wounds are still felt, and the hurts still hurt. Those who were middle schoolers during the Cultural Revolution have become mature observers, and their biographies, self-printed, Internet-circulated, become irreplaceable sources for this contested chapters in history. Scholars often criticize the poor quality and casual writing styles of the biographies, consider them as lacking of scholarly depth or being merely self-entertaining, and dismiss the interest in them as merely a passing fad. However, their criticism misses the very purpose of the new surge of family history writing in the public sphere: when personal memories and family narratives morph into the public sphere, they fill a gap—a gap that is unfortunately not addressed by professional historians.

A New Quest for the Old Question Science has also joined the chorus. Genetics is being increasingly promoted as a valuable tool in genealogical research, and DNA quests for family genealogy have started to emerge as one of the many aspects of the public fascination with the ideas of family, clans, kinship, and roots or with the past in general.123 Genetic genealogy in China is at its embryonic stage, and scholarly research articles began to appear in 2011. Genetic genealogy is applied to family history, community structure, the mutation rate, the origin of the human population, archaeology, and forensic medicine.124 For instance, Y chromosomes have been used to investigate the ancestry of Emperor Cao from approximately 1,800 years ago, to  In the United States, by the late 1970s, genealogy was for everyone. See Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America, 206–12.  See Yan, et al., “Y chromosomes of 40% Chinese Descend from Three Neolithic SuperGrandfathers,” 1–7; Wang, et al., “Agriculture Driving Male Expansion in Neolithic Time,” 1–4;

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construct the genetic stemma of Si Maguang, a well-known historical figure during the Northern Song dynasty, and to compile the genealogy of Aisin Gioro (C3b1a3a2a-F14735 type), the late imperial house of the Qing dynasty.125 In these cases, genetics meets genealogy. However, the use of genetics in family history is also acquiring a populist twist. Viewing the genes as a type of historical document, genetic-related genealogical research revives the ancient quest for roots and origins and fires up the new genealogical imagination regarding old questions such as: “Who am I and where do I come from?” For example, memorywhere.com, a website dedicated to building an ancestral chain based on DNA genealogy with a comprehensive mapping of one’s root quest, offers a tangible connection with the ancient past. The website was developed by a technology company in Jilin Province with a technical team based in Beijing. The project is listed as the key investment project of the cultural industry in Jilin Province, and the project is currently applying funds to establish a physical memory hall. Along with for-profit model, the founders of memorywhere.com have seized upon the market demand. The social and anthropological inquiry into such public understanding of the biological aspect of human history has yet to take off, but the emerging enthusiasm from below seems difficult to ignore. The passion for this research represents a different search for identity, although an instant or direct relationship between genetics and one’s identity remains unsettled. Marc Scully, Turi King, and Steven Brown caution us with their project, “Surnames & the Y Chromosome,” which aims to build a picture of the genetic legacy of the Vikings in Northern England, that it remains uncertain whether geneticization of social identities is too dramatic for imagining a sudden change when there has been a rather subtle shift in the nature of identity. Scully, King, and Brown use the term “placeholder identity,” a concept that reflects the fundamental fluidity of identity and the agency of individuals in shaping their identities within the restrictions of available discursive resources.126 However, the real question is how individuals incorporate the findings of their genetic makeup with their personal and family narratives and how this, in turn, becomes situated within the memory of a nation.

Wen, Tong, and Li, “Y-chromosome-based Genetic Pattern in East Asia Affected by Neolithic Transition,” 50–55.  Wang, et al., “Present Y Chromosomes Reveal the Ancestry of Emperor CAO Cao of 1800 Years Ago,” 216–18; Wang, et al., “Ancient DNA of Emperor CAO Cao’s Granduncle Matches Those of His Present Descendants: A Commentary on Present Y Chromosomes Reveal the Ancestry of Emperor CAO Cao of 1800 Years Ago,” 238–39; Yan, et al., “Y Chromosome of Aisin Gioro, the Imperial House of the Qing Dynasty,” 295–98.  Scully, King, and Brown, “Remediating Viking Origins: Genetic Code as Archival Memory of the Remote Past,” 921–38.

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Thus, genetic-related information symbolizes a shift in the nature of authority, and genetic genealogy places an emphasis on biological reasoning rather than social and historical data. If we compare genetic knowledge to knowledge in other sources such as archival records, family stories, or folklore, we notice that both types of sources complement each other. How much weight do the scientific findings derived from genetic analyses carry compared with other social, historical, and anthropological data remains an intriguing and open question. In China, scientific research is generally regarded as less political (compared with research in the humanities and social sciences), thus it is relatively easy for scientific research to receive financial support from the government and come to fruition. Applied genetic research also opens avenues for commercial exploitation as clearly demonstrated by the business model of memorywhere.com. Genetic genealogy boasts of the potential for creating “an imagined genetic community” in the foreseeable future, as the Chinese Human Genome Diversity Project (CHGDP), a recent study investigating the genetic relationship among populations in China, reveals.127 The “imagined communities,” an idea coined by Benedict Anderson, refers to “the promotion of local or folk traditions as found in enabling people to imagine something wider than their own immediate community. Beyond their own families and households were others, who they would likely never meet, but who would speak the same language, hold the same values, sing the same songs, and aspire to the same sense of identity and nationhood.”128 Bob Simpson extends the idea in his perceptive discussing of an imagined genetic community as the following: the “ideology of nationhood reflects continuity between a past which may be invented and a future which exists only in the imagination. The ideologies that link past and future are often built on notions of genealogy and the names, stories and property that connect children to their ancestors.”129 The consequence of such an imagined genetic community is, according to Simpson, “the illusion of enhanced prediction and control grounded in essentialized identities and relationships.”130

Family Stories and Public History The dynamic and diverse practices of family history occur in a gradually expanding public space that is both physical and virtual. If the desire to return to the beginning, as falling leaves returning to their roots, to restore an unbroken conti   

Chu, et al., “Genetic Relationship of Populations in China,” 11763–68. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1, 46. Simpson, “Imagined Genetic Communities,” 5. Ibid., 6.

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nuity has always been a part of Chinese ancient philosophy, the expanded inquiry has clearly evoked a new genealogical imagination. Why this sudden surge of enthusiasm about family history from the very bottom of the social totem pole? Why are ordinary people becoming increasingly interested in collecting material culture, interviewing family members, constructing genealogies, writing biographies, tracing genetic-related evidence, and preserving all sorts of family records as archival memories? We cannot clearly explain the massive appeal of family history by measuring it against the current framework and methods of analysis. Ideas such as roots, attachment, kinship, identity, and even the very concept of family invite further thoughts. Certain assumptions need to be reconsidered in some historical depth. A surprising variety of practices represent a collective yearning for roots and identities, for returning to the beginning to establish an impossible certainty in a constantly shifting world. The practices also reveal an epistemological anxiety over truth, order, and understanding. In this massive rush for a return to, memory sometimes joins history to navigate through the quest for the past, while at other times, memory competes with history in claiming the territory of the past; according to Tim Brennan, “The interpretation of the past is not necessarily regarded as full-blown history. The past in question exists on a much smaller scale.”131 In this revived interest in the ancient ideal and the aspiration to find one’s roots, the seemingly rigid boundary between history and memory becomes relaxed and fluid. Equally startling is the gradually blurring line between the private and the public. Thus, we witness personal stories, narratives, and histories morph into a type of public memory. The space-annihilating collective remembering crosses generations, and at a modest scale, it gives personal lives a meaning and significance that the traditional family history has ignored. The motivations driving the current wave of family history vary, and the most direct one is the social disintegration of the communist ideology, a popular disillusionment with state power. Since the late nineteenth century, we have witnessed the weakening of patriarchal authority, the gradual disappearance of large, elite households, the rise of the nuclear family, the increasing emphasis on love and mutual affection between spouses, and attention to the nurturing and education of children.132 These dramatic social changes have been accompanied by political intervention into the ownership of the land, basic birth rights, and burial practices. The infamous one-child-per-couple policy, which started in 1979, denied a woman’s right to give birth to more than one child and had a five RMB

 Brennan, “History, Family, History,” 49.  Esherick, Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History, xii.

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per month financial incentive. Alarmed by the rapid decline in the working population, the government has gradually relaxed the policy since 2016, but the policy has irrevocably impacted population growth and demographic distributions.133 Currently, China has entered the modern pattern of population reproduction manifested by low birth rates, low death rates, low growth rates, lower total fertility rates, and late marriage. As its current total fertility rate has decreased to 1.18 percent, China has an ultralow birth rate compared to other countries in the region and with the lowest-low fertility countries.134 Take the recent battle over burial practices as another example. The Chinese government has had a long history of discouraging people from burying their dead. The reformers in the People’s Republic advocated for cremation, claiming that it symbolized modernity. A more recent effort to force the people to break with ancient burial rituals is backed by a more practical concern. The government believes that burial practices and mourning rituals could result in arable land becoming even scarcer, thus impairing China’s ability to feed its rapidly growing population. However, for many Chinese people, keeping the body intact epitomizes respect for one’s ancestors and is thus an inseparable part of family history and identity. Almost 40 years ago, James Rhoads quoted John Gardner in discussing the importance of family history as follows: “All experience shows that our shared values survive best in coherent human groups—the family, the neighbourhood, the community.”135 When the government stepped-up anti-burial practices by setting cremation rate targets for selected areas and promoting ecoburials starting in 2012, some of the most basic connections and shared values of ordinary families were ruthlessly cut out. As previously discussed, during the revolutionary period, the ordinary Chinese people were mobilized by the lofty ideal of sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party. Currently, the quest for roots occurs on a much smaller scale in a drastically different context. To better understand these practices, we need to connect family history with larger social structures and processes. In Charles Tilly’s brilliant summary about the goals of social history, family history is only one part along with reconstitution and connection. On the one hand, social historians seek to reconstitute a complete picture of life as people lived it; on the other hand, historians also try to connect life on the small scale

 Some argue that the low birth rates in China would have happened anyway, if somewhat later, if investigating the fertility rates of other countries in the region, including Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. See “Special Report: Childhood.” The Economist, January 5 (2019): 5.  Guo, Pan, and Zhang, “Historical Demography for Late Marriage in China: A Verification Study,” 111–25.  Rhoads, “The Importance of Family History to Our Society,” 15.

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with large social structures and processes. Tilly wrote some 30 years ago that, “properly pursued, family history based on collective biography can greatly strengthen our analyses of large-scale social change. It can serve as an exemplar for the study of large-scale social change, as a direct contribution to that study, and as a challenge to its improvement.”136 Without establishing a causal relationship, family history studies could “produce many bright fragments of dubious comparability and uncertain relationship,” and thus, according to Tilly’s analysis, “will miss the opportunity to address, criticize, and modify general conceptions of historical development.”137 The search for roots, for origin, for connection, for attachment, and for identity is but still loosely associated with the nation and large-scale social changes. Family history needs to step beyond reconstructing people’s lives. It should connect with social changes to contribute to our historical understanding. With a focus on practice, or in various disguises, actions, activities, praxes, experiences, and performances, we situate family history with a broader social and public history and addresses the whys and hows of human actions and interactions. Sharing with the structuralist view the belief that the system affects families in a powerful manner, a practice-oriented approach emphasizes the actual assessment of ordinary people’s experiences. Probing how those experiences interact with larger structural changes in society, we face two specific challenges. First, content-wise, a vast amount of information, censored or otherwise, has gone far beyond physically or politically imposed boundaries. Big family data redefine the very idea of family, suggest a fresh approach to family history, and, consequently, challenge the traditional sense of selfhood and family identity. Digitized historical sources have broken that hierarchical authority. Second, the physical distribution of narratives down across generations reveals a mounting sense of intrigue for continuity and connection. In this spirit, family historians will have to become more receptive to new sources and methodologies, such as social–scientific approaches, measurements, and analyses. Family historians also need to engage in the cross-pollination of research collaborations and to explore the creation of more accessible forms of history—in a form of public history. ✶✶✶✶✶ Currently, with the help of the digital and media technology, millions of ordinary Chinese people have engaged in researching, writing, and presenting their family histories. Family history has become a cultural phenomenon that refuses to be

 Tilly, “Family History, Social History, and Social Change,” 325, 319–30.  Ibid., 322.

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pigeonholed, proudly flaunts its lack of disciplinary boundaries, and, most importantly, directly contributes to our understanding of historical and social changes. The eclectic nature of the research, the human-scaled writing style, and the innovative styles of presentation all indicate that family history in China is now at a crossroads. When historians criticize the products of this family history research as messy, unpolished, and emotionally driven, they miss the bigger picture: not only the intellectual quality of the research but also the scale and depth of the research merit serious attention. Accuracy is but a part of the equation; identity, not merely pedigree, counts. If, in previous times, officials and scholars constructed genealogies for a narrow association with the state or with power, genealogy has now become family history, which has been an agent for root seeking and identity building. The growing demand for genealogical information and products will soon stimulate the family history market. How to play a professional and responsible role in this gradual but definite transformation poses an exciting challenge for a new generation of public historians.

Chapter 4 Museums and the Public From the appearance of the first public museum in China in 1905 to the more than 48,000 museums registered with the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in 2016, the number of Chinese museums has grown exponentially. At first glance, the speed and scale of the development seems startling. Despite the diversity of public missions and social obligations of these museums, they remain largely controlled by the state. Thus, the efforts to better communicate the artifacts to a broader public remain inadequate and constrained. How does one design an exhibit for a better-informed public? What kind of interpretive space is needed to engage the public? How do museums function as sites of public history? This chapter begins by tracing the genealogy of museum development. The analysis, both conceptual and historical, focuses on how the state has intervened in and controlled the cultural enterprises that influence the public consumption of history. The analysis takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century, and argues that the birth of the modern museum in China is a product of the radicalism of the time. Embedded in the subsequent 100 years of development are a changing definition of “public,” a remodeled idea of “history,” and an evolving relationship between museums and their publics. This provides the context for the second part, an in-depth case study arising out of the “Museums and the Public: Urban Landscape and Memory” project. This was an institutional collaboration between Chongqing University and the Chongqing Three Gorges Museum (referred to as the 3GM). The project explores how the public interprets the history and landscapes of Chongqing through exhibits, and analyzes if and how the exhibits reflect their memories. The project team used oral history interviewing as its primary methodology. The final section summarizes some of the important findings from project. These suggest three important lessons learned that could shape new approaches to and new visions for museums.

Genealogy Artifact collection, as a habit or a hobby, is clearly nothing new to the Chinese. Since the Shang Dynasty (approximately 1523–1046 BC), considered the time of the emergence of Chinese civilization, royal families and aristocrats have collected jade, pottery, and bronzeware, among a diverse range of fine ornaments. This was a time when Chinese civilization started to emerge, embryonic as it was. The Shang and Zhou (approximately 1046–256 BC) governments, as archaeological https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-006

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evidence indicates, consisted largely of warrior landlords with aristocratic lineages, and the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, the nobly born and the common people, was perpetuated through ownership of prized objects. The kinds of object collected gradually expanded to include historical drawings, portraits, imperial seals, and sacrificial vessels of various kinds. These collections, which were a symbolic embodiment of imperial power and authority, remained exclusively for the upper classes, and were not publicly exhibited. Artifacts, especially bronzeware, which was mostly preserved in the ancestral temples, embodied a yearning for continuity and immortality. Collecting became the hobby of emperors and intellectual elites in the Song dynasty (960 AD–1279 AD), especially during the Zheng He Period (1111 AD–1117 AD). Later, the study of epigraphy thrived, reaching its apogee during the Qing dynasty (1616 AD–1911 AD). However, the birth of the museum in China is not an extension of the collection mania inherited from the imperial period. It is, paradoxically, a product of the strong foreign influence and intercultural exchanges. The process is part of a general climate of reform after 1840, the year China signed the Nanjing Treaty with the United Kingdom, ending the First Opium War and forcibly establishing a foreign presence within its borders. Any established political system possesses huge inertia that resists change, yet when such an ancient and proud civilization as China feels marginalized, reforms become inevitable. From 1840 to 1895, China experienced increased international trade and interaction. Some members of the Chinese elite took advantage of their new ability to travel and study abroad and gained access to the ideas and institutions they observed in Europe and other parts of Asia, including museums.138 Exposure to new cultures and ideas helped create a free, liberal, and receptive milieu that prevailed in the late nineteenth century and evolved into the early twentieth. Many of those who took part felt compelled to share the ideas they encountered in their travels or education with their countrymen and women. Educated outside of China yet feeling permanently attached to their native land, they returned to awaken, enlighten, and change. The idea of museums became one of many Western imports they wholeheartedly embraced, especially the public and social function of museums in these countries—education, entertainment, and enrichment. Integrating historical and cultural artifacts into civic education represented a profound difference from the traditional Chinese approach to collections. Fitting with Chinese philosophy, most advocates of new kinds of museums supported gradual, rather than radical, change, integrating new approaches with Chi-

 Including Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Spain, Ireland, Vietnam, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.

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nese tradition. The Reform Movement, or the Hundred Days Reform, of 1898, led by a group of progressive intellectuals, including Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, advocated for establishing museums, especially folk museums. Conservatives in the government prevented the museum project from moving forward. However, Lin Zexu, Xu Ju, Xu Jishe, Yao Yin, and Liang Tingdan, among others, persisted. The word “museum” was first mentioned and expounded in The Encyclopedia of Geography, written and compiled by Wei Yuan.139 The Reform Movement initiated a different school system and encouraged students to study abroad. A number of highranking officials, sent by their equally open-minded superiors, traveled internationally, and came back with passionate descriptions about museums that they visited in Western countries. For example, Jian Lin went to visit and work in the United States, and helped introduce museums to his fellow countrymen. Another prominent intellectual, Guo Liancheng, wrote in elaborate detail about museums he experienced in Italy, including “exhibition halls,” “antique exhibitions,” and “curios.” Although using different terminology, Guo described what was later known as the comprehensive museum. The experience, eclectic and refreshing, provided further impetus for establishing museums in China. Before Zhang Jian (1853–1926), a well-known intellectual, industrialist, and reformer, established the Nantong Museum, he had visited Japan and was deeply impressed by its constitutionalism. Zhang became a strong advocate for museums. He believed that industrialism and education complemented each other and helped to create a prosperous nation. He saw education as the only way to salvage China from its national crisis—industries would financially support education, which, in a roundabout fashion, would improve industries. In his proposal to the imperial court, he argued for the educational, the social, and the public mission of museums. Education happened beyond the limited walls of schools; libraries and museums provided alternative forms of education, as Zhang convincingly argued in the Proposal to the Educational Ministry for Establishing Museums. Influenced by his experience with the Kyoto Imperial museums, Zhang began working to convince the imperial government to establish museums. Though Zhang’s first attempt to win government support for his museum project failed, he was not discouraged; rather, he began work on the project with his own resources. In 1905 when planning a public arboretum for Tongzhou Normal College, Zhang purchased approximately 35 mu of land,140 removed hundreds

 The Encyclopedia of Geography (Hai Guo Tu Zhi), one of the first comprehensive treatises in world history and geography, was written and compiled by Wei Yuan between 1841 and 1847. The work was commissioned by Lin Zexu. Its core concept was that China needed to learn the advanced technologies of the West in order to resist the invasion of the Western powers.  1 mu is equal to 666.67 square meters.

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of tombs, filled the land, and built structures for different uses. The project lasted for four months and, in 1906, he turned the arboretum into a museum, known as Nantong Museum. Artifacts from five continents, ranging from animal and botanic specimens, tablets with inscriptions, curios, classic literary works, rare drawings, calligraphies, massive inscriptions, iron Buddhas, weapons, and minerals, to name but a few, were collected, categorized, and presented in the key exhibition halls. The buildings were beautifully nestled in the natural environment. The outside space accommodated a spectacular range of plants, flowers, birds, and other animals, making it just as cosmopolitan as the historical and cultural artifacts presented inside. Formerly designed as a practical training base for the students from Tongzhou Normal College, the museums assumed their public and educational mission from the beginning. The objects were not separated from visitors by glass boxes, nor were the visitors bored by jargon or narrow, specialized knowledge. Interpreters were trained to guide visitors; Chinese, Japanese, and Latin were provided on the labels, to make the exhibits accessible to the general public. Nantong Museum, part of Zhang’s effort to modernize China, paved the way for Constitutionalism, and played a prominent role in shaping the public consciousness. The museum also pioneered ways for core concepts such as public ethics and civic virtue that would impact the public through later museum development. The evolution of museums in China corresponded with the undulating landscape of reform at the time. Fifteen museums were established by Western founders from 1840 to 1895 in trading port cities such as Shanghai, Hongkong, Yantai, Qingzhou, and Beijing. Almost all museums were science-related in nature, and were strongly influenced by their Western founders. The number of the museums doubled from 1896 to 1914, expanding both geographically and in terms of subject matter. Among the 15 museums established from 1840–95, 14 were natural science museums, and another one remained unidentified. From 1896 to 1914, only 11 were natural science museums, whereas the number of social and history museums and comprehensive museums grew.141 The New Cultural Movement, or Chinese Enlightenment (1915–23),142 assumed that “the Chinese past can be reconstructed according to the historical model of the West.”143 This assumption has its origin in the New History, advocated by the contemporary cultural and intellectual elites. Eminent historian Liang Qichao was one of the key proponents. The New History advocated a moral ideal of col-

 Chen, The Historical Analysis of Museums in China 1901–1911, 175–83.  Chen, The New Youth.  Yu, “The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century,” 131.

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lectivity, a society with “a high level of autonomy and freedom, and a bottom-up structure, with the moral principles appropriate to this kind of civil society. Here, the collective, or society is . . . a mode of social construction.”144 With a profoundly revolutionary and humanistic spirit borrowed from the West and having the aim of reinventing China, the New History praised history from below, or grassroots history. Beginning in this period, Western ideas replaced the past as a new frame of reference. These ideas challenged institutional sameness, provoked a radical mentality, and thus became “iconoclastically anti-traditional.”145 As a result, more museums, especially historical and cultural museums, opened. Among 57 museums established from 1915 to 1936, 31 museums fell into the social and historical category, with only 12 natural science museums. In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party came to power and founded the People’s Republic of China, the official record showed only 25 museums in existence, a result of the war with Japan and the civil war. Under strong Soviet influence, the CCP nationalized all cultural institutions to build the ideology of state socialism, and established an official presentation of the nation’s history through museums and memorials. The Museum of the Chinese Revolution was an early example of this policy. The subsequent political upheavals dominated the historical landscape, with the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution as pivotal events that led to both the creation and destruction of museums on the CCP’s political whim. When Mao Zedong, the CCP leader, visited Anhui Museum in 1958, he declared that the major cities in all provinces should build a museum similar to it. It was urgent and critical that the people (ren min) learn about their own history and creative power.146 At the same time, however, museums were also demonized as sites for harboring the “four olds” (si jiu, i.e. customs, culture, habits, and ideas) during the Cultural Revolution. Since the 1980s, the Open-Door policy, also known as the Open-and-Reform policy, has led to a prodigious jump in the number of museums in China. The policy was officially announced at the Third Plenary Session of the eleventh Central Committee of the CCP in 1978. The tenets of this policy included a reform of the governing of rural villages, a greater opening-up to the outside world, and the establishment of a market economy under the socialist political system. During this period, the government promoted the role of museums in enhancing spiritual and cultural civilization, and in 1982 passed the Law of Cultural Relics Protection

 Liang, Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Bubian, 4, 8–9, 180, 224, 230–32, 191–92.  Ibid.  Source: “The Major Events of Chinese Museum, 1949–1990,” in Chinese Museum Records. http://www.sach.gov.cn/.

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of the PRC among other laws and regulations aimed at protecting China’s cultural heritage.147 Museums continued to develop at an accelerated speed after 1980, under the slogan that “every city should have its own museum.” The state has drawn upon the pedagogical and ideological powers of museums. Museums have been booming recently because they are seen as critical sources of China’s soft power.148 When Chinese president Xi Jinping called in 2013 for systematic work on traditional cultural resources, including cultural artifacts locked in secret and forbidden palaces, heritage sites dotted across vast landscapes, and words inscribed in the ancient works, he did not mince his words.149 Systematic is the important word here. Since 2013, museums across China, big and small, have been motivated politically to engage in large-scale exhibit redesign. Museums have helped the CCP boost China’s global image and win admiration for Chinese culture. Privately owned museums have also risen steadily from 2006. In 2013, there were 811 privately owned museums, approximately 19.4 percent of the total 4,165 museums.150 The past 100 years have been complex and sometimes contradictory for Chinese museums. The numbers and kinds of museums have expanded and contracted, depending on the political climate. Kirk Denton underlines the importance of politics in Chinese museum development when he writes, “from their beginnings, modern museums in China were closely associated with nationalism and the ideology of nation building.”151 In the twenty-first century, technology has changed how people access information, and, subsequently, the very concepts of “public” and “history.” The tension between government-controlled cultural enterprise and the public consumption of history fluctuates. Recently, there seems to be a loosening of authority, a more liberal social environment, and a better-informed reading public. Both the government and the public seem to engage with museums, as part of China’s soul-searching. On the other hand, the balance between rapidly expanding collections and public interest fluctuates. This effects a profound cultural change. What follows is a case study that explores the intersection where an inward-looking museum culture focused solely on collections and an outward-facing public culture focused on communicating with the public converge.

 Chinese Museum Records, http://www.sach.gov.cn/.  Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Nye defines soft power as the way nations exert their influence through cultural means rather than by force.  Xinhua News, December 30, 2013.  Chinese Museum Records.  Kirk A. Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012), 16–17.

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6000

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Graph 11: Numbers of museums in China. Data source: Chinese Museum Record, http://www.sach.gov.cn/.

The “Museums and the Public” Project Born as a collaboration between the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Chongqing University and the Three Gorges Museum, the “Museums and the Public” project aimed to incorporate multiple perspectives into the exhibit development process. The project started in 2015 during a conversation between the author and the curators at the 3GM about the redesign of the exhibit Journey towards a City. Public history, as an innovative intellectual framework for understanding how the public uses history and how that may inform exhibition redevelopment, caught the attention of the leadership of the 3GM. With academic backgrounds in history, archaeology, archives management, and museums studies, the leadership and the designated curators demonstrated both the capabilities and a desire for change. They were receptive to learning or, at least, trying to learn how a public history methodology could improve their exhibit. Our team addressed questions of audience reception, including whether the current exhibit represented visitors’ experience of urban history; how effectively the artifacts communicated concepts to the audience; in what way did artifacts evoke memories for local people; how did visitors learn about the historical landscapes of Chongqing through the exhibits; and to what extent did that representation collide with their knowledge about or memory of the city. These questions revealed a genuine interest in learning more

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about visitors, which remains rare in China. Fortunately in this case, the sparks gradually fired into a blaze. The project (2015–16) studied three groups of individuals: museum professionals including researchers, exhibit designers, and public educators; volunteers; and visitors. A total of 78 interviews were collected, transcribed, and divided into the three groups listed above. For the first two groups, we conducted oral history interviews in the designated space at the 3GM, with lengths ranging from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. For the visitor group, we used generic questions and extrapolated from them using the logic of probability sampling (that is, the idea that a sample will be representative of the population from which it is selected if all members of the population have an equal chance of being selected in the sample). We randomly collected 20 to 30 minute interviews from 40 visitors in the four permanent exhibition halls.152 The interview was designed with eight open-ended questions, each with two-to-three sub-questions probing various aspects of the generic questions. Although visitor surveys may be familiar in the Chinese context, this project introduces the methodology of public history to study multiple publics and to generate policy advice for redeveloping exhibits. Whereas traditional questionnaire-type surveys tend to reduce visitors to passive observers, devoid of complex emotion and ambivalent psychology, oral history interviewing seeks out emotional behavioral clues from the visitors. This often demands substantial amounts of time in the field, including learning from visitors and their motivations, aspirations, and (dis)satisfactions. Within the Chinese academy, public history remains mysterious. However, in the wider field of history, the climate is more generous and welcoming, and I sought to take advantage of that openness to publicize the project. For example, I gave a lecture at the museum titled, “Public History and Museums: The Practice of Oral History.” A good mix of audience members, including approximately 20 professionals from different departments of the 3GM, along with 26 junior students from Chongqing University, attended the lecture. This lecture introduced the idea of public history and discussed the practice of public history in the 3GM setting, the characteristics of urban space and the role of urban museums, ethics in exhibit design, and oral history as a methodology (Figure 8). The second part of the lecture focused on the rationale, process, and methodology of the project, and also considered lessons learned. The lecture inspired some fruitful exchanges among the audience. The professionals provided structured feed-

 The interview data were transcribed by the 26 class participants from the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Chongqing University in 2016 and organized and compiled by Zhang Ting from the Department of History at Zhejiang University in 2018. The quotes come from the interview surveys, with page numbers specified from the transcription. The oral histories and transcripts are now archived at the Center for Public History, Zhejiang University.

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Figure 8: The training program on museums and public history, and a seminar discussion on the “Museums and the Public” project, April 19, 2016. Photo credit: Department of Public Education, the Three Gorges Museum.

back that centered around what they would like to improve in the exhibit, and how. The dialogue proved critical in the questionnaire design, adjustment, and implementation. As a result of feedback, the scope of the project eventually expanded from one to four permanent exhibits. Formerly known as the Southwest Museum (1951), and the Chongqing Museum (1955), the 3GM is located in Chongqing, one of four municipalities in China (Figure 9).153 It boasts a wide range of collections including antique chinaware, paintings and calligraphy, Chinese zithers,154 and ink drawings preserved in Chongqing during the Anti-Japanese War. In 2000, the Three Gorges project gave the 3GM a fresh impetus. Historically, the Three Gorges area is where the Kingdom Shu was located. A large number of Shu relics were identified and interpreted. Underwater inscriptions also tell, quite convincingly, a story of hydraulic development. More recently, after more than 40 years of geological surveying since 1950s, the central government selected Sandouping as the site for a major dam project and invested RMB 200 billion to build it, which became known to the rest of the world as the

 The four municipalities in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing.  A traditional Chinese musical instrument.

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Three Gorges Project.155 The project, one of the most ambitious hydroelectric projects in Chinese history, started in 1994 and spanned 17 years. Geographically, the project spills over into neighboring regions, and it carries unequivocal national significance that China is eager to demonstrate. With flood prevention, hydroelectric power, and water transportation as three primary goals, the project has submerged approximately 120 towns, more than 500 rare species and plants, and numerous historic sites and cultural landscapes along the Yangtze River. More than one million residents were dislocated. The ecological and cultural impact upon the local communities remains difficult to assess.

Figure 9: The main entrance to the Three Gorges Museum, with the red banner indicating the Museum Day of 2016: Museums and Cultural Landscapes. Photo credit: the author.

With a new mission to preserve the heritage of the Three Gorges project, the 3GM was expanded into four locations, including the key exhibition hall in the core city of Chongqing, the White Crane Ridge (Bai he liang) Underwater Inscription Museum, the Defending China Alliance Headquarters (Song Qingling’s Former  The granite at the dam site was formed by magnetic condensate crystalline at the depth of the shell. The lithology is uniform, and rock masses are integral with high mechanical strength and the slightly poor permeability. The dam site is a rigid section with high stability. It is suitable for the construction of high concrete dams.

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Residence Exhibition Hall), and the Tushan Kiln Site, all of which are located within approximately 100 kilometers of the city core. Thus the former local urban museum acquired national status, despite its somewhat disadvantageous location. As the “comprehensive museum,” a term coined by the State Council, the 3GM collects, preserves, studies, and exhibits historical, social, and cultural artifacts that, as it claims, represent the essential character of Chongqing, although what constitutes that character remains vaguely and arbitrarily defined. It also functions as the city’s National Patriotism Education Demonstration Base, the National Juvenile Education Base, and the National Scientific Education Base. The newly revamped key exhibition hall opened to the public on June 18, 2005. The permanent exhibitions include the Splendid Three Gorges, an overview of the history, geology, and culture of the Three Gorges region; the Ancient Bayu, a chronology of premodern history of Chongqing; the Journey towards a City, which traces urban evolution of Chongqing; and the Sculpture and Art of Han Dynasty, a presentation of pottery works, foodways, and stone works of the Han dynasty (202 BC–202 AD), all of which were designed more than a decade ago, and needed refurbishing. Take the Journey towards a City exhibition as an illustration. It presents a panoramic view of how Chongqing evolved from a small town into a vibrant municipality in China. As the capital of the Kingdom of Ba (circa 1100–316 BC) during the Zhou Dynasty, Chongqing became a regional political and military center after 316 BC when the Qin Kingdom replaced the Ba. Centuries later, in 1890, the city took a new direction after China and Britain signed the Amendment to Yantai Treaty in Beijing, under which Chongqing became a bustling trading port along the Yangtze River. It was not until 1929 that Chongqing officially obtained “city” status. In 1937, during the 1930s war with Japan, the capital Nanjing fell and became the seat of the collaborationist government. In 1939, under the political contingency, Chongqing was designated as a municipality, and, in 1940, the nationalist capital. The war-capital quickly became home to approximately 400 factories and one million immigrants. The best technology, industry, human talent, and political capital rapidly accumulated in the city, bringing energy and prosperity. The upgrade of the city to national status also influenced its urban structure and planning. The municipal government busied itself building roads, ports, and factories and redesigning the city into a tripartite pattern with the old core, the rivers, and the riverbank remaining intact. On November 30, 1949, the new Communist government took over Chongqing. The Southwest Bureau of the CCP Central Committee entered Chongqing, which directly managed the local party organizations at all levels, and the city became the political, military, and economic center of the southwest region. After the establishment of the Southwest Region in 1949, Chongqing became a munici-

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pality under the direct jurisdiction of the central government. In 1954, the Southwest Region was abolished and Chongqing was placed under the authority of Sichuan Province. Chongqing maintained two years of status as a municipality (under the direct authority of the central government) until this privilege was revoked by the Southwest Military Commission in 1954. The broad strokes of the city’s history are similar that of other urban areas in China. Unlike many other cities, however, Chongqing does not boast about its ancientness. Historical records mentioned that the city was first built during the Qin Dynasty, and expanded in the Three Kingdoms Period (220–280 AD). It was later constantly rebuilt during the Ming Dynasty when the basic city layout, including the Eight Diagrams of nine palaces, came into existence (Figure 10). The city did not embrace modernity. The gaudy cylinder-block high-rises in the downtown core and the equally garish streetscapes, against the skyline the color of unpolished pewter, all seem tastelessly bland. Even when it was upgraded to the status of municipality in 1997, it was difficult to get rid of its parochialism.

Figure 10: Map of Chongqing. Source: Chongqing Archives

The city’s history as wartime capital continues to shape urban landscapes and local identity. The State Council and the Central Committee has peddled Red Tourism (tourism associated with China’s Communist revolution and the establishment of the Communist government) as part of national patriotic education,

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and the creation of the Red Crag Circuit, which connects two major museums, the Red Crag Revolutionary Memorial Hall cluster and the Gele Mountain cluster, among other scattered revolutionary sites in and near Chongqing, is part of this initiative. The interpretative labels at these sites, riddled with inaccuracies, false memories, and self-serving distortions, are meant to create nostalgia for the revolutionary era. Journey towards a City attempted to interpret and present the city’s tumultuous history, urban landscape, and revolution-era identity in a structured public space. The exhibit faced two major challenges in doing so. First was the decision to primarily follow a thematic structure, making the chronology of events unclear. A frequent criticism from the professionals within the 3GM lay in the fact that the exhibit lacked a clearly defined chronological line and seemed “too scattered without a chronological order to tie the pieces together.”156 Dominated by poorly interpreted artifacts, the exhibits leave the audience with a muddled grasp of urban history. A second concern was about the balance between visitor engagement and protection of the artifacts. As one observer stated, “many reenacted scenes were designed with the original artifacts, and we have to exercise certain level of protection. The ‘no touch’ warning notice did not work for the crowds.” An example of the tension between public engagement and artifact preservation was the adobe house on display. “We are worried when such a crowd flows in, it will gradually be deteriorated. But many visitors are curious, and they want to touch the house,” one museum professional noted. He wondered, “What about an interactive space for such experience? Or we could design some models?”157 In contrast, advocates for participation believed that artifacts that are not touched are unloved. The exhibit redesign sought to tackle problems associated with exhibit labels, public space, service, guides, and communication between the 3GM and the public. With such an ambitious project, the museum had to justify that the new plan had clear advantages over the old one. This meant an inevitable clash between the new and the old.

 Feedback A from professionals to author’s series of lectures on public history and the museums on April 19, 2016.  Feedback C from professionals to author’s series of lectures on public history and the museums on April 19, 2016.

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Issues and Analysis Many stories, memories, insights, and lessons came out of the fieldwork, and it is worthy to point out two of the most important ones. The first one is familiar to public historians: despite a desire to identify and convey history accurately and clearly, the past is multi-faceted, complex and sometimes conflicting. By trying to reduce history to a simple and single narrative, museums can reduce richness and complexity of historical experience, and create a contrived interpretation that does not communicate well with some visitors. The second one is that although most visitors want to be engaged by and participate in museum exhibitions, they interact with the artifacts and interpretive media based on their interest, experience, and learning style. Below, I will further explain three aspects of these issues.

Interpretation: The Holy Grail of Authenticity The word “authentic” is derived from the Greek authenikos, meaning original, genuine, and principal, and entails a sense of authority. In modern use, authentic, defined as trustworthy and reliable, implies that something corresponds to the facts and is not fictitious. We encountered an overwhelmingly positive response to the ideal of authenticity in our field research at the 3GM, but different groups interpreted the word differently. For museum professionals, authenticity, which is associated with authority, becomes a benchmark of their trade: authenticity is an integral part of their professional identity. The data reveal, however, that they understand that absolute authenticity is not attainable. As one museum professional acknowledged, “We select artifacts to present, and interpret artifacts selectively. The material culture does not talk literally, so it cannot, in and of itself, reflect an absolute authenticity. It may touch a scrap of it, yet not tell a complete true story. Interpretation strives after authenticity, yet it is limited by various implications. The result? A limited, tortured, and sometimes misleading version of history.”158 Professionals and visitors seem to have a different view about the use of replicated objects. As long as the artifacts deliver the intended historical information, it matters little to the professionals if they are replicas or originals. Visitors, however, come to museums for the originals, which is the very virtue for visiting a museum. Why bother to travel to see replicas? At the same time, visitors are aware that artifacts are open to interpretation and can tell more than one version of historical truth.

 Interview with museum professional A, transcript 131.

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How does one interpret multi-faceted history to or with the public? How do a museum space and its exhibit labels function as a contested terrain? How should a museum approach particularly contentious past events? One example concerns Chongqing’s wartime history, which has always been ideologically contested. As one volunteer noted, the city’s history during the revolution is: Important, but complicated. Let me give you a story of my own family. My uncle harbored an untold motive for joining a northern expedition during the revolution, during which he was designated as a hero. Our textbook today paints a rosy picture of the revolution, in which everyone eagerly joined to fight for a better nation. My uncle, however, happened to offend the local landlords, so he fled to join the army. He was also struggling for three meals every day . . . What is a true history? You cannot simplify history by unselectively labeling these big words. People are complicated.159

Sometimes volunteers and staff advocated for compromise with “pure” authenticity in display. One volunteer noted, in reference to the collective burial in the Ancient Bayu exhibit: “The bones are real and therefore thrilling in a way. However, traditional Chinese culture emphasizes having one’s bones buried for eternal peace. Exposing the skeleton out in the public seems disrespectful. Moreover, the exhibit embeds the bones beneath the ground, so everyone will step on it for a closer view—this seems ironically degrading.”160 Visitors, for the most part, seemed to embrace the idea of authenticity. As one stated: When I was about five to ten years old, the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party were fiercely fighting. But I have never had a chance to learn the details, rather a skimpy description from a text book. Where is the true history? What is missing? The history textbook stated, “China is one of the best nations in the world.” After travelling all over the world, however, I find the statement may not be completely correct. There are many excellent nations, and China may not be the “best.”161

Many echoed this interest in authenticity and the importance of the truth by acknowledging the role of interpretation. Part of the Journey towards a City exhibit presented the war with Japan in an ideologically biased light, blurring the line between facts and ideas, which aroused some criticism. Our respondents were not comfortable with presentations that seemed prejudiced, but they were open to complexity and uncertainty in historical interpretation.

 Interview with volunteer A, transcript 355.  Interview with volunteer B, transcript 311.  Interview with visitor A, transcript 170.

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Presentation: Engaging or Alienating the Audience? Traditional exhibit design in China rests on the assumption that visitors come to museums as passive recipients of information, ready to absorb whatever is presented. In this thinking, as long as the artifacts are effectively presented (which often means using the latest gadgets and technologies), museums serve their purpose. Our project revealed the flaws in this assumption. Exhibitions, regardless of whether they are well-researched, text-heavy, or visually appealing, fail if they do not engage with what the visitors bring to the museum. Often visitors’ interest in coming to the museum stems from very personal reasons, or, as Freeman Tilden stated, “whatever touches his personality, his experiences, and his ideals.”162 The Journey towards a City exhibit records changes in the urban landscape and in doing so triggers local memories and collective nostalgia. In the past two decades, frenzied construction has dramatically reshaped the city, altering original street patterns and people’s way of life. Traditional houses perched on elevated topography have long given the city a unique look and locals believed that they should be preserved. At least some visitors reminisced with fondness about the past look of the city: The seemingly untidy streetscape, well-spaced buildings, and sun-flooded flora, gave us a pleasant space to reminisce. The real change started in 2004. The local government took care of urban infrastructure, construction went well with historic preservation. You could feel, smell, and witness the change (of the urban landscape) even from ordinary landscapes such a sycamore-coned street. Old times.163

The challenge lies in creating a narrative that pulls together discreet information and seemingly unrelated artifacts to reveal the soul of the city, not just presenting an inventory of the facts. In this case, the public cares about changes in the urban landscape, and they come to the exhibit to remember and to learn. As the only exhibition in the museum that attracts mostly local residents, Journey towards a City has inspired many intimate experiences and personal stories, as as shown by our data. In the surveys, visitors described local memories, even those only dimly recalled, with a firm sense of ownership. A few visitors noted, however, that incorporating some more recent artifacts into the exhibition would help it more effectively interpret postwar urban development and make the experience feel more relevant.

 Tilden was inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age, or state of society, or mode of action in history, to which there is not something corresponding in his own life.” See Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 36.  Interview with visitor B at the Journey towards a City exhibition hall, transcript 363.

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The question of how museums can make exhibits feel more relevant generated fruitful conversations from our respondents. One notable example comes from discussions about decontextualizing artifacts in the museum setting, focused on the inscriptions on the tablet located at the entrance of the Splendid Three Gorges exhibit. This particular inscription, elegant in style and accompanied by substantial textual documents, offers a glimpse into the history of the late Song dynasty, especially the epigraph of the “Eulogy of Holy Virtues of the Song Emperor” originally located on a high cliff.164 The experts found it difficult to perform rubbing work in situ, as they would have had to climb high to reach the top and, worse, find and use paper adequately large enough for rubbing. Outsourced to a cultural heritage company, the original inscription was cut into several parts, taken down, and then pieced together in the museum. The removal of the epigraph from its original location to the 3GM jeopardized its spatial integrity, as decontextualized artifacts can hardly inform the audience about specific geographical locations. However, most of our respondents viewed this as the best alternative preservation strategy as it allows visitors to appreciate the magnificence of the original inscription. Even in the museum setting some deterioration is inevitable, although placement there slows down the weathering process.165 A second significant question concerns how an exhibit can accommodate diverse and contested voices. What if voices from members of the public do not agree with mainstream opinions? “The Splendid Three Gorges” exhibition, which presents the story of the creation of the Yangtze River and the unique landscape of the Three Gorges, represents a lost opportunity to provoke audiences. The residential buildings, which were designed for the mountainous typography, were built on stilts and supported by wooden or bamboo pillars, embodying the Chinese notion of a harmonious relationship between people and the environment. But the project actually produced considerable disruption. The issue of largescale out-migration as a result of the Three Gorges Project remains contested and unresolved, and the effect is lingering. An original resident noted: As an original resident of the Three Gorges area, I feel personally connected with the immigration project. I am not displaced (because our dwellings are located at a higher latitude which would not be inundated), but most of my relatives were. Separation carries the kind of weight that we are still digesting after all those years. We have lost contact with many old friends . . . it is the simplicity of old-timely neighbors that draws me back. Their minds were not cluttered with monetary profits.

 Huang Song Zhong Xing Sheng De Song, the title of the epigraph.  Interview with volunteer C, transcript 276.

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Figure 11: Sculpture about Three Gorges Immigration Project, with the inscription stating: Sacrifice the small families (the individuals) for the big family (the country); we salvage the Three Gorges wholeheartedly. Photo credit: the author.

Our project specifically aimed at unearthing the untold stories of the Three Gorges Project, and reactions were decidedly mixed (Figure 11). Some commented on the Three Gorges Project positively, while others clearly disagreed; still others recollected the project more measuredly. With such strong differing interpretations, the issue for the museums is how to present many complex and contradictory points of view. As one respondent noted: People are displaced, and they have to move to other places because their houses are destroyed. So, it is not good. But maybe it is inevitable in a big project like this, you know. It is important for flood control and power generation . . . sometimes we find out sacrifice maybe not so good. Their house will be destroyed—not good, but inevitable, and understandably a benefit to the whole country; it happens in other countries also.166

The Roaring Bashu exhibition offers another site of contention. One visitor was quite critical, asserting that “the exhibits definitely downplay, if not altogether ig-

 Interview with visitor C at the Gorgeous Three Gorges exhibition hall, transcript 273. This piece of oral history involves an interesting cross-cultural perspective.

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nore the role that the Nationalist Party played during the war. Here we have a carefully selected presentation, a tortured version of history.”167 These competing viewpoints underscore how contentious presentation of the past can be. Is it possible to present history in a way that does not demonize one side, and deify the other? Who controls what to present and how? Because the museum attempted to shy away from controversy and therefore sometimes ended up displaying a limited, if not an entirely false, version of the past, these questions went largely unanswered. A third Issue concerns technology and access. Most respondents did not embrace digital technology and new media uncritically. They agreed that, used wisely, technology can enrich the exhibit, yet asserted that all forms of media, old or new, should blend into the exhibit. For example, the “My Wartime Life” landscape and documentary painting that combined voice, light, and electronics was attention grabbing, yet the form took over the content. Many visitors left the exhibit with very little knowledge or memory of the city’s wartime history, and instead only remembered the flashy painting. In this case, the museum would have benefited from input from visitors. Material culture, rather than electronics or text labels, offers the opportunity for learning and interaction for audiences. Artifacts are more open to multiple interpretations than text labels. When visitors bring their own experience to bear on their interpretation, curators can avoid taking sides in political debates by demonstrating more than one way of looking at the artifact. Designing an exhibit based on artifacts might seem to restrict focus to specific social groups; however, in a culture where censorship is still in place, material culture can be more persuasive than written sources. Thus investing more in interpreting artifacts to present a richer narrative to the public, instead of engaging in divisive political debates, offers a glimpse of hope. In various exhibitions, from collections and archives to labels and exhibit space, we asked what was missing and what truly matters. If an exhibition offers a playground that invites different voices, exhibit design and presentation should work as an organic whole. At the 3GM, where the research department is responsible for reviewing text for quality, it is mainly up to the designers to write the scripts narrating the exhibitions’ stories. Our data reveal a broken link. Occasionally, visitors come primarily for information, but most of the time, they yearn for something deeper that lies behind factual statements. Isolated names or uninterpreted artifacts may enter into visitors’ eyes, but psychologically they rarely

 The exhibit focuses on the war period in China (1937–1945). Interview with visitor D at the Roaring Bashu exhibition hall, transcript 177.

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enter into visitors’ hearts. These exhibitions fail to reach visitors on an emotional level. Unfortunately, the researchers at the 3GM rarely get involved in public education as intradepartmental dialogues are unusual. Part of the reason is that each department is evaluated differently, and partly is it because museums mimic the academy with self-imposed disciplinary or departmental barriers. The gap here is unfortunate but hard to bridge. Information is part of any interpretation, but good interpretation must go beyond factual statements. Turning a mélange of information into interpretive strategy requires a collaborative joint venture.

Authority and Authority-Sharing: Public Service, Culture, and Education With social relevance at their very core, “the goal of the museums was to bring people into contact with new, educational, and potentially inspiring experiences.”168 Spencer Crew and James Sims connect authenticity with authority, writing: Authenticity is not about factuality or reality. It is about authority. Objects have no authority; people do. It is people on the exhibition team who must make a judgment about how to tell about the past. Authenticity—authority— enforces the social contract between the audience and the museum, a socially agreed-upon reality that exists only as long as confidence in the voice of the exhibition holds.169

How effectively, or ineffectively, does the 3GM function as a site of public history? When Harold Skramstad analyzed the evolution of museums in the twentieth century, he found that there had been “a gradual yet profound cultural change as museums shifted the direction of their energies from public education and inspiration toward self-generated, internal, professional and academic goals. Museums began to see their primary intellectual and cultural authority coming from their collections rather than their educational and community purpose.”170 He observes that the dominant focus of museum culture for most of the twentieth century remained the accumulation and management of museum collections and the professionalization of museum workers and museum work. The above analysis of the museum development in China shows that this professionalism has too often widened the gap between museums and the public who use and support them. Let me start with the public and social mission of the museum. It is not enough that we preserve and conserve. We need to think about how to use our institutions for the public. However, such social function of historical artifacts has long been

 Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, 163.  Ibid.  Skramstad, “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century,” 109–28.

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undervalued in Chinese museums. Moreover, museums seek to quell concerns about abuse or commercialization of objects that can lead to the instinct to lock artifacts away, thereby limiting their public utility. And further, the question of how public is public has been debated. The public mission represents a key difference between museum education and academic education. Museum-based research is different from scholarly research in focus, method, audience, and impact. Visitors approach the artifacts as an interactive platform, or a bridge linking the past and the present. This generally involves three aspects. First, visitors look for historical information and knowledge. Second, visitors engage in emotional communication, or a dialogical process, which works particularly vividly in ancient history. Visitors come to talk with those who have long passed away, out of admiration or respect. Third, the museum acts as a source of cultural creation. When information is absorbed, knowledge is enriched, and emotions are communicated, one reconstructs one’s knowledge structure and emotional world. In our project, some individuals commented on the connections between museum education and exhibits; some view public education and exhibitions as unrelated, and others considered exhibitions as but another approach to and form of education. All activities count and are integral to the social function of museums. Viewed through this prism, educational activities, based on exhibits, complement one another. Authority is the key here: Chinese students are taught to respect teachers’ authority, while museum education focuses more on creativity, interaction, and analytical thinking. A second takeaway is that visitors focus on participation. Many agree that the museum is part of civic education. When young students come in, they are thrilled to interact, touch, and explore in their own way. Exhibitions should accommodate this particular group of visitors. For example, artifacts should be displayed so that they can easily view them to attract their interest. The same goes for interpretation. The kinds of words or language we use can reach a wide range of interest groups with different attention spans. Hoping to do just that, our project created the 123 Creative Workshop for the museum based on the themes of the four exhibitions (Figure 12). The Workshop combined visual and architectural cues to create an aesthetic spatial experience, and valued active learning from curiosity and exploration, allowing visitors to connect the artifacts to contemporary life. When cultural artifacts are linked to the present, tradition and culture become a living reality. The workshop encouraged multi-sensory engagement that allowed visitors to associate the artifacts with a broader context and with personal experiences. Ultimately, the visitors viewed the exhibitions through their own eyes, not the interpreters’, and became what Nina Simon calls “cultural

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Figure 12: The 123 Creative Workshop, located at the core of the first floor of the 3GM. Photo credit: the author.

participants, not passive consumers.”171 A sense of getting involved enhances and enriches the experience, and the corner-space is transformed into a creative terrain, waiting for the visitors to be provoked and inspired, and to leave with wonder and awe. As one of the professionals interviewed noted, visitors “do not come to the museum to be indoctrinated; they come to get informed, inspired, or even challenged. Aside from the attractiveness of the artifacts present, the interpretation entailed, stories elicited, and field experience shared also play a crucial role.”172 Thus, the 3GMs should accommodate diverse learning patterns. A third issue raised by our research concerns volunteering. In a culture without a volunteering tradition in public institutions, what are the motivations of those who volunteer at the 3GM? The data revealed a personal connection, a sense of ownership, and a genuine pride in the 2,000-year history of Chongqing, as well as the hope of having an opportunity to have an impact on visitors. Volunteers have given extensive time and energy to their work at the 3GM without any monetary return. Many expressed an intense gratification, on both personal and professional levels, from volunteering experiences.

 Simon, The Participatory Museum, Museum 2.0, 1.  Interview with professional C, transcript 45.

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Visions for Museums in China The “Museum and the Public” project is significant in three ways. First, it foregrounds the idea that a comprehensive museum could strive to be inclusive and representative. This type of museum, which is strategically located in the center of a city, or often in the capital of a province, opens up a window to urban history, landscapes, and political memories. The scale and location of the 3GM represents the general situation of public museums in China and could serve as a model for other similar museums. Second, it is the first interaction between public history and museums in China, both of which were imported from the West, and struggle to survive and thrive in the Chinese setting. The collaboration is challenging in that it requires political maneuvering, scholarly patience, and attention to multiple stakeholders. Museum studies scholars in China, isolated and restricted, rarely step across selfimposed boundaries, and museum professionals speak their own languages in their own limited circles. The willful blindness to the very public that museums serve seems unfortunate. A collaborative project such as this becomes both a result of and an agency for change. Third, the visitor survey has long been part of the contemporary museum culture, although traditional surveys tended to collect cold numbers, unwilling words, and machine-like responses. These surveys, which were designed from professionals instead of the public’s perspective, assumed visitors, at best, were passive receivers of information, not active participants in museums. Technology and social media in the past two decades have added extra layers of sophistication to visitors—they arrive at museums to consume, participate, and be inspired, not to be indoctrinated. Our method of interviewing with open-ended questions served to animate the artifacts, and to create an interactive space for creative and genuine discussions. The project offers three lessons for museums in China. First, interpretation is hugely important. In order to serve the needs of visitors better, museums must move beyond detailed, factual information about objects or simple narratives and get at something larger and deeper. They must reflect the multi-faceted experiences of people and their communities. Our project qualitatively reveals a missing link between the professionals and the public, and interpretation should fill this void. In a museum, zoo, park, or heritage site, interpreters “translate” artifacts, collections, and physical resources into a language that helps visitors make mean-

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ing of these resources.173 In his classic Interpreting Our Heritage, Freeman Tilden defined interpretation as “an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.”174 In many museums in the West since the 1960s, curators have taken an active role in exhibition development. Now they often work as or with interpretive planners and text writers to create the storylines for displays. Exhibitions in Chinese museums, however, rely primarily upon collections, and seeking to assemble unique collections often takes priority over interpretation. Interpretation has played, if any, a marginal role, as if artifacts announce their histories, values, and stories in bold terms. However, artifacts do not talk themselves; interpreters do. What is informative does not always overlap with what is interpretive. Quite often, the interpretive labels appear either as skimpy generalizations, or as half-or-overbaked research statements filled with academic jargon. Both care little about the visitors as complex human beings who enter the museum with personality, emotion, experience, and education (not necessarily formal training in the museums or the subject areas), intelligence, and aspiration. The rationale seems that visitors come to be educated, and the museum assumes the sole authority. As our project demonstrates, this is misleading on many levels. When researchers become intoxicated by a welter of details about certain artifacts and fill their narratives with indigestible facts, they do not reveal something larger or deeper, and they do not interpret; they just inform. This is why, during our project, consciously or not, the professionals expressed some frustration with the public. Of course some visitors can be difficult, but most come to be provoked and are anxious to learn; that is, they are “in a receptive mood.” Instead of overwhelming the visitors with simple facts, plain numbers, and drab statements, interpreters engage the visitors’ “mindsight” with storytelling, and satisfy their mood and emotion with sympathy.175 The audiences responding to our interview survey carry complex motives and emotions.

 Credit for using the word “interpretation” to describe the work of exhibit designers, docents, and naturalists goes to John Muir who penned in his Yosemite notebook: “I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.” Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations,” 271–84.  Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 33.  Mindsight is a term coined by Tilden to mean the mind’s eye. He explained that the interpreter’s task is to plant the seed of provocation and help the visitor see beyond the mind’s eye. See “Mindsight: The Aim of Interpretation,” in Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 161–65.

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Any interpretation should be grounded in solid research; good interpretation reveals something larger and deeper than superficial material appearance. A good interpreter is a skilled storyteller. In this light, an ideal interpretive space is where objects, ideas, and people meet in a kind of narrative form. Within that space, diverse voices clash and intertwine, creating a historical ambiance, with artifacts carefully arranged and properly interpreted in order to invite engagement. Consider the landscape-documentary painting in the Roaring Bashu exhibit. The painting, which captures and reenacts a historical scene, provides ample space for reflection, and for analytical thinking. An engaging space always has an eye on experience, design, and delivery, as the 123 Creative Workshop well demonstrated. Second, exhibition teams must strive to create more open-ended, participatory exhibitions built on public history expertise and using approaches like co-curation to incorporate communities in the creative process. If interpretation creates an engaging democratic public space, participation logically follows. Public needs can be effectively served by engaging in continual dialogues, and by relying on those who have lived the experience to collaborate with us in constructing the community’s history.176 In redesigning the exhibits, we should incorporate local stories and personal memories. These stories and memories will reinterpret and reconstruct histories. Third, at a broader scale, museums are facing an evolving public, an increasingly demanding and thinking public that is craving history and active engagement. More educated and sophisticated audiences not only contribute important content for community-based exhibitions; some are excited about exploring contested and complicated histories. Co-curating, co-making history, and co-constructing public memory have come into play. This will require public historians to be flexible and to learn new skills which must be based on certain essential principles. One possibility seems to create exhibitions based on public history research, which has redefined historical research in China as well as in other parts of the world. Public history research, with its attention to the common people and their everyday lives, requires a different method of inquiry simply because new questions are asked, new sources identified, and new insights revealed. Voices and insights from the eyewitnesses, the marginalized, and the overlooked should be considered. ✶✶✶✶✶ In ways similar to the liberal free-flow social ethos at the turn of the twentieth century, today’s China is encountering another wave of liberal thinking. As social consumption of history expands, museums boast incredible potential as sites of public history, where people interact, engage, learn, and share. To better accom Ibid., 301.

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plish this mission, a new generation of public historians will need to acquire certain skills. The following four principles are essential: 1. Professional research is central to all exhibition and interpretation development. Please note this is not limited to the field of history or museum studies or any narrowly defined discipline. It refers to competency to engage in rigorous research. 2. Subject knowledge is important, but one has to go beyond the academic and professional relationship with it; one has to love it, be enthusiastic, and stay curious about it. 3. One should master the art and craft of language. Establishing a genuine and trustworthy relationship with the public flows from the proper and clear use of language, and that promotes an accessible style of writing and speaking. 4. The ability to talk and work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries needs to be cultivated. It requires political savvy, patience, tenacity, and, most importantly, humility. These possibilities should show no finality, no exclusivity, and no limits. The intellectual visionaries at the turn of the twentieth century observed what their contemporaries did not. From the first public museum established in 1905, academics and professionals have explored and written about museums and museum studies has become a well-established discipline in China. Over time, unfortunately, museums have gradually moved away from a public spirit, and turned inward and myopic as a close ally to rigid academic culture. This chapter is plowing a virgin field as far as the philosophy and practice of public history is concerned. The spade-work intends to provoke, and it invites further furrow.

Chapter 5 When Environmental History Goes Public Environmental history in China originates from its older sibling disciplines, such as historical geography, archeology, agroecology, agroforestry, and history. The field has gradually gathered a small community of scholars since the 1980s, when environmental degradation, air pollution, overly grazed pastures and arable lands, and the uncontrolled use of toxic chemicals in farming—all visible consequences of the progressive ethos—started to become prevalent in China. When the term “environmental history” appeared in Chinese academic journals in approximately 2000, it was used interchangeably with “ecology.” Historical Studies (Lishi Yanjiu), one of the leading history journals in China, ran two special sections about environmental history in 2010 and 2013. The discussions covered a range of issues, including historical interpretation,177 population and land use, water resource management, social and economic impacts on the environment,178 environmental history at the regional level,179 nature and power, and the ecological environment.180 Despite a call for interdisciplinary collaboration among ecology, sociology, history, geography, and ecology scholars,181 methodologically speaking scholarly research has not yet crossed disciplinary boundaries.182 With only a handful of insightful studies, the field of environmental history remains in a perpetual embryonic state in China. Most works do not discuss their own limitations; therefore, it is worthwhile to note three major limitations. First, despite the acclaimed support for connecting man and nature, nature has remained separate. Donald Worster’s definition of environmental history as “the interactions people have had with nature in past times”183 is widely adored in China, yet it is often quoted without sufficient critical analysis. Nature, to paraphrase Worster, is at once a cultural construct and a set of actual things outside of us and not fully contained by our constructions, and it must be incorporated into human history. When scholars engage with the chronology of a certain place, they tend to treat it as static and isolated, or they reduce it to merely a thing de-

 Hou, “An Intricate Pedigree (Cuozong de Guiji): Writing Urban History in Nature,” 10–17.  Zou, “On Environmental History Studies,” 15–18.  Lan, “Four Ideas about Regional Environmental History in China,” 18–24.  Zhu, “An Exploration into Eco-Environmental History based on Man and Nature’s Relationship,” 4–10.  Wang. “On Establishing Environmental History in China,” 10–14.  This is largely based on environmental history written in the Chinese language.  Worster and Crosby, The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, vii. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-007

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void of cultural implications. Most of them write natural history alongside human history and then name it “environmental history.”184 In a thorough yet uncritical survey, Bao Maohong divides environmental history into ancient (from the ancient period to 1840), modern (1840–1949), and contemporary periods (1949 to present), following the chronology of Chinese history within the traditional frame of historical narratives.185 First, most current studies of environmental history focus on imperial periods because of the rich written historical materials that are available.186 State documents as well as local gazetteers make possible a detailed reconstruction of agrarian, climatological, and other facts and connections, and provide a rich and variegated picture of China’s environmental history.187 Very little environmental history addresses the living human elements in the environment. Second, discussions about the relationship between Chinese society and its natural environment largely focus on the traditional philosophy of nature and environmental ethics. Confucianism’s harmony between heaven (which metaphorically refers to nature) and people, Daoism’s love for untamed nature, and Buddhism’s concept of the therapeutic value of nature for human beings all embody a poetic love of nature and an almost religious longing for an ultimate unity between nature and human beings. Curiously, however, the passionate cultural association with the natural environment constantly and persistently parallels the ruthless exploitation and destruction of nature, a paradox to which I will return later. The major strands of historiography address, rather superficially, the actual consequences of human actions upon the environment and the multiple impacts of said actions on the public. Third, given that environmental space is inherently imbued with public significance, it is unfortunate that genuine communication between the scholarly community and the general public is glaringly absent. This chasm, however, should not be automatically interpreted as the public lacking an environmental consciousness. Quite the contrary: a grassroots consciousness has evolved and matured over the past two decades because media technology has revolutionized the way that ordinary Chinese people access information. For example, when the investigative journalist Chai Jing’s multimedia environmental protection docu-

 There are exceptions. For instance, Liu Ts’ui-Jung (2012, 2016) of Academia Sinica in Taiwan has done extensive work on integrating environmental history into urban change, economic development, and human ecology. Hou Shen of Renmin University also tried to approach environmental history in a more human perspective.  Bao, “Environmental History in China,” 475–99.  Chao, “Historical Records and the Environmental History Studies,” 29–33.  Dabringhaus, “Perspectives on the Environmental History of China,” 281–90.

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mentary Under the Dome was released online on February 28 2015, it garnered 6,000,000 hits and over 12,000 comments on various social media platforms within 12 hours, and it accumulated 500,000 views every hour and 280,000,000 posts within 24 hours.188 Another environmental documentary, Waking the Green Tiger,189 features archival footage from an earlier film by Shi Lihong, one of China’s first environmental filmmakers, which presented, for the first time, the village-level environmental consciousness and engagement with a huge dam project on the Nu River and the Upper Yangtze River. The real issue, however, is that folklevel environmental consciousness rarely finds a legitimate space for expression. Despite its immense social impact, Under the Dome, with its wide circulation and proliferating viewer discussion on various social media platforms, survived for only 48 hours. Shi’s short film captured the desperation of the villagers and unmasked the deception of the dam builders and local officials, and can now only be distributed underground among environmental activists. In 2018, the Center for Green Public History (CGPH) was established at Tsinghua University, one of the top universities in China. Born as a collaboration between the Green Venture Corporate Limited, a Malaysia-based company, and the Institute for Humanities of Tsinghua University, the CGPH aims to fulfill, as its name suggests, a public mission. At the inaugural forum, academics passionately advocated a more accessible version of the core scholarship on environmental history, a proposal premised on the idea that the public is not in a position to fully understand the recondite scholarly works written in a wordy and wooden academic prose. The academics assumed that if the media professionals could streamline their dissemination, scholarly works could reach a broader public. It never occurred to them to involve the public in the process of dissemination itself. Confronting a better-informed public with a rising environmental consciousness,190 scholars, the ultimate gatekeepers of knowledge, remain the authors who produce it, while the public, passively sitting at the receiving end, consume it. While approaching the environment from anthropological and sociological perspectives involves some level of public engagement,191 the  Cui, “Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: A Multimedia Documentary in the Digital Age,” 3–45; Liu, “The Controversial Under the Dome: ‘New Media’ in Combat with ‘Old Orality’” [Zhengyizhong de Qiongding Zhixia: “xin meiti” hunzhan “jiu daode”], 28–32; Yang, “Under the Dome: ‘Chinese’ Smog as a Viral Media Event.”  Director: Gary Marcuse.  Hong, “The Public’s Environmental Consciousness in China,” 27–31; Liu and Mu, “Public Environmental Concern in China: Determinants and Variations,” 116–27; Ran, et al., “The Trend of Chinese Public Environmental Consciousness,” 55–60; Steinhardt and Fengshi, “In the Name of the Public: Environmental Protest and the Changing Landscape of Popular Contention in China,” 61–82.  For example, Lan Yong of Xi Nan University has brought the environment down to the regional scale with extensive fieldwork with the local public.

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communication between environmental historians and the public, if any, is unidirectional. The separation is obvious and unfortunate. For scholars who do not care about the public dimension of the environment, they can continue to treat environmental history like they do: it is “business as usual.” However, when environmental history goes public, interpreting it merely as the dissemination of knowledge authored by academic scholars eschews its very potential. This chapter tackles that potential. Rather than framing environmental history with the public living in an annotative text of academic research, we call attention to the rhetorical power of nature; it invites meaningful public engagement; it asks a different set of questions than those often posed in the Chinese context: how does one interpret environmental history with the public? How does one present environmental history in the public space? How does one engage with an environmentally conscious public? And, ultimately, is it possible to establish a new mode of knowledge that we can call “public environmental history”? In answer to these questions, this article focuses on relationships, including the relationships between nature and culture, the environment and people, and history and memory. With the dredging history of West Lake in Hangzhou as an illustrative case, it argues that environmental history should be interpreted and presented as public memory.

Nature as Material Culture: The Dredging History of West Lake The idea of the “environment” first emerged at the end of the fourth century. Xie Lingyun, the first landscape poet, viewed the environment as an interrelated complex of different but mutually independent forms of life in varying habitats, and considered everything to be part of an interacting and organic whole. In his classic Viewing on the Sojourn from the South Mountain to the North Mountain via Lake Wu,192 Xie depicted a variety of landscapes, including cliffs, forests, trails, waterfalls, oases, seagulls, pine trees, bamboo, creeks, and cattails. These elements of nature, beautiful on their own, interact with each other in a harmonious way, and become an organic part of each other. During this active and constitutive process, the ultimate ecological beauty and an organic kind of thinking about the environment loom large. Xie’s exquisite narratives revealed a mystical delight in nature as well as a respect for and an artistic sensitivity toward it. However, given the strong, human-dominated psychology embedded in ancient philosophy, the Chinese have an equally strong belief that nature is to be

 Yu Nanshan wang Beishan jing huzhong zhantiao (于南山往北山经湖中瞻眺).

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tamed, exploited, engineered, and mastered by human power. Efforts to find a compromise among these conflicting attitudes toward nature seem far-fetched. Take water management as an example. The chief strategy of water control in premodern China was channelization and embankment-building along the river floodplains to constrict the turbulent flow and move water more quickly downstream. There are two competing philosophies, Joseph Needham argues, about where to place the embankments or dikes and constrain the current.193 Civil engineers who followed Confucian principles believed in establishing tight, rigid control, resulting in high and mighty dikes built as close to the river as possible, while Daoistinspired engineers advocated for low dikes set far apart, giving the river more space to meander. However, many of the major hydraulic projects appeared well before the so-called “schools” of Confucianism or Daoism. Most ancient Chinese water projects were pragmatically driven, not philosophically or aesthetically mediated.194 The paradox at the heart of Chinese attitudes toward the natural environment lies in the idea that, on the one hand, nature is to be adored, respected, and contemplated and in harmony with human beings. As alluded to above, nature is filled with aestheticism, myth, and revelation; thus, the natural environment exemplifies the workings of the deepest forces in the cosmos. It originates as a part of the supreme numinous power, riddled with spiritual inspiration drawn from contemplating nature. Consider Daoism; Chuang Tsu believes in a perfect harmony between nature and human beings: “I live in harmony with heaven and earth. Everything in the infinite cosmos is part of me, and me, part of the universe.”195 The mystic experience, or rather the coming out of it, led to the understanding that we constantly create not only the world around us, but also ourselves, as Jordan Paper elaborates: “This is the essential meaning of the central term in Daoist thought: ziran. Ziran literally means arising from itself; accordingly it can be translated as ‘spontaneity,’ but it also means ‘nature’”.196 Confucianism, on the other hand, involves a more pragmatic socioecological approach, which recognizes the necessity of forming human institutions and means of governance. Human cultural values and practices are grounded in nature and part of its structure; they are dependent on its benefi Worster, “The Flow of Empire: Comparing Water Control in the United States and China,” 1–22.  It is worth noting that one of the most important hydraulic projects, Dujiangyan, was constructed (256 BC) by the State of Qin after the emergence of Confucianism and Daoism. While Dujiangyan certainly had a pragmatic element, it actually would not function properly without its connection to ritual and liturgy that is heavily influenced by Daoism.  Tiandi yuwo bingsheng, er wanwu yuwo weiyi (天地与我并生,而万物与我为); see Fang, Chuang Tsu, 6.  Barnhilland and Gottlieb, eds., Deep Ecology and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Ground, 19.

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cence, and human flourishing is thus dependent on fostering nature in its variety and abundance. Going against nature’s processes is self-destructive. Human moral growth means cultivating one’s desires not to interfere with nature but to be in accord with the great Dao of nature. Thus the “human mind” expands in relation to the “Mind of the Way.”197 In this twinned sense of respecting and taming nature, one theme recurs: changes brought by human beings should always be in conformity with nature. Let me situate the creative tension between nature and culture within one of the core concepts in contemporary thinking about the environment, deep ecology. Defined as the ethical and religious attitude of valuing nature for its own sake and seeing it as divine or spiritually vital,198 deep ecology invites deep questioning about environmental ethics and the causes of environmental problems, and a methodological approach to environmental philosophy and policy.199 Historically, the idea of deep ecology can be traced back to George Perkins Marsh’s prescient message that humans’ environmental impacts are not only enormous and horrific but perhaps irreversibly cataclysmic.200 In 1864, Marsh pioneered one of his most inspiring ideas: that wholesale forest clearance depletes soils, impairs drainage, and generally disrupts the quotidian balance of nature. Long before modern sciences, he speculated that human action, deliberate or accidental, might affect the Earth as a planetary body. In an insightful analysis, David Lowenthal asserted that Man and Nature “meets all the criteria . . . essential to anthropocentric understanding.”201 A century later, in the 1960s, Rachel Carson popularized the long-term effects of misusing pesticides.202 She challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and talked about the importance of the balance of nature, “a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot be safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a man perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance.”203 Around the same time, Lynn White analyzed the historical roots of the ecological crisis and acknowledged the dynamic role that people play in shaping their

      

Ibid., 131–32. Ibid. Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism. Marsh, Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Lowenthal, “Origins of Anthropocene Awareness,” 58. Carson, Silent Spring. Ibid., 246.

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own environment.204 Central to this philosophy of balanced nature is the reality that one cannot track environmental history separately from human history, or, in Roger Gottlieb’s words, “a general spiritual orientation of intimacy with and reverence for the earth” that “prizes our connection to the natural world as vital to who we are.”205 Working from the premise that nature and culture coexist in a creative tension, we need to think of nature in terms of material culture206 and interpret it as a human artifact or a cultural construction defined as a “segment of humankind’s biosocial environment which has been purposely shaped by people according to culturally dictated plans”;207 material culture implies not only human-made objects but also a method of cultural investigation that uses these objects as primary data: “Material culture evidence that survives for cultural analysis, partial though that data may be, often provides us with a broader cross-section of society and, therefore, a more representative source of information than if we were to rely on written or statistical records alone.”208 This tension also challenges the conventional dichotomy between naturally given and culturally constructed worlds,209 and invites people’s practical engagement, as meanings of the environment are not attached by the mind to objects in the world; rather, these objects take on their own significance.210 Examining the attitudes, motives, and psychology embedded in the ways humans have acted upon the natural environment, and transforming it into a humanized environment, can help one better comprehend the cultural nuances and contemporary impacts of human actions. How, exactly, do people transform nature “according to culturally dictated plans”211 at a particular place over time? Is what is created generative and sustainable, and if so, how? With these questions in mind, we turn, in the remainder of the article, to the dredging history of West Lake in Hangzhou as an illustrative case.

 White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” 1203–7.  Barnhilland and Gottlieb, Deep Ecology and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Ground, 19.  I have benefited from conversations with Philip Scarpino of Indiana University on this line of thinking.  Schlereth, “Material Culture Research and Historical Explanation,” 22.  Ibid., 28.  Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception; Gibson, Reed, and Jones, Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson.  Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.  Schlereth, “Material Culture Research and Historical Explanation,” 22.

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A Story of Nature by Design An ordinary bay near the Qiantang River flanked by Wu Mountain in the south and Baoshi Mountain in the north, West Lake originated as an atoll lagoon “at least 12,000 years” ago.212 With deposits silted up and a sea-level elevation that was obtained in the later part of the Ice Age, West Lake evolved into a lagoon secluded from the ocean. The waters from the surrounding mountains became the key sources for West Lake. Increasing human activity accelerated the process of sedimentation. With a gradual decrease in salinity, which reduces the cohesion of molecules, West Lake eventually became a freshwater lake.213 With the continued biological sedimentation of a large amount of mud and sand, West Lake quickly encountered the problem of swamping. The bottom started to show as waters receded and weeds quickly grew. For a closed body of water, swamping is a natural process, and dredging becomes inevitable if one wants it to remain as a closed body of water: “Without dredging, West Lake cannot survive. If one can fully comprehend and thoroughly enjoy its unique beauty, it simply evidences that human beings can conquer nature.”214 Strategically located at the intersection of the Grand Canal and the Qiantang River,215 West Lake provided the main water supply for the city of Hangzhou (Figure 13). Bi Li, the local governor of Hangzhou, developed six reservoirs (wells) utilizing West Lake water to resolve the urban water shortage during his time in office (781–784 AD). The intricate relationship between West Lake and Hangzhou evolved, and became the key rationale for the major dredging of West Lake from the Tang Dynasty (618–907) to the present. Some of the open-minded emperors and a group of visionary intellectuals played a visible role in the dredging. Bai Juyi (772–846), a well-known poet of the Tang Dynasty, led the major projects of building dykes and causeways with sludge and silt dragged from West Lake. The water being conserved in this way not only resolved the water shortage for the residents but also irrigated the local farmland. Bai Juyi wrote Qiantanghu shiji in a lucid and poetic style that detailed the importance, process, and management of West Lake  Zhu, “Formation of the West Lake in Hangzhou,” 1–6.  Regarding the geological origin of West Lake, see also Zhang, “Explanation of Formulation of the West Lake.”  Zhu, “Formation of the West Lake in Hangzhou,” 1.  The construction of the Grand Canal, linking Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south, started during the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC) and was mostly accomplished during the Sui Dynasty (581–618 AD), eventually becoming approximately 1,797 kilometers long. As one of the key hydro projects in Chinese history, the Grand Canal connects the five major water sources— Hai River, Yellow River, Huai River, Yangtze River, and Qiantang River—and has played a critical role in the irrigation, farming, and industrial development of the cities along these rivers.

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water conservation. With his literary talent, Bai brilliantly integrated Chinese cultural elements into the dredging and created many scenic spots, or what would later be called “cultural landscapes,” such as the Baisha Causeway. From the Wu Yue period (907–978) until the Southern Song period (1127– 1279), when Hangzhou became the national capital, West Lake dredging received increasing amounts of official attention. Qian Liu, the king of Wu Yue who ruled Hangzhou for almost half a century,216 dredged West Lake and built massive dykes with bamboo cages, stones, and giant wood beams. The basic urban infrastructure of Hangzhou was established during this period. Su Shi (1037–1101), a prominent poet in the Northern Song period (960–1127), proposed and implemented the systematic dredging of West Lake.217 Approximately 200,000 civilian workers were involved in the massive dredging project. With a culturally dictated plan, Su Shi encouraged more Chinese appreciation of natural beauty than his predecessors. He really helped make attitudes toward the natural environment around West Lake more positive. The Su Causeway (Su Di), the Pagoda of Six Harmonies (Liu He Ta), and the poetically named scenic spot, Three Towers Mirroring the Moon (San Tan Yin Yue), all became popular tourist destinations at the time. The ruling power of the subsequent Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) took little notice of West Lake due to political turmoil. It was not until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), when Yang Mengying became the governor of Hangzhou (1502), that West Lake was dredged again.218 Yang’s dredging proposals encountered strong local resistance. The state government of the Ming Dynasty legalized businesses’ exploitation of West Lake, so local businessmen recklessly built fences and planted water caltrops alongside the lake for profit. However, Yang prioritized the strategic importance of West Lake in Hangzhou’s development and successfully dredged West Lake, although he was later dismissed from his office. The dredging continued until the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), when the basic layout of West Lake emerged, that is, one lake, two pagodas, three islands, and three causeways. The governments of the Qing Dynasty placed Hangzhou as the key revenue generator in the Jiangnan region and generously financed the area’s water projects, including the dredging of West Lake.219 Additionally, the government took a more comprehensive and sustainable approach to the water management of West Lake, expanding the West Lake water sources, and com-

 Approximately 46 years.  Su, Proposal for Dredging the West Lake (《杭州乞度牒开西湖状》).  Yang, Records of Dredging and Restoring the West Lake (《浚复西湖录》).  From the Shunzhi period (1652) to the Guangxu period (1876) during the Qing Dynasty, there were 11 dredging projects, averaging one every 20 years. See Guangxu, Local Gazetteers of Hangzhou: Water Conservation Projects (《光绪 杭州府志:水利》), 53. The Jiangnan region refers to the southern part of the Yangtze River.

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bining the dredging of West Lake with that of other inner river sources. As a result, sufficient lake water was inducted into the city as the residents’ water supply and a key source for irrigation in the Qiantang, Renhe, and Haining counties.220

Figure 13: Diagram of the dredging history, from the Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. Some 23 dredgings were documented, three of which had more than 100-year intervals. As a result, we see the shrinking size of West Lake from 10.8 square meters in the Hantang period to today’s 5.6 square meters (source: Department of Urban Planning, Hangzhou, 1950).

Since 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, three major dredging programs have been conducted. The first dredging (1952–1956), with an interval of more than 150 years, was led by the Engineering Office of West Lake Dredging under

 Lin, “Management of the West Lake of Hangzhou in the Ancient Period,” 91–96.

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an extremely limited budget in an unpredictable political climate.221 The government recruited unemployed residents as affordable labor, and they became a key force in this dredging effort. For the first time, mechanical equipment was adopted. The maintenance dredging was interrupted during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The second dredging project (1978–1982) was led by the structured Office of West Lake Water Management. Properly depositing and utilizing the silts and sludge dredged from West Lake became the main challenge. The third dredging effort (1998–2000) began to resolve the heavy pollution caused by increasing tourism and urbanization. The dredging plan was debated, and it was decided through an open tender. Suction-dredging was supplemented with dipper-dredging, and the substrate sludge was sent through pipes that were approximately 3,000 meters long and made out of tar barrels. This was due to a lack of steel at the time for mud dumps for natural dehydration to improve the water quality; then, West Lake entered a regenerative cycle. With dredging, West Lake has evolved from a natural lagoon into a cultural landscape. The process represents an unfolding history, a sustained, intentional human intervention, and a fluctuating journey subject to political whims and intellectual visions. The biological consequences of urbanization, industrialization, and technological progress have impacted West Lake dredging in many ways, yet the progress of the economy, modern science, and technology seems to have survived its own urban complications.

The Rhetorical Power of Nature From the perspective of material culture, we see, in a constantly shifting balance between nature and culture, that cultural attitudes have been actively translated into nature and created a cultural landscape. Carl Sauer once observed that “culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.”222 In a similar search to understand the landscape, J. B. Jackson defined the landscape as a composition of human-made spaces within the land, “a portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance.”223 The implications, in the case of West Lake, can be interpreted on multiple levels. First, West Lake evolved from a natural lagoon to a human-scaled space. Dredging from the Tang Dynasty until the present has been deliberately performed to  This climate refers to the reign of a newly founded regime that came into power immediately after the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Civil War (1945–1949).  Sauer, The Morphology of Landscape, 25.  Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 3.

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speed up or slow down the natural process of sedimentation. As a result, a set of distinct topographical and cultural features with a different time scale has been introduced into this space, such as Spring Dawn at Su Causeway (su di chun xiao), Melting Snow at Broken Bridge (duan qiao can xue), and Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake (ping hu qiu yue). Many classic Chinese poems engage people through beautiful imagery and elegant prose, and express a cultural quest for beauty, continuity, and immortality. Take the classic poem “Spring along Qiantang Lake” by Bai Juyi as an example: West of Pavilion Jia, North of Lonely Hill, Water brims the bank and clouds hang low. First orioles playing in the spring sunny trees, Young swallows pecking in mud. Fresh flowers dazzle one’s eyes, Horse hooves covered by shallow grass. Cannot enjoy enough in strolling the east lake, White causeway shadowed by willow green.224

The poem portrays the signs of spring observed while strolling along West Lake with vivid images and lavish colors. First orioles, young swallows, fresh flowers, shallow grass, and willow green represent signs of early spring, while actions such as playing, pecking, dazzling, and strolling animate West Lake. Spring, in Chinese culture, embodies an eternal hope. The poet brilliantly unites scattered natural elements, the pavilion, the hill, the banks, clouds, and mud with a felt joy. Each line rhymes, that is, each line ends with a character with the same vowel in order to make the poem sound beautiful. Another well-known poem, “Drinking on the Lake in the Sunny Rain” by Su Shi, metaphorically describes the beauty of West Lake: Ripping water shimmering on a sunny day; And misty mountains shrouded in the rain. Plain or gaily decked out like Xizi, West Lake is always alluring.225

A feeling of empathy between people and West Lake runs deep in these four simple lines. The poet integrates his emotion with the natural elements in West Lake, such as water, the sun, mountains, and the rain. Comparing West Lake with Xizi,

 Bai, “Spring on the Qiantang Lake (West Lake)”. (《钱塘湖春行》: 孤山寺北贾亭西, 水面初 平云脚低。几处早莺争暖树, 谁家新燕啄春泥。乱花渐欲迷人眼, 浅草才能没马蹄。最爱湖东行 不足,绿杨阴里白沙堤。). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.  Su, “Drinking on the Lake in the Sunny Rain”《饮湖上初晴后雨》: 水光潋滟晴方好, 山色空 蒙雨亦奇。欲把西湖比西子, 淡妆浓抹总相宜。.

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one of the most beautiful women in Chinese history, he stands, amazed at her arresting beauty. The rhythms, similes, and intertextuality blend perfectly into a seemingly casual simplicity. West Lake, in this light, represents both material culture and discursive construction, and it resonates most when it is nested in the aesthetic values and cultural beliefs of the public. Second, West Lake is shared by a group of people, so it acquires public and collective significance. As a cultural landscape, it “denotes an interaction of people and place: a social group and its spaces, particularly the space to which the group belongs and from which its members derive some part of their shared identity and meaning.”226 Here, private memories are made public, and precisely because of this publicness memory joins history. As a result, the landscape carries a purposeful or engineered continuity and acquires a degree of durability and permanence. West Lake becomes a place for scheduled and repeated visits, hence providing a fresh context for place-based collective sense-making. Ten poetically named scenic spots of West Lake, the result of dredging, epitomize the synthesis of nature and culture.227 Established during the Southern Song Dynasty, each place was named using four Chinese characters with poetic connotations. The tradition of giving poetic names to scenic places continues today with the active participation of local residents.228 Third, the dredging of West Lake reveals larger historiographical concerns about nature and power. Despite its accumulative artificial traces and humaninduced engineering, West Lake remains naturally beautiful, as discussed above. The imposed order, spatial or cultural, epitomizes political will and confirms a Chinese sense of environmental perception, value, and moral and ethical judgment. In the past three millennia, the Chinese have irrevocably transformed landscapes according to their own perceptions, values, and political interests—and West Lake is one such example of this phenomenon. The aesthetic, collective, synthetic, and political implications suggest the rhetorical power of West Lake’s dredging history as public memory. If rhetoric is defined as “the study of discourses, events, objects, and practices that attends to these subjects’ characters as meaningful, legible, partisan, and consequential, then rhetoric

 Groth, “Frameworks for Cultural Landscape Study,” 1.  Ten poetically named scenic spots: Spring Dawn on the Su Causeway (su di chun xiao), Lotus Flowers in the Breezing Winery Yard (qu yuan feng he), Orioles Singing in the Willows (liu lang wen ying), Viewing Fish at the Flower Pond (hua gang guan yu), Evening Bell Ringing at Nanping Hill (nan ping wan zhong), Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake (ping hu qiu yue), Three Pools Mirroring the Moon (san tan yin yue), Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge (duan qiao can xue), Leifeng Pagoda in Evening Glow (lei feng xi zhao), and Twin Peaks Piercing the Clouds (shuang feng cha yun).  Citizens have engaged with the naming of the new versions of the ten poetically named scenic spots in West Lake.

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organizes itself around the relationship of discourses, events, objects, and practices to ideas about what it means to be public.”229 Rhetoric also means to persuade, as “a more particularized kind of practice—persuasive speech in the public domains of the agora, courts, and deliberative assemblies.”230 Furthermore, rhetoric also seeks to “have a formative effect upon attitude,” as Kenneth Burke observed, with the power to induce or communicate states of mind to an audience.231 This, I believe, is where the real potential of rhetoric lies: to exert affect, to establish emotional affiliations, and to sustain public memory: “When the ‘public’ situates shared memory where it is often the most salient to collectives, in constituted audiences and positioned in some kind of relationship of mutuality that implicates their common interests, investments, or destinies, there are profound political implications.”232 And rhetoric’s emphasis upon publicity seems to indicate that, in the public space, memory, which is fluid and alive, stands in contrast to history, which is singular and fixed. In this light, public memories can be interpreted within two frameworks. One framework is the memory of publics—that is, memories affect and are affected by various publics: “The ways memories attain meaning, compel others to accept them, and are themselves contested, subverted, and supplanted by other memories are essentially rhetorical.”233 The other framework is the publicness of memory, or memories’ public appearance, which involves a strong spatial implication. If the public space is discursive, then the public sphere is “the realm of influence that is created when individuals engage others in communication—through conversation, argument, debate, or questioning—about subjects of shared concern or topics that affect a wider community.”234 Thus, places of public memory generate a rhetorical experience. However, the boundaries between the two frames, which are fluid and transitory, often overlap: they work co-effectively to constitute a public sense of place, and are also constantly reconstituted by those who are involved in this space.

Presenting Environmental History as Public Memory Given this connection between rhetoric and memory, the question now becomes: how can one present the rhetorical power that is embedded in the dredging history of West Lake in the public space? In order to answer this question, I will turn to

     

Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, 2. Ibid., 3. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 50. Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, 6. Phillips, Framing Public Memory, 2–3. Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 26.

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the history of the West Lake Museum of Hangzhou (the Museum), which is the primary public space for presenting the dredging history of West Lake.

Environmental History on Display One of the first lake-themed museums in China, the Museum opened to the public in 2005. Designed by the Architectural Design and Research Institute of Zhejiang University, the Museum adopts a form of archeological exploration known as the “square and ditch,” which is a metaphor for the exploration of the history of West Lake.235 Two-thirds of the space is underground and the southern roof a seamless slope, so the main building is beautifully integrated into its natural environment, with plenty of natural sunlight and ventilation. The façade of the building has a suspended glass curtain wall, overstepping granite eaves and a plain gold-brick wall. Five permanent exhibits—the Natural Evolution of West Lake, History of the Dredging and Formation of West Lake, Man’s Positive Interaction with Nature, Poetically Named Places of West Lake, and Cultural and Historic Sites of West Lake— present the geology, history, and culture of West Lake. Although the architectural design of the Museum dovetails with the Chinese way of respecting the natural environment, the exhibit presents a space that neither mediates nor communicates public memories. The resulting visitor experience is superficial, uninteresting, and largely irrelevant. In what follows, I will bring the History of the Dredging and Formation of West Lake exhibit into sharper relief. With the primary mission of preserving, presenting, and communicating the history of West Lake, the Museum functions as a place for public memory. On the one hand, the memories of those who have participated in or been affected by the dredging are still alive and continually evolving with West Lake; thus, the Museum has become a repository of memories and is hence inherently rhetorical. On the other hand, personal memories are made public through oral history, and they rely on various forms of material support, such as objects, physical space, exhibit labels, rituals, and performances, to communicate that collective identity to the public. In this way, individuals make a public version of themselves. Does the History of the Dredging and Formation of West Lake exhibit work or fail to create such a space for public memory? The tenor of the exhibit is indisputably celebratory of human power and the ability of humans to control nature. The grand sculptural painting installed immedi-

 “The square and ditch” in Chinese translates to tan fang (探方) and tan gou (探沟). Combined together, they metaphorically mean “exploration,” tan suo (探索).

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ately across from the modest Natural Evolution of West Lake exhibit (Figure 14) works in sharp contrast, and the dominant message is crystal clear: human will and power have conquered nature. Prominent historical figures are depicted, and their names are inscribed, so the dredging history becomes the result of “the wisdom and peerless creativity of our ancestors.”236 If we view how the labels and images work together as the means of symbolic communication from which visitors attain meaning, no expert eyes are needed to see how the labels and images are deliberately constructed to achieve the desired political ideas and ideological alignment. The history of dredging is presented, first and foremost, as a heroic act, an elite intervention, and a definite victory over nature.

Figure 14: A large sculpture at the entrance of the History of the Dredging and Formation of West Lake exhibit. Photo credit: the author, July 18, 2019.

The exhibit presents a linear overview of dredging history from the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) to the present (Figure 15). Each panel provides a brief description of dredging in the designated period and the key historical figures involved in a partic-

 The source for this quote is from a panel text in the Natural Evolution of West Lake exhibit. Prominent historical figures include Bai Juyi, Li Bi, Qian Liu, Yue Fei, Su Shi, Yu Qian, Yang Mengying, Zhang Changshui, and Ran Yuan.

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ular dredging initiative. One or two selected objects are accompanied by names and dates. There is no other information provided, nor is there any interpretation.

Figure 15: A linear presentation of the dredging history of West Lake. Photo credit: the author, July 18, 2019.

The separation of the “natural evolution” and “dredging and formation” of West Lake delivers a clear but ironic message that, despite the popular claim about harmony between people and their environment, nature and culture remain separate. The exhibit confirms information that one can easily learn from other media venues and invites almost no critical debate or discussion about, for example, the interpretive and explanatory value of material culture or current ideas, trends, and movements in environmental history. This raises the central question of just how to put environmental history on display.237 And the voice of the participating public is missing. Most of the existing historical materials on the West Lake dredging focus on geology, policy, landscape, architecture, and historical sites, including relics, temples, tablets, inscriptions, and drawings

 Stine, “Placing Environmental History on Display,” 566–88. See also Peter David, Museums and the Natural Environment: The Role of Natural History Museums in Biological Conservation (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996); Jennifer Barrett and Phil McManus, Civilising Nature: Museums and the Environment (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007).

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about West Lake.238 If the dredging in the imperial periods was primarily driven by the state power and visionary elites, as seen in the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties, the large-scale dredging since 1949 has seen a strong public presence. The local residents have played an active role in three dredging projects (Figure 16). When the first large-scale dredging effort started in 1952, three years after the founding of the PRC, approximately 3,000 unemployed people who were on the state’s welfare plan were called to participate in the dredging as part of an alternative welfare plan.239 Most of them were happy to volunteer their labor as a means to contribute to the higher, collective will. Dredging was, and still remains, an intimate part of the lives of many people, particularly the dredging workers and local residents, but their voi-

Figure 16: One of the exhibit panels about the dredging after 1949. The panel does not interpret the pictures shown here. Actually, the image describes the residents who volunteered their labor for dredging. The original image credit: Wang Kuiyuan, 1955; the panel photo credit: the author, July 18, 2019.

 Wei, Qian, and He, About the Historical Records of West Lake.  Chen, Studies about Public Participation in Conserving West Lake since 1949.

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ces are curiously absent. Only one image of the public is presented in the exhibit, and no corresponding interpretation or commentary is provided. When memories attain meaning and become public, they generate a rhetorical experience. John Dewey defines experience as “the result, the sign, and the reward” of our interaction with our environment.240 Experience is a composition that we create for ourselves—on our own or using others’ composition work as a guide—from otherwise inchoate encounters. In these encounters, for Dewey, meaning is made from the raw materials of experience in an aesthetic process. When those materials and that meaning are shared, when that meaning enters collective life, it results in new understandings, new attitudes, and even action.

An Oral History and Public Memory Project How does one improve the exhibit space and the visitor experience? The West Lake Memory Project (WLMP), a multiyear collaboration between the Museum and the Center for Public History at Zhejiang University, attempts to solve this problem. Targeting three major dredging initiatives since 1949, the WLMP focuses on the tension between the history and memory of West Lake dredging. Interview questions, based on a thorough analysis of archival documents about West Lake dredging efforts, were designed in four major parts, each with one generic question and three to five open-ended sub-questions (Table 1). The first phase of the WLMP, from 2016 to 2017, saw the interviewing of ten persons who had participated in the first dredging project, resulting in approximately 160,000 words transcribed, an accumulation of approximately 30 hours of audiovisual materials, and Table 1: Oral History Interviewing WLMP. Key Subject

Generic Question

 Individual memories (including personal reminiscences/biographical memory) and community memories of the dredging efforts

What are the motives, attitudes, emotions involved in participating the dredging efforts?

 Consequences or impacts of the dredging projects

How did the dredging project impact your life, West Lake and the landscape on a broader scale?

 Quoted in Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, 116.

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Table 1 (continued) Key Subject

Generic Question

 The relationship between the dredging initiatives of West Lake and the city of Hangzhou

How do you [local residents] interpret the evolving relationship between the natural, the cultural, and the urban?

 Environmental perceptions, attitudes, and emotions

How has each dredging project reflected your environmental attitudes? In particular, how has this intense human intervention worked with, or against, nature?

Source: The Center for Public History, Zhejiang University, 2016.

two books. The second phase, from 2019 to 2021, will see the interviewing of persons who participated in the second dredging project. The initial findings of the WLMP offer some surprisingly complicated information. The oral histories add an extra layer to the already well-documented dredging history. For example, the oral history of the dredging workers, including many local residents who volunteered their labor for the dredging efforts, reveals a complicated emotional and psychological world. Some people vividly recalled their dredging experience, including their pride, fear, hope, love, drive, and regret, as if it all happened yesterday. The oral histories also offer new information and add vernacular voices to the record.241 They extend the archival and informational material that we have available to us and add a lot more nuance. When probing the place-based stories, insights, and patterns, we find that they challenge some of the basic tenets of how one ought to understand environmental history. Additionally, in a rather curious twist, when personal memories are made public, they tend to have a fluid, collective, and ritualized existence.

Place-Based Narratives and Insights While the written documents record the West Lake dredging statistically, the oral history of the dredging reveals that for the ordinary people who, by a fortuitous set of circumstances, were involved in dredging, their involvement was tantamount to a quest for daily meaning. Words and phrases such as “value,” “meaning,” “a sense of responsibility,” “spirit,” and “personal growth” came up rather often in the WLMP interviews. One interviewee had this to say:

 Endres, “Environmental Oral History,” 485–98.

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If you talk about the memory of West Lake, I would say good character with a sense of responsibility is also part of that memory. These workers, in their early twenties when they participated in the dredging, would just jump in if an accident occurred on site. They used their bodies to block the water-flows if the banks were broken. Just as simple as that! At that particular moment, they were willing to sacrifice for the national interest, or the community value? I am not sure, but it has to be something larger than their individual lives!242

The spirit of the West Lake dredging was collectively expressed. Another interviewee has this to say: My father (Sheng Lishu) saw dredging not only as his eight-hour mandatory work; it was his calling. He never stopped working. In a recent exhibit about the rare objects from the dredging out of West Lake, I wished that the public, especially the younger generations, could learn from the stories behind these objects. Dredging represents the best spirit and character of my father’s generation: altruism, hard work, tenacity. When people talk about West Lake memories, I hope they understand that memory is part of history.243

The interviewee continued: “West Lake dredging is also a collective will, memory, and tradition that I think should be carried on. I am dedicated to dredging because of the influence of my father. For some reason, I feel it is missing in today’s life. When we talk about West Lake memory, it means a lot to me, personally.”244 The oral histories also reveal that, for an act officially portrayed as heroic, there was barely concealed discontent and grievances and a complicated psychological world surrounding the dredging. One suction-dredging boat-worker described the process of manual dredging: “It was a hard life! There was no machinery, no . . . the sludge was dredged, bit by bit, all by our hands, like this.”245 Another worker expressed that the dredging life, which was filled with hardship and deprived of material necessities, could likewise be described as “hard”: “How did we transport the dirt and sludge? It was all by hand! I remember it was freezing cold in winter, and we had to pick up the mud and transport it from the dredger to the nearby dump, barefooted. We were supposed to work eight hours a day, so I left around seven o’clock at the break of the day, and came back at night, in that coldness.”246 When asked if there were any local government officials involved in the actual

 Interview with Sheng Guojin, the son of Sheng Shuli, who was in charge of the first dredging from 1949, by Tian Le, Pan Lichuan, and Zhang Ting on April 29, 2016. Transcripts, 19.  Ibid., 7.  Ibid., 13.  Interview with Zhang Jinshun, a suction dredging worker, by Tian Le and Zhang Ting on May 6, 2016. Transcripts, 81.  Interview with Mei Shoudan by Tian Le, Zhang Fumei, and Pan Lichuan on November 26, 2015. Transcripts, 119.

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dredging, one worker said quite frankly: “All (of the workers) were villagers. The officials were in charge, but we did all the dirty work!”247 The workers’ simple leisure time included watching movies, reading novels, and various other hobbies as a sidebar to their busy working life: “I enjoyed reading books and novels about revolutionary heroes, such as Dong Cunrui and Huang Jiguang.248 I also read translated classics at the time, for example, The Making of the Hero / How the Steel was Tempered.”249 Behind the simple leisure time lay an honorable and childlike honesty in attitude that has become foreign in modern life. As one dredging worker recalled: “We had dredged many valuable items out of the lake, such as nuggets, gold necklaces, and treasures. We never thought of keeping them for ourselves, even when no others were present. We always turned them over to the officials. Well, this does not necessarily mean we were a group of noble persons; we did it out of pure consciousness. Is it that simple?”250 While the pain of material hardships during the Great Leap Forward and the political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution are still raw, the motivations for dredging West Lake were pure and simple: It was extremely difficult. Even the meat coupons (worthy of two liang of meat) were handed in . . . I was always hungry. I had to eat lots of dry sweet potatoes, lots! They were not even fresh out of the field; they were delivered from the north. As rice was in serious shortage, we had to mix dry sweet potatoes into rice as congee. You know what? Nobody complained, not a single word. Actually, we were happy to have each other around, going through the material deprivation together. We had a strong, or even stubborn, belief that we would overcome all the difficulties.251

Memories have survived and outlived the dredging projects. One resident expressed a childhood memory of West Lake and the impact of dredging on his daily life, with an inescapable tinge of nostalgia: “When I was little, West Lake was in a really bad shape. If you stepped into some parts of it, there was no water at all! I came here to play a lot, just like playing in my backyard. The willow trees were there . . . The lake was part of the city with a population of just about 500,000. It was never as crowded as today!”252 Many local residents shared similar sentiments.

 Ibid.,124.  Both are heroes who died in the Civil War.  Interview with Zhang Jinshun by Tian Le and Zhang Ting on May 6, 2016. Transcripts, 89.  Interview with Zou Chuangen, a dredging worker, by Tian Le and Zhang Fumei on May 22, 2016. Transcripts, 103.  Interview with Zhang Jinshun by Tian Le and Zhang Ting on 6 May 6, 2016. Transcripts, 94.  Interview with Zou Chuangen, a dredging worker, led by Tian Le and Zhang Fumei on May 22, 2016. Transcripts, 106.

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These place-centered narratives endow West Lake with a sense of ownership and a sense of identity in which individual voices and memories are acknowledged: “An important aspect of interpreting landscapes is discovering how local residents and outsiders, past and present, have themselves interpreted the land.”253 David Glassberg argues that “an important aspect of interpreting landscapes is discovering how local residents and outsiders, past and present, have themselves interpreted the land.”254 These narratives, taken together, also enrich and expand our understanding of dredging history. To what extent the embedded rhetorical power influences public environmental consciousness remains to be measured, yet it may imply a potential to construct a new understanding and a new mode of environmental history.

A Communicative Space: Environmental History as Public Memory Memories of the dredging history have coevolved with a public sense of place. This dynamic interaction requires a serious rethinking about the definition of environmental history. The conventional wisdom that environmental history is a linear documentation of what happens to the environment proves problematic, or at least inadequate. Rather, if we approach the environment as an open system, where information, data, and narratives, in various forms and formats, are aggregated and interpreted, the sum is often more than the individual parts. When environmental history goes public, it gets more, not less, complicated. To better communicate placebased narratives and insights in museums, two cumulative layers of context—textual and visual—should be incorporated into the exhibits. Let me start with the textual layer: “A landscape, like a language, is the field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring.”255 Here, language functions socially as symbolic action. A landscape acquires meaning when it is verbalized and narrated through such symbolic action. In this vein, the charm of West Lake is semantic: it is a language that human beings use to communicate with each other.256 Interpreting West Lake carries public and social implications, as Gregory Clark argues: “The separate identities of individuals are constantly reconstituted as people participate in the shared experiences of public life—whether those experiences are    

David Glassberg, “Interpreting Landscapes,” 31. Ibid. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 8. Spirn, The Language of Landscape.

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intentionally ideological or merely recreational in their apparent form.”257 In the museum space, symbolic associations among words, images, material culture, and space can fire up the public’s imagination. Because there is no “interpretation” between the research and the exhibit design in museums in China, developing a storyline for environmental themes remains a challenge. One possibility is to incorporate local memories into the text panels and either replace supported generalization with stories and narratives or simply enrich the original narratives. Now, let me discuss the visual layer. Visual images, as another mode of the representation of nature, can influence attitudes toward the environment, shape the public understanding of West Lake’s dredging history, or ignite a greater awareness of environmental issues in general. For example, the illustration of dredging workers who volunteered their labor possesses the potential advantage of being a public forum for creative and critical conversations about environmental issues, such as modern dredging machines, motives for participation, and the environmental impact of dredging. How does the visual communicate? Anders Hansen and David Machin suggest, in terms of the political economy of representations, that the ideologies and the culturally loaded viewing they carry, as well as the different kinds of viewers who experience them, are the modes of communication.258 If “the public vocabulary on the environment is to a large extent a visual vocabulary,”259 then images need to be articulated and constructed similarly to other modes of communication. If a visual is not interpreted, at best, it reinforces what is already textually expressed or “visualize[s] what is said.”260 Most of the images of West Lake in the exhibits are taken out of their historical context or are used out of purely aesthetic concerns in order to confirm a cultural discourse, belief, or myth about West Lake. The proper selection and interpretation of images should be based on a thorough visual analysis at two levels, as Hansen and Machin explain: the immediate level of the story told by a series of images and the metanarratives that are activated by or drawn upon by the individual images analyzed. ✶✶✶✶✶ Interpreting environmental history as public memory uses values, beliefs, and attitudes as the starting point for establishing a context for judgment. During this process, personal memories intertwine with environmental history, and the line between history and memory sometimes blurs. As an academic, I understand, at

   

Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke, 11. Hansen and Machin, “Researching Visual Environmental Communication,” 151–68. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 158.

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least intellectually, the difference between history and memory. Yet working with the public on the WLMP I see how personal memories blend into public history and how these memories guide us to surprising landscapes where history acquires more depth. Incorporating these memories into museum exhibits, communicating them with the public, and creating a rhetorical space for them present pressing challenges. In many ways, the lessons learned from the WLMP are transferable. When environmental history goes public, we need to reexamine the assumption that communicating environmental history is about delivering authoritative knowledge in an accessible manner. We need also to move beyond generating opinions, reinforcing consensuses, or evoking convictions and move into a reciprocal, constitutive, and sustainable process for a new mode of public environmental history.

Chapter 6 Performing History: Cultural Memory in the Present I loved the armor so much I decided a decade ago that I will make it. How to make an accurate armor? You need to be an avid reader, an assiduous researcher to make an accurate armor or anything truly historical.261

One of the reenactors from the Bozhou Rebellion reenactment observed the above enthusiastically. His bookish dedication to accuracy was no less rigorous than that of academic historians, but more broad-minded and public spirited. The reenactment took place at the original site, Hai Long Tun in Zunyi city, Guizhou province, from October 1 to 7, 2018.262 Historically, the Bozhou Rebellion took place in 1598 during the Wan Li period of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It was one of the key battles in which the central government suppressed the local rebel Yang Yinglong. The site, approximately 30 kilometers from the historical core of Zunyi city, remains one of the best-preserved fortresses under the Tusi system, a separate system of rule over ethnic minorities away from state power during the Yuan (1271–1368), Ming, and Qing dynasties (1644–1912). Four key parties were involved in the reenactment: the local government (who supported the reenactment because of tourist interests and commercial concerns), armor hobbyists (people who made and wore armors during the stage battle, and who strove for material authenticity and for accurate and artistic recreation); reenactors, some, with his-

 Interview with an armor maker on May 9, 2019, by Ye Jingcheng and Liu Zihe.  Built in 1257, the site was a collaborative work between the central government of the South Song dynasty and the prominent Yang family in Bozhou, the historical name of Zunyi city. It was destroyed around 1600 during fighting against the imperial court ruling the Ming Dynasty. Surviving are a six-kilometer wall with an area of approximately 1.59 square meters inside and the old palace and new palace, which are the two largest architectural clusters of approximately 20,000 square meters with a three-horizontal and three-vertical layout. The site is a unique combination of military outposts, government offices, and imperial palaces: an artistic and architectural wonder in which large scale military architecture dovetails with imperial palatial architecture, listed as a world heritage site in 2015. Perched on the tops of mountains are garrets, military camps, warehouses, water dungeons, and ornate embroidered buildings. The parapet walls connect nine key passes that are organically designed to form a grand military hurdle, with three layers of protection systems naturally dovetailing with the extension of the mountain ridges. Hailongtun was announced as a provincial-level cultural relics protection unit in Guizhou in 1982. It was listed as a national-level key cultural relics protection unit in 2001. On July 4, 2015, it was included in the “World Heritage List” and became the forty-eighth World Cultural Heritage in China. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-008

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torical backgrounds, came as living historians to witness a critical historical moment. They sought some level of intellectual enrichment and a felt sense of history, while others joined as amateur history lovers and spectators, the latter as casual participants, who were primarily attracted by the performance and playfulness, and secondarily by a tinge of nostalgia. They participated for fun and sociality (Figures 17 and 18).

Figure 17: Bozhou Rebellion reenactment scene, October 2018. Photo credit: Zhou Yu.

Performing History in China: Snapshots Such bodily engagement with the past – living history, heritage performance, war reenactment, festivals, pageants, parades, dramas – has become appealing in China since the dawn of the twenty-first century. While the Bozhou Rebellion reenactment performed a less well-known chapter in Chinese history, other embodied histories have caught the attention of officials and scholars. Consider theatrical performances at museums, historical sites, and heritage places, an integral part of revolutionary tourism, or better known as Red Tourism.263 “Singing, dancing, dramas, staged per-

 Originated as a state response to a vast range of revolutionary sites, museums, memorials, and theme parks as places for constructing and restoring national memory, Red Tourism has been promoted as a form of patriotic education since 2004, to instill in tourists a sense of a

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Figure 18: Bozhou Rebellion reenactment scene, October 2018. Photo credit: Zhou Yu.

formances, performed by the tourists, are a collective, participatory, performative, and ritualized affair.”264 War reenactment is another popular form. They are purposely designed at the original battlefields, the military filming bases, or war museums. Most of such places commemorate modern and contemporary Chinese history such as the Anti-Japanese War, walking tours, cultural performances, and mock military court experiences accommodate click-and-go tourists with a superficial interest in either the sites or war-related experiences. Among them is the booming trend of dressing oneself in Communist army clothes of the Anti-Japanese war. Staged pageantry and spectacles represent another dynamic form. Consider the Shanghai World Exposition (2008), Olympic Ceremonies, or the large-scale military parade that rolled across Tiananmen Square at the People’s Republic of China anniversary, among others. The state carefully selected elements from the past and reshuffled the meaning for the present use, that “ultimately pave[s] the way to specific shared past and a shared homeland, a collective relationship to a temporal narrative of revolutionary history and the place in which that history unfolded. See Li, Hu, and Zhang, “Red Tourism: Sustaining Communist Identity in a Rapidly Changing China,” 101–119; Song Hanqun and Catherine Cheung, “What Makes Theatrical Performances Successful in China’s Tourism Industry?” 159–73; Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in PostSocialist China.  Denton, Exhibiting the Past, 21.

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policy choices, for instance those related to the ‘harmonious society’ concept which imply national or ethnic unity within China. The national identity is communicated through staged performances such as the children in ethnic attire carrying the national flag, or minorities that “dance joyously to greet all athletes.”265 History, in various shapes, scripted or improvised, fixed or promenade, solo or ensemble, comes alive in performance. A performance, according to Erving Goffman, refers to all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence the other participants in any other way. Taking a particular participant and his performance as a basic point of reference, we may refer to those who contribute to the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants. The pre-established pattern of action which is unfolded during a performance and which may be presented or played through on other occasions may be called a “part” or a “routine.”266 Performances thus mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories. Performances – of art, rituals, or ordinary life – are “restored behaviors,” “twice-behaved behaviors,” performed actions that people train for and rehearse.267 Framed in this light, performing history involves a conscious engagement with the past, and invites collective remembering. Despite its immense popularity, studies of performing history though reenactment remain a marginal area of inquiry, even within the closely allied field such as public history.268 Many scholars view it as purely emotional, experiential, recreational, and hastily dismiss it. However, when history is repeatedly and periodically performed, reenacted, played in a profusion of dynamic settings by a growing public, even the most conservative historians would acknowledge that the nature of history is shifting. If the past is a foreign country,269 it is no longer a settled and closed business; it is chaotic, unfinished, and unsettled. Turning to traditional archives for conventional data seems futile, as “the future historian may be confronted with an apparent void of information on lives that were in fact richly documented, but only through fleeting digital entries on security encrypted online services.”270 With the current studies about performing history in China, three problems exist. First, very few works deal with performing history involving the public at the grassroots level, partly due to the lack of data or proper documentation. Second, the

 Schneider, Staging China: The Politics of Mass Spectacle, 25.  Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 15–16.  Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 28.  Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies, 6.  Lowenthal borrowed this phrase from L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.” Quoted from Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, xvi.  Erll and Rigney, Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 102.

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methods are, though often unconsciously, elitist-oriented. Such an approach uses the official historical narratives as the default reference, either to confirm or to oppose it. What it fails to recognize is that the meaning of the past can be created and circulated outside the referential. Third, and most fundamentally, these works sidestepped one of the core issues of performing history: what exactly is the cultural impulse behind the massive craze for performing history? This chapter attempts to untangle part of that mystery. Premised on that history is one of many modes of representation of the past, and performance being one of them, this chapter argues that performing history through reenactment, an expression of cultural memory mediated and remediated in the present, is a new form of public history. The democratic impulse enacted by such a performance can nurture serious discussions on historical issues, cultivate a shared interpretive authority, and shape historical consciousness of the ordinary Chinese.

Reenacting History, Performing Identity: An Illustrative Case Now let me proceed with an illustrative example of historical reenactment through popular culture, to explore how cultural memory is reenacted in the ritualized space, and how reenactments remediate the cultural memory of the participating public. The case is deliberately chosen for involving a thoughtful, historically conscious public on a purely volunteering base. The methodology, including participant observation, field interviews, and media data analysis, is emergent and reflexive: emergence begins with the empirical world and builds an inductive understanding of it as events unfold and knowledge accrues. It is “inductive, indeterminate, and open-ended,”271 and the method resides within the research process; reflexive, because it “tends to focus interactively on the outcomes of action, the action itself, and the intuitive knowing implicit in the action.”272 In the reflective conversation, practice is a kind of research. The Liyue Jiamo Cultural Studio (LJCS) is a Beijing-based company dedicated to a variety of ritual reenactments. Collaborating with a range of government agencies, cultural and academic institutions as well as nonprofit organizations, LJCS incorporates the essential elements of Chinese historical and cultural tradition into contemporary products and services, including ritual reenactment, traditional Chinese garment reenactment, historical documentaries and films, among other modes of media expressions. In reenactment, LJCS commemorates an essential part of Chinese heritage that is increasingly losing its grip on contemporary China.

 Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy, and Leavy, eds., Handbook of Emergent Methods, 155, 161.  Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, 56.

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LJCS chooses to focus most of its reenactment projects on the Ming dynasty, particularly the Jiajing period (1522–1566),273 and for good reasons. Clearly, relatively more historical documents and archaeological findings from this time period are available, making an accurate reenactment possible. Deep down, a substantial number of reenactors feel emotionally close to the Ming dynasty. For them, the Qing dynasty ruling from Manchuria imposed an alien set of governing structures, culture, and social customs, all of which found very little sympathy from the predominantly Han Chinese. Reenacting the Ming dynasty, a symbolic resistance, reveals a genuine yearning to return to and ultimately a stubborn belief in the continuity and unbroken evolution of Chinese culture and tradition: Ancestor worship in many ways constitutes our beliefs: we are united and unified with the same blood descended from the same ancestor and reenacting these rituals carries on what lies within our hearts. Continuity is the very virtue of being Chinese. We are not simply dressed up in ‘antique’ clothes to look ‘historical,’ we are living interpreters and inheritors of Chinese history, the only civilization with an unbroken tradition.274

Celebrating and commemorating Chinese traditions, history, language, and culture come as no novelty. The Confucius Institutes, headquartered in Hanban, which are affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, have flourished around the world since 2004 to promote Chinese language and culture. Tradition, whether invented or not, and its happy association with ideology has long been used and abused by the state and promoted or disrupted on a political whim. However, LJCS is different from the officially sanctioned heritage activities in one fundamental way: the majority of the participants are volunteers, members of a passionate and concerned public. In these large public displays, we see a teeming spectacle of ordinary people attempting to explore the past with their heart and mind, creativity and passion. It is this raw, intense, and palpable yearning from below, from the general public, that makes us ponder. Let me illustrate my point with two recent projects. The first one, the three-day Ming Tombs project, took place in April 2019. Collaborating with the Ming Tombs heritage site, the LJCS organized a range of ritual reenactments to commemorate the Ming dynasty. The most important part was the processions to pay imperial homage to ancestor mausoleums. The reenactment was based on the classic drawing of the Procession to the Ancestors’ Mausoleums (Chu Jing Ru Bi Tu) of the Ming dynasty and the authoritative Historical

 The emperor, Jiajing, carried out the New Deal (c. 1521–1530) to reform the political rule, economic policy, and cultural customs, including the style of the imperial garment and rituals.  Interview with Ji Enxun, cofounder of LJCS, on April 30, 2019, by Lou Shunan and Chan Wingtung.

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Records of the Ming Dynasty that describes spectacles of the Ming emperors paying homage to their ancestors’ mausoleums. The procession followed the same route, starting from the De Sheng Gate and leading to the Tian Shou Mountain, where massively luxurious mausoleums were built for the Ming emperors (Figure 19). The original route was approximately 45 kilometers along, and the actual walking route was 1.5 kilometers. However, walking along the original rite of passage lined with original sculptures and ceremonial figurines, for a fleeting moment, the participants travelled back to the era they have yearned for; at that moment, history was truly with them. The homage rituals were discontinued in the subsequent Qing dynasty and thus viewed as the ultimate tribute to ancestors from the imperial times in an authentically Han Chinese way. Deeply emotional, they are an inward journey of soul searching in an outward reenactment.

Figure 19: Procession to the Ancestors’ Mausoleums along the original route of the Ming Dynasty, April 5, 2019. Photo credit: LJCS.

The second part of the reenactment commemorated the sacrifice and prayed for beatitudes: the ceremonial commemoration in front of the Ling En Dian (temple) at the Ming Tombs. The material cultures were religiously laid out, the participants bowed to pay homage, Gong Ji (躬), and followed all the steps to offer sacrifice to ancestors or to pray to god for beatitudes. The third part was the archery ceremony, one of the most important rituals since the Qin dynasty (221 BC) when the first emperor unified China, and which continued at all levels from national to the local village throughout the imperial periods. According to the classic

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Liji,275 when a male child was born, he was expected to use mulberry wood as the bow and make the arrow from couch-grass, symbolizing that his ambition lies everywhere in the world. The archery ceremony was a critical step in adulthood, and it varied at four levels: grand archery for the emperors and higher-level bureaucrats, for the banquet, and for the local officials. Other activities included military equipment reenactment, Han garment shows, cultural products, and a Ming market recreation. Another project was the sacrificial commemoration at the Imperial Temple, the only imperial temple that survives today. The cultural reenactment, “paying homage to ancestors, commemorating wise predecessors,” took place in 2016 and 2017, with approximately three to four hundred people were involved each year. Centering around “three emperors and five sovereigns” – or the legendary rulers of antiquity–,276 the Temple consecrates the memorial tablets for these legendary rulers from time immemorial, with 180 emperors flanked alongside. The material culture has delivered a symbolic continuity since antiquity, as all Chinese are descendants of the same ancestors. The spiritual and cultural core is permanent and paramount, while the less important, or even human idiosyncrasy, marks the vicissitudes of imperial dynasties. Nationalism, real or imagined, has prevailed. Strictly following the official historical records such as the History of the Ming Dynasty (Ming Shi) and Records of the Ming Dynasty (Da Ming Hui Dian), the sacrificial ritual meticulously reenacted welcoming the god, offering silk garments and vegetarian food, reading sacrificial scripts, and the bowing and paying of homage by designated individuals. Dance and music, beautifully integrated in each step, demonstrated a perfect harmony of li and yue in which formalism joins performativity. In a solemn and pious mood, at a slow and reflective pace, the participants found something that has become a luxury in modern life (Figure 19). These projects offer a glimpse of a remarkable distance from a past that is performed in a controlled environment. At LJCS, sharing the interpretive power with the participants is paramount. “Everyone comes with something to contribute. At LJCS, we hate authority. If you have a different opinion, simply share with others – say what position to hold in a particular procession or what detail is

 Liji, Sheyi. Records of Rites, one of the Five Classics (Wujing) of Chinese Confucian literature. Liji underscores moral principles in its treatment of such subjects as royal regulations, development of rites, ritual objects and sacrifices, education, music, the behavior of scholars, and the doctrine of the mean (zhong yong), interpreted as staying neutral.  The three emperors refer to Fuxi, Shennong, and Xuanyuan. The five sovereigns refer to Shaohao, Zhuanxu, Diku, Yao, and Yushun. Taken together, they are regarded as the ancestors of all Chinese.

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wrong with a particular dress – we communicate and share with each other. I would rather see myself as an adviser, not as a director.”277 However, political censorship and lack of financial support remain major obstacles. LJCS has to use politically correct phrases such as cultural or folklore activities, cultural performance,278 expeditionary performance, etc., instead of historical reenactment.279 Similarly, “performers,” instead of “reenactors” is used – the gilded phrases require a certain political and practical savvy, with which LJCS obtained all the required paperwork from the myriad bureaucracies in a fairly efficient manner.

Nationalism from Below? When a teeming number of people take an imaginative leap into the past with long and various twists and turns, what exactly lies behind the haunting craving at such a scale? What easily come to mind is a new surge of nationalism in China. Chinese nationalism, from a cosmopolitan and popular perspective, surfaces from a cross-section of the participants. It often is relegated to an easy dumping ground for ideology or state patriotism. Not so visible, however, is the kind of nationalism and its presentation. Performing history through reenactment is driven by a surge of popular nationalism, a conscious construction of cultural memory and collective identity from below. Robert Wiebe offered an insightful perspective that “rather than a gigantic fraud perpetrated time and again on the mindless masses, nationalism thrived because it addressed basic human needs”280 and I agree. If popular nationalism addresses “basic human needs,” it is not a one-way traffic, and it needs an invested participant. Reflexive participation, as Jan Assmann observes, is part of a collective identity.281 Identity, in this light, is interpreted as “tacit knowledge, latent and everyday, that consistently structures and guides the thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions of the collective’s members.”282 The case of LJCS has revealed that how public engagement with the national past has become more, not less, complex. Many reenactors feel emotionally close to the Ming dynasty, the symbol of an unbroken Chinese culture and tradition; reenacting is a living interpretation. Re-

     

Interview with Ji Enxun on April 30, 2019. 文化表演或展演. 历史重演. Wiebe, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism, 11. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis [Cultural Memory], 134. Straub, “Personal and Collective Identity,” 76.

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turning to the Ming dynasty to create an uninterrupted Han-tradition had already been a central part of the agenda of prominent Chinese philologist, anti-Manchu revolutionary Zhang Binglin. In the 1900s, Zhang had called for the restoration of the earlier dynasty in his xenophobic struggle against the Manchus. In 1908, Min Bao, a newspaper, was banned by the Japanese government. Zhang coined the phrase “Zhonghua Minguo” which eventually became the name of the Chinese Republic. In 1909, he established Guangfu Hui (Revive the Light Society), an antiQing Empire organization originally organized by Cai Yuanpei in 1904. These efforts aimed at restoring Chinese history as an unbroken tradition to recreate Han-centrism of national historical memory. If the fascination with the Ming dynasty is important to the Han ethnicity, what does this tell us about the exclusion or inclusion of other ethnicities? The crescendo of Han culture and tradition reaches its apogee in the Ming dynasty. A sense of history and beauty is brilliantly provoked through the Han garment and rituals to fill the void of contemporary nostalgia. Today, a yearning for continuity still runs deep, but it does not have to be ethnically exclusive: “Yes, I particularly love the Ming dynasty, and I fully believe in Confucius’s thought, my pride in being Chinese is not narrow-minded or exclusive. Actually, I enjoy working with people from other ethnic backgrounds.”283 It is all a part of the quest for individual and collective cultural identity, for a pure sense of Chineseness, or in Benedict Anderson’s haunting phrase, “imagined communities.”284 A public performance is curated like an exhibition, an outward expression waiting to be internalized, respected from within. The need to hold onto something and reenacting ancient heritage releases the pent-up nostalgia, suggestive of an invented tradition – a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past to fill the emotional void.285 How far can new tradition use old materials to invent historical continuity? Back in 1911, Sun Yat-Sen envisioned the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and his nationalist ideal rarely spread beyond elite circles and often died with them. These exploratory intellectuals essentially kept their own company. None of those they were exhorting mounted a popular nationalistic movement along lines they advocated, and their energies were never fully tapped. However, popular nationalism came by other routes and in other guises. If there had been no Sun Yat-Sen,

 Interview with reenactor A in the Bozou Rebellion reenactment on June 9, 2019.  Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

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hundreds of millions of Chinese still would have mobilized as Chinese in opposition to the Japanese invasion of the 1930s and 1940s.286 The first two decades of the twenty-first century have challenged the assumption that nationalism remains to be invented and articulated by the elites from the top, then imagined and consumed by the ordinary at the bottom.287 In this spirit, with a strong sense of agency, historical authority is shared and sometimes challenged through a diverse range of vernacular understandings of a common ritual, running parallel or competing with the official narratives. Instead of bold, in-the-face type of confrontation, in Bozhou Rebellion reenactment the professionals’ voice is seriously compromised. Take the assessment of key historical figures such as Yang Yinglong in the Bozhou Rebellion as an example. An officially condemned rebel, Yang is persistently portrayed as a negative figure. However, hardcore reenactors questioned whether Yang was a real insurgent against the state. They reasoned that the Yang family had ruled Bozhou since the Tang dynasty and that as the last generation of this prominent family, Yang Yinglong was not an ethnic ruler in a traditional Tusi system. He already owned his legacy in Bozhou. Why would he attempt to rebel against the state rule? What were the real motives behind the battle? These questions were ridiculed as fantasy, not real history. Therefore, when reenactors engaged in rethinking the past, they ended up as outsiders, feeling strangely alienated. As one of the reenactors with historical expertise lamented, “I was invited to participate, but received very little respect. They (the armor people) gave out orders as to who should stand where. Everyone comes here out of pure passion . . . they (the organizers) need to learn how to get the public truly involved, not as spectators but as true participants!”288 Here we see a diverse audience carving out a communicative space.

Cultural Memory: Reenacted and Remediated Reenacting history expresses anxiety over the present and acts upon uncertainty about the future: it meets a psychological need and fills a cultural void; it points to a collective yearning for identity. In a pioneering essay in 1988, Jan Assmann defined Cultural Memory as “body of reusable texts, images, and rituals to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that self-

 Wiebe, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism, 128.  Whitmeyer, “Elites and Popular Nationalism,” 321–41.  Interview with Zhou Yu on June 15, 2019.

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image.”289 Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity. In many ways, cultural memory and collective identity are mutually constructed as a dynamic process. All acts of cultural remembering show a specific mediality.290 Groups and societies, with media as the agent, relate to past events in a constructive, evaluative, and self-referential manner, in a way that is similar to individual remembering. They administer the past and its relics in a manner that seems in some way to correspond to the individual knowing that. Finally, they are influenced by past events and traditional procedures. If cultural memory is the sum of the total of all the processes (biological, media, social) which are involved in the interplay of past and present within socio-cultural contexts,291 cultural memory becomes emergent in this mediated and remediated process of remembering. It is emergent because if we view performance as a dynamic and complex adaptive system, the process of performing history generates outcome from action and interaction of agent, or generators of emergent behavior of multiple memory communities. When cultural memory is reenacted in the ritualized space, it supports collective identity, and the dynamics of cultural remembering is more than the sum of individual remembering. The hallmark of emergence, declares John Holland, is “this sense of much coming from little,” and it is “recognizable and recurring.”292 In reenactment, historical information is redistributed, aggregated, and reinterpreted. When such history involves a historically conscious and media savvy public, cultural memory is reenacted and remediated in the public, and a new form of public history is taking shape. How does it work? In what follows, I will explore it in three key aspects: remediation, authenticity, and circulation. First, cultural memory is remediated in the public space through rituals, performances, and material cultures,293 all productive alliances in the dynamic process of collective remembering, and all of which are forms of collective remembering. Memory works in the virtual space deserves a whole separate study.294 Here the public space is primarily physical, storied, and communicative, where creative ten Assmann and Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 125–33, esp. 132 (this article was originally published in Jan Assmann and Tonio Holscher, eds., Kultur und Geddchtnis (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19).  Erll and Rigney, Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 104.  Ibid., 108–10.  Holland, Emergence: From Order to Chaos, 2.  Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Yu, “Glorious Memories of Imperial China and the Rise of Chinese Populist Nationalism,” 1174–1187; Gustafsson, “Chinese Collective Memory on the Internet: Remembering the Great Famine in Online Encyclopedias,” 184–197; Wang, “Contesting the Past on the Chinese Internet: Han-

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sion between traces of the past and contingencies of the present loom large. How does this tension play out in the ritual reenactment of LYCS? Ritual is often described as a routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic action that is a purely formal and merely physical expression of culturally confirmed ideas;295 as the means by which collective beliefs and ideals are simultaneously generated, experienced, and affirmed as real by the community.296 In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused with the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turns out to be the same world, thus producing that idiosyncratic transformation in one’s sense of reality. Thus, ritual is the means by which individual perceptions and behaviors are socially appropriated or conditioned. Hence, “a ritual is not just a pattern of meaning; it is also a form of social interaction.”297 Across a vast span of Chinese history, rituals ebb and flow, adopt and change, but the core elements remain permanent: they are symbolic, commemorative, and morally and pedagogically mediated among performers. In a range of variations, rituals have integrated nature and culture, the real and the imaginative, tradition and myth, the individual and the group, history and memory. The outward rituals represent a strong, almost religious, sense of collective sympathy and identity that is instinctively inward. The rituals, as a performance language, can be interpreted as collective and symbolic texts and repetitive rule-governed series of activities, which “draws the attention of its participants to objects of thought and feeling which they hold to be of special significance,”298 facilitating a sense of continuity with the past. Ritual reenactment of LYCS traces its origins to the Cultural Movement of the Han nationality (CMH). The movement, roughly from the Tang dynasty until the Qing dynasty advocates and which preserves the four-thousand-year culture of the Han nationality, is also known as Hua Xia civilization.299 The Han garment, a quintessential part of Chinese civilization, becomes a tangible link to the past. The movement has experienced a vigorous revival, known as the Han Cultural Revival (HCR), since the early twenty-first century. Out of this renaissance, renewed interest has emerged in the complicated cultural system with a long and tumultuous history, as has a deep yearning for the ancient tradition, and a popular quest to identify the very virtue of being Chinese (Figures 20 and 21).

centrism and Mnemonic Practices,” 304–17; Han, “Journalism and Mnemonic Practices in Chinese Social Media: Remembering Catastrophic Events on Weibo,” 162–75.  Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 19.  Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology.  Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 168.  Connerton, How Societies Remember, 44.  This refers to the culture and tradition of the Han nationality, including its language, philosophy, literature, art, science, society, and many other aspects.

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Figure 20: Sacrificial ritual reenactment at the Imperial Temple, April 4, 2017. Photo credit: LJCS.

Figure 21: Sacrificial ritual reenactment at the Imperial Temple, April 4, 2017. Photo credit: LJCS.

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Material culture occupies a central place in the HCR. The garment proceeds first in reviving the Hua Xia civilization, or Hua Xi Fu Xing, Yi Guan Xian Xi. The dress codes follow a strict governing structure. However, wearing the green dress (qing fu) on various occasions implies how the formality of a ritual can be anecdotally disrupted on a whim and reflects a clash between progress and the inertia of dead rules and rituals. For example, historically, one should wear a special dress made of a deer’s hide to participate in the sacrificial rituals of the Ming dynasty. This kind of dress, the pi bian, decorated with jewels and gems, represented one of the premier tiers in the less varied hierarchy of the imperial dressing system. The elaborate decorations and delicate tailor-making skills not only clearly indicate imperial grandeur and unchallenged authority but also demonstrate impracticality. When one emperor did not follow the rule, the rest of the crew simply followed suit. Instead of dressing in the heavy and cumbersome sacrificial dress, they wore a much simpler and more comfortable version, the green dress, for sacrificial ceremonies. If physical comfort was the initial excuse for wearing the green dress, some managed to find a clue in the classic historical works and interpreted this interchangeably with qin, which means physical proximity and emotional closeness, as one part of the ancestors’ laws. According to the official historical records of the Sui Dynasty (581–618), the concubines and higher bureaucrats should wear qing fu for sacrificial ceremonies and other important occasions.300 However, reenactment moves beyond a fixated interpretation of material cultures. Stefanie Samida explores the relationship between material culture and reenactment on three levels, the meaning of things for actors while performing reenactments, the meaning of things within the reenactment community, and the meaning of things as presented to an audience, which involves a degree of mediation.301 In LYCS, a series of rigidly defined activities, the original architecture layout, the actual historical place, and the meticulously obeyed movements are all meant to stir the visual imagination and encourage a constant dialogue with historical processes. Take the proper way of walking and carrying oneself as an example. One should walk with one’s head and shoulders straight up. While walking, one should also take care of every piece of decoration, which always has some practical function, so that one has to walk gingerly to avoid even a slight disturbance. Take the sacrificial rituals and ceremonies as another example. One has to fake death to be brought alive to commemorate the dead; a youngster needs to eat the sacrificial food to search for the souls of the dead; Chinese wines and paper money are en-

 “Concubines and spouses of the officials higher than the third-class should wear Qingfu.” See Wei Zheng, The Book of Sui.  Samida, “Material Culture,” 131.

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shrined; obituaries are read with fake tears: all these provide venues for remembering the dead in another world. In this way, processions, postures, gestures, and movements are reenacted as part of what Arnold Van Gennep wrote in his classic The Rites of Passage, which includes three phases, separation, transition, and incorporation.302 It is in the intervening phase of transition, or “limen” (threshold in Latin) that the ritual objects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states. Victor Turner further defined the liminal phase as “a betwixt-and-between, a neither-this-nor that domain,”303 and liminality is both more creative and more destructive, and therefore anti-structure. The liminal phase presents an ambiguous state, “the breakthrough of chaos into cosmos, of disorder into order,”304 in which ritual and myth crisscross, and history, heritage, and memory become inseparable. Consciousness is also provoked in a rapidly shifting mode, as it moves to and from where the reenacted world and the historical world converge. Many scholars explore the Han Garment movement as heritage,305 a cultural industry,306 a social movement,307 or material cultures.308 Kevin Carrico discusses ritual reenactment of the land of rites and etiquette with two cases, Coming of Age in Shenzhen and My Big Sacred Han Wedding,309 and observes how the revitalization of an essential ritual is constitutive of both personal identity and the social order. However, history and memory emerging from below does not merely refer to public participation; it means the participating public selects historical events as “reference canon memory” and turns them into “cultural working memory.”310 In reenactment, they carve out a space for mediation and remediation, for communication, for storytelling.

 Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 11.  Turner, “From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play,” 40.  Ibid., 46.  Ying, The Hanfu Movement and Intangible Cultural Heritage: Considering the Past to Know the Future.  Wang, et al., “Research on the Development Mode of Hanfu Cultural Industry Under the Background of “Internet+” – Analysis Based on Cross-Sectional Data of 1002 Hanfu Taobao Stores,” 603–14.  Yuan, A Study of Han Apparel Movement.  Li, et al., “Hanfu Rising: The Simulation and Evaluation of Chinese Cultural Garments: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison Study.”  Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today, 108–21.  Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 108–10.

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Along the line, imagination intervenes during a continuous readjustment of the self and world in experience; imagination and reality intertwines. Tangled scenes of life are made more intelligible through representing their meanings as the subject matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or “impassioned” experience. “Reenacting consists in rethinking, and rethinking already contains the critical moment that forces us to take the detour by way of the historical imagination.”311 What kind of consequence would have followed? How to resolve the contention between imagination and authenticity, the fictional and the factual? Aside from blatant deviations from historical facts, in a theatrical performance, participants enjoy ample room of being unsettled, “of having expectations overturned, assumptions about the subjectmatter challenged, of finding that they were personally being confronted with strong emotions or were expected to participate verbally or even physically.”312 Such an experience, riddled with the creative imagination, helped the participants not to take stereotypes for reality or to simplify history down to well-established rules or unsupported analogies. With the blurring line between imagination and reality, multiple time scales are introduced, as we see in the Bozhou Rebellion reenactment. Time works at three scales: the historical time when the actual battle took place, the heritage time when the place was designated a national historical site in 2015, and the reenacted time filled with contemporary expectations in 2018. When such ambiguous temporal and spatial senses converge in the reenacted battlefield, an alternate reality emerges. This reality, telescoping time and space at a different scale, challenges the linear, non-recurring temporality and causal connection between various moments in history that historicism holds dearly. This “cross-or multi-temporal engagement,” in Rebecca Schneider’s words, reminds us of “the very pastness of the past that is never complete, never completely finished, but incomplete.”313 The past is thus not preserved as such but is cast in symbols as they are represented in oral myths or in writings, performed in feasts, and as they are continually illuminating a changing present. In the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history fades. Second, all modes of historical reenactments value authenticity, but authenticity is not automatically validated or proven; rather, authenticity is experienced and performed. When historians reconstruct the past environment to capture an accurate history, or “what really happened” in a Rankean sense, they often ignore, consciously or unconsciously, “the visual imagination of the physical world  Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past, 8.  Jackson, Anthony, and Kidd, Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation, 18.  Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 33.

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in which historical activity takes place.”314 Historical reenactment, by contrast, probes the psychology of the very past that the reenactors are passionate about, thus bringing us closer to “what really happened.” Historical reenactment, by contrast, probes the psychology of the very past that the reenactors are passionate about, thus bringing us closer to the reenactors’ version of “what really happened.” Stephen Gapps reminds us that the “public turn toward reenactment as authentic experience is not to be confused with reenactors’ own use of the term authenticity.”315 Vanessa Agnew and Juliane Tomann also acknowledge that “reenactment lacks a mechanism for defining authenticity in affirmative terms. Instead, reenactors often negotiate among themselves, and in dialogue with their audiences, as to what constitutes an authentic representation of the past.”316 In their mission to achieve an authentic mise-en-scene, reenactors strive towards a complete, visible form of authenticity; this urge towards a visual, participatory history is a seductive version of the past – of experiencing history rather than reading it.317 Understanding motivations in a broader social framework could help historians offer more adequate causal explanations. When reenactors act upon such mental and motivational probes, they may translate the pursuit for authenticity in a visual and visceral manner, as Stephen Gapps rightly observes, “By virtue of its performative nature, reenactment is open-ended – an ephemeral site of history, always ready to be constituted a new at the next reenactment. Authenticity in reenactment inspires people to read other performances critically . . . reenactors craft a theater of history through authentic props and costumes.”318 In ritual reenactment, routine is written seamlessly into a formative part of human psychology. Ever since the ancient times, ritual in China has carried a moral implication: it does not tell you what or how you should do something; rather, one imitates it as the first step. By copying, one gradually learns and understands it in a larger historical process and is then unconsciously influenced by the process, ultimately morphing into the process. “You can feel and touch history. Once you put on the Han garment, walking along the historical route with such a crowd, you never feel out of place; you are naturally part of the whole. We reenact the historical time as well: the emperors pay homage to their predecessors at this time of the year as well. I am in step

 Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” 492.  Gapps, “Practices of Authenticity,” 183.  Agnew and Tomann, “Authenticity,” 23.  McCalman, Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn, 60–61.  Gapps, “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History,” 395–409, 398–99.

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with history and remake history in some way. It is a remarkably empowering and humbling experience!”, as one of the reenactors commented.319 Most participants go from dressing up to becoming an integral part of the ritual. They do not just present the past in funny dresses as casual onlookers; they need a more immersive and fuller participation in “history.” They mince no words in their professionalism regarding minute details. For them, reenactment means so much more than casually wearing a Han cultural style dress in public; it is a serious hobby, both the dress and the ritual. “We know every single detail of the garment that we put on. We research the archives and hand-make these dresses based on rigorous archival research . . . we are living witnesses of an ancient heritage.”320 Reenacting seeks to compress the past into an overwhelming personal, concrete experience of the present.321 If authenticity is achieved through performance, it often moves beyond the mimetic level to “investigative reenactment,” a more calculated and structured reenactment. When reenactments occur at the original site, modern individuals speak directly to the not-so-distant past by Chinese standards; the clash of contemporary values and expectation of the ancient tradition requires live interpretations. The physical environment offers an intimate historical ambiance; it is simultaneously constraining and enabling. Still, reenactments are at best only very rough approximations of the original, but in renewing perspectives on a simulated historical world, they have the potential to interpreting the past from different perspectives. In the Bozhou Rebellion reenactment, reenactors not only value material authenticity, but also place it in a larger social and historical context. The nonmilitary aspects of the war at many levels evoked the full imaginative appeal of the Ming dynasty life, and even a fake spear became a talisman against rootless modern life. When historians make a mockery of the imaginative elements in reenactments or revise some factual details by adding footnotes, they miss the real purpose and potential of reenactment. Reenactors participate not to confirm what is documented but often focus on what is absent in the textbooks, or a different scale of history that could be managed by individuals and small groups, says Stephen Gapps.322 Tony Horwitz expressed a similar passion, though in a different cultural context, in his widely popular Confederates in the Attic, quoting

 Interview with Zhang Ziyi, one of the full-time employees at LJCS, on May 7, 2019, by Lou Shunan and Chan Wingtung.  Interview with Zhang Ziyi on June 9, 2019, by Lou Shunan and Chan Wingtung.  Hall, “Civil War Reenactors and the Postmodern Sense of History,” 7–11.  Gapps, “Practices of Authenticity,” 185.

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one of the reenactors, “we are here to find the real answers, to read between the lines in the history books, and then share our experience with spectators.”323 An experienced authenticity also means a stronger sense of relevancy and ownership. As one of the reenactors observes: “If the performance is just to exhibit, to showcase for others, it is fake. We are here looking for who we are, a kind of soul-searching, and the performance is an inward journey as well as an outward declaration.”324 For the sacrificial ritual reenactment, the LJCS searched for the Zhu family descendants through their kinship and clan associations around the world, because this part of reenactment commemorates the emperor Zhu Di. It is more authentic to have someone whose family name is Zhu to perform in the worship procession, as one of the reenactors observed.325 When absolute authenticity is impossible, they seek for a different version of authenticity, as another reenactor elaborated, Of course, it is difficult, if not altogether impossible to achieve absolute authenticity. We try our best, nevertheless. That is why we exhaust the available archival materials and use them as the standard for reenactment. We make compromises here and there. For example, no women were allowed in the official sacrificial ceremonies in the Ming dynasty. We arrange positions so that women can participate. Are we changing history? Yes! Women held an equal social status as men today, and we cannot exclude them from performing the kind of history about which they are equally passionate. We are not a bunch of antiquarians; we are interpreting our history and tradition back to the public—historically, only the emperors and high-level officials could worship; now we, the ordinary public, can do it in the same elaborate fashion. Isn’t it incredible?

The emancipatory connotation flows so naturally from her enthusiastic commentary.326 Third, cultural memory actively circulates among performers. In reenactment, the past is reanimated through a consciously physical and psychological experience.327 The cultural memory of such experience is the “ongoing result of public communication and of the circulation of memories in mediated form.”328 Performing history through reenactment thus becomes a new form of public history, “a process by which the past is constructed into history and a practice which has the capacity for involving people as well as nations and communities in the

     

Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, 136. Interview with reenactor A at LJCS, on June 9, 2019, by Lou Shunan and Chan Wingtung. Ibid. Interview with reenactor B at LJCS, on June 15, 2019, by Lou Shunan and Chan Wingtung. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience: Cultural Memory in the Present, 243–44, 262. Rigney, “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory,” 16.

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creation of their own histories.”329 As we have seen so far, many emergent history practices offer an ever-expanding space of dissidence and possibilities outside established categories or academic fields, historical reenactment being one of them. Such practices start to have a profound impact on how people see, feel about, and engage with the past. Into the twenty-first century, media technology has triggered seismic changes in the public history landscape. Instead of being more than merely passive and transparent conveyors of information, media are always emergent, and technologies for meaning-making and networking emerge in relation to each other and in interaction with each other.330

Shaping Historical Consciousness How does historical reenactment, one of a diverse range of publicly consumed and participatory history, impact the historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese people? In what capacity can the reenactment contribute to historical understanding? Regarding the first question, the influence is visibly felt. The reenactors we interviewed in the LYCS case observe positively about evocative and emotional effects, an affective engagement, a sine qua non of popular participation in history. In David Harvey’s words, “the immediacy of events becomes the stuff of which consciousness is forged.”331 As a form of historical representation, reenactment invites multiple voices, which further allow for possibilites for producing new historical meaning. All representations of the past draw on available media technologies, and media, and, in this way, play an active role in shaping our understanding of the past, in “mediating” between us (as readers, viewers, listeners) and past experiences, and hence in setting the agenda for future acts of remembrance within society. All LJCS projects, for example, are organized, presented, and disseminated through social media platforms such as weibo and we-chat. The narrative competence of historical consciousness provides further moral guidance in actual life situations. For example, a sacrificial commemoration organized by the LJCS shows the moral-ethical potential. Primarily morally and pedagogically driven, the reenactment took place at the Zhengding Confucius Temple

 Kean and Martin, The Public History Reader, xiv.  In the age of new media, the rapid revolution of the media technology, agent for dissemination and circulation, has increased the public access to these material traces and also networks the public, thus making it mutually generative to a new understanding of media as complex and dynamic systems rather than as a line-up of discrete and stable technologies.  Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, 54.

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in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, the past twelve years. Key participants include teachers and students from a local middle school, with experts in Confucius studies offering guidance. The commemoration deliberately focused on the ritual of respecting one’s teachers in the ancient academy for classic learning. The core tenets of Li involve the heaven and the earth, ancestors, and emperors and teachers, and the sacrificial rituals belong to the “emperors and teachers.”332 The contemporary implications of reenacting this ancient ritual finds expressions in the local senior high school students performing as musicians and dancers. They were trained to play the traditional musical instruments and dance the traditional dances. The moral lessons were seamlessly integrated into the training. Students learned how to respect their teachers, follow the tradition, and appreciate history and culture. In this process, a cult was reenacted, a ritual performed. In this process, ritual reenactment evoked, in a curious twist, a holy and homey sense of history. In this case, the ritual reenactments transform the didactic function into temporal and spatial possibilities of historical interpretations. A sense of time flows through the reenacted element li, the sense-creating procedures, guiding our moral decisions. Here history is not treated as a static thing, as we see at the many designated official heritage sites across the country, but rather a cultural performance, reenacted and performed as a contemporary version of historical understanding. At a subtler level, performing “into” history, an immersive experience, becomes a process of reconstructing cultural identity and memory, a form of negotiation of historical values and social meanings. Now we come to the second question: does conscious experience necessarily lead to knowledge? Performance has the accessibility or ability to ignite, construct, and sustain cultural memory, but does it come at a price of serious analytical thinking and analysis? The mechanism of sympathy, i.e., the identification with characters in the original historical contexts, as the historical drama projects show, or the identification with the cultural and nationalistic implications in the ritual reenactments, may jeopardize the critical distance needed for historical investigation. The control of distance evidently involves much more than an aesthetic or emotional impact alone, warns Mark Phillips, it also carries ideological implications.333

 In Liji, Xunzi, one of the ancient philosophers, generalizes the core of the idea Li in three categories, i.e., heaven and earth (tian di), ancestors (zu xian), and emperors and teachers (jun shi). Sacrificial rituals carried out at schools initially adopted a flexible format and gradually evolved into rituals dedicated to Confucius and his students.  Quoted in Seixas, Theorizing Historical Consciousness, 93–94. See also Phillips. Society and Sentiment Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820.

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If “historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the redoing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the present . . . The only way in which I can know my own mind is by performing some mental act or other and then considering what the act is that I have performed.”334 So far as experience consists of mere consciousness, of sensation and feelings pure and simple, such experience is true. But an act of thought is not a mere sensation or feeling. It is knowledge, and knowledge is more than immediate consciousness. If the process of knowledge is not merely a flow of consciousness, how does the conscious experience become epistemology? Or more precisely, how does performing history help us understand historical complexity, reconstruct a lost world, enhance our historical understanding? In reenactment, we see a nuanced transition from expertise to experience, in which a personal judgment is involved in seeking for a historical truth, a reciprocal construction of identity and knowledge. Such knowledge, as Michael Polyani defines, is tacitly knowing.335 It is historical knowledge-in-practice. This type of historical knowledge is internalized; it is internalized to echo the inner psychology of the involved public. It is this raw, intense, and palpable yearning from below that, as a social surgery, probes the psychology of the very past that the reenactors genuinely care about. Despite its potential for harnessing the wisdom of the crowds,336 however, performing history in various modes of practice does not expunge its limitations. Many performances so far engage only a superficial level of research, lacking methodological rigor and critical interpretation. They “can only work effectively by sending us back to the conventional sources of historical evidence armed with a new set of questions and a renewed sensibility,” as Alexander Cook suggests.337 Alun Munslow also warns us that “(other)modes of expression have often been claimed to be the cutting edge of experiment, but more often than not such modes remain epistemologically unchallenging.”338 The visceral nature of conscious experience can be a powerful stimulus to reflect or to mobilize, but it has not teased out larger historiographical issues. ✶✶✶✶✶

 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 132.  Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension.  Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations.  Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” 494.  Munslow, Narrative and History, 103.

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Performing history is a distinctive expression of cultural memory mediated and remediated in the present in China. It foregrounds the needs and desires of the present. On many occasions, a spectacle of modern people passionately and intimately engages in dialogue with an ancient past. Although the experiential has not yet been elevated to the epistemological, its massive appeal and its capacity to mobilize, suggest itself, performing history is here to stay. Such “unconventional” forms of history should be encouraged precisely because they do not fit into any established categories: they add alternative perspectives, and they encourage diversity – a diverse foray into the past that remains perpetually open to all. They boast potential for new modes of historical inquiry. Let me point out three of them. First, performing history raises new questions, or gives fresh attention to the historical subjects that had long been dismissed as trivial, such as garments, armor, dialects, gestures, processions, etc. A focus on material culture, especially on how they enhance a particular performance of identity, is worth pursuing. Second, performing history challenges, or at least has the potential to challenge, the established historical canons, explanations, methodology, and thinking process. It unsettles the past. The tension between the factual and the counterfactual, the real and the imaginative, opens up new possibilities for historical interpretation. Last, and most significant, the democratic impulse enacted in performance can nurture serious discussions on historical issues and can cultivate a shared interpretive authority in a culture where history is highly controlled and censored by the state. I started this chapter with a conversation with an armor maker, and will end it with the same conversation: “This is a different type of research: when some scholars engage with historical reenactment, they do it in an academic or a purely technical way, they do not care if their work reaches the public. For us, every minute detail needs to be translated into that piece of armor for the public to wear!”339 The armor maker represents a more educated, sophisticated, and demanding public in China: they passionately engage with rigorous research; they embrace a different, sometimes deeper and unexplored reality; their work epitomizes a different kind of commitment stepping beyond educational or occupational realms. In this vein, performing history illuminates more than an intellectual gap; it reveals an emotional void, a deep anxiety. It does not only dramatize what has already been known, but also motivates and mobilizes the public to learn something different and communicate those fresh insights to a wider audience. It is up to a new generation of trained public historians to fulfill that potential, to make that ultimate leap of faith.

 Interview with an armor maker on May 9, 2019.

Chapter 7 Playing the Past: Historical Video Games as Participatory Public History During the past two decades, digital media have changed the speed and scale of historical materials accessed and absorbed by ordinary Chinese people. In a virtual space, when a myriad of historical representations both take affect as its object and its effect, people engage with history with more liberty, and history becomes an interactive, immersive, and embodied experience. Historical video games, as one genre of historical reenactment in the digital environment, are booming. If the traditional reenactment emphasizes the performatory challenge embedded in a variety of cultural practices of engaging the past from theatrical and living history performance to museum exhibits, television, film, travelogue, and historiography,340 historical video games, however, a digital-ludic reenactment, engages the exploratory challenge, which changes the course and outcome of the whole event, with the competitive uncertainty of ludonarrative outcome able to present some of the tension between contingency and causality that is inherent to the fragmentary process of lived experience.341 Probing the affective, imaginative, and playful nature of historical video games, this chapter analyzes the methodological value and pedagogical virtue of the counterfactual thinking involved in well-designed video games, and discusses how these games have digitally and collectively shaped the historical consciousness of players. It further explores that, with a potential for a shared authority, historical video games have emerged as participatory public history.

Video Games in China Long before video games were invented, a variety of games, such as cards, dice, board games, and Chinese chess, flourished as part of Chinese culture. Some have speculated on the relationship between a game called the Game of Leaves (yezi xi) and the development of printing technology in the Tang and Song dynasties

 Agnew, “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” 327.  Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice, 203, 205. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-009

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(618–1279 AD).342 Some have related rule-based games and sports to national identity, granting them a certain aura of authority; others have also demonstrated the way in which sport and national identity were interwoven in the Republican China of the first half of the twentieth century.343 More recently, the deployment of games in the performance of national identity and projection of soft power has been widely debated in relation to the Beijing Olympics of 2008.344 Originating from the West, video games first appeared in mainland China in 1994. Object Software, the first business entity dedicated to game design, development, and service, was launched in Beijing in 1995. In 2000, Fate of the Dragon, designed by Object Software, made its debut at an E3 international exhibition, an occasion referred to as the “Oscars of digital entertainment.” The game brilliantly integrated the history of the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 AD) and entered the acclaimed global top-100 games in 2001. The market value of the Chinese gaming industry reached 500 million RMB (72.7 million USD) in 2001, among which mobile games accounted for 310 million RMB (45 million USD), surpassing personal computer (PC) games for the first time. Three years later, the market value of mobile games reached 24,700 million RMB (3592 million USD). An extraordinary year for the gaming industry, 2005 saw the increased sale of online products and added-value service replacing the sale of game-cards, which had long been a major revenue generator, to become the key profit generating business model of the gaming industry. In July, the China International Digital Entertainment Expo, or better known as China Joy, supported and advised by a series of key national agencies, was established to expand and promote digital entertainment products and technology application. The General Administration of Sport (GAS) approved E-sport, or Internet gaming, as one of the official sports in China. Basking in its official blessing, China Heroes (Zhonghua Yingxiong Pu), a grand, patriotic Internet game project, was launched in September 2005. The project aimed to develop video games based on the stories of historical “movers and shakers” in Chinese history. Jointly organized and administered by the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) of the People’s Republic of China and the Central Committee of the Community Youth League CCCYL), the first round of the project comprised Zheng He, Lei Feng, Bao Zheng, Zheng Chenggong, and Yue Fei, all of whom were prominent historical figures designated as representative of certain historical periods. The design, application, tone, and mood had to serve the

 Lo, “The Game of Leaves: An Inquiry into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards,” 389–406.  Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Culture in Republican China.  Liboriussen and Martin, “Special Issue: Games and Gaming in China,” 227.

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lofty goal of instilling citizenship, patriotism, and nationalism. With a dozen games, the National Internet Gaming Publishing Project was launched later that year. Legally, any game company that wants to sell its product in China needs a license to do so. During the past few years, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT) put stricter regulations on granting licenses. Three genres of games—gambling titles such as Mahjong and Poker, games that deal with the country’s imperial history, and games featuring corpses and blood—are banned. China’s Online Games Ethics Committee (OGEC) is only a small part of a larger trend in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against video games. Media-oriented social discourse about resisting playing such games persistently emphasizes the negative effects of the games. “Contamination of spiritual civilization” appears in nationwide news reports and municipal propaganda, warning people, especially youth, about the dangers of indulging in video games. Curiously, however, against all odds, both the game sales market and game players have both steeply increased. As smart phones are popularized, the Internet is optimized, and games are diversified, the mobile game market has jumped to being one of the fastest-developing subdivisions of the game market, occupying 62.5 percent of the total in 2018. Cutting-edge technology, such as 5G Internet, game engines, and cloud computing, keeps driving the market. While most of the studies approach games and gaming in fairly broad industrial, policy, political, technocratic, cultural perspectives, the scope for this study is more modest. It focuses on historical video games. The dictionary definition of the video game, i.e., “a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen,” is technically correct, but it simplifies video games as a form of interaction. Games themselves, video or not, are first and foremost an expressive medium. Marshall McLuhan observed with startling clarity that the action and effects, rather than the content of the media, drive the game and asserts that “games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture.”345 His prophetic adage that “the medium is the message,”346 though eccentric at the time it was written, offers an inkling of insight and inspiration. This study is premised on that insight, i.e., that video games are a distinct cultural medium. As a quintessentially global technology, video games have permeated in virtually every country in the world – created and played differently in different places, as cultural and national context impact the circulation and meaning of games in myriad

 McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, 208.  Ibid., ix.

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ways.347 The term “cultural ludology” focuses on the analysis of video games as such, attending to the myriad ways culture is incorporated into game mechanics, but at the same time recognizes the signifying potential of the cultural environment in which games are created, designed, manufactured, purchased, played and otherwise put to use.348 Situated within this broad frame, video games, as technological and cultural products, are shaped by concerns and practices that are specific to a certain culture. When “history” and “video games” are combined together, an oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historical events, transcendence and immanence, and representation and presence occurs.349 In the constant battle between the factual and the counterfactual, historical video games are not merely another representational mode of history. Rather, they simulate, transcend, create, and renovate. They carve out a space for diverse voices, conflicting perspectives, the fusion of reality and virtuality, and dialogues between the factual and the counterfactual.

Historical Video Games: Feeling, Touching, and Playing the Past The digitization of history in video games has flourished since 2001 when the Internet became popularized in China. Digital environments, characterized by Murray, are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic.350 Analyzing video games in such an environment requires some methodological thinking351 on three dimensions, i.e., gameplay (the players’ actions, strategies and motives), game-structure (the rules of the game, including the simulation rules), and gameworld (fictional content, topology/level design, textures etc).352 Historical video games can thus be roughly categorized into role-playing games (RPGs), strategy games, adventure games, puzzle games, card games, control games, resource management games, massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), simulation games, etc. These categories are by no means mutually exclusive, and

 Penix-Tadsen, Video Games and the Global South, 16; Apperley, Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global; Wolf, Video Games around the World; Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back.  Penix-Tadsen, Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America.  Fogu, “Digitalizing Historical Consciousness,” 103–21.  Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.  Carvalho, “Videogames as Tools for Social Science History,” 794–819.  Aarseth, “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis,” 28.

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interpretations actually need to cross-reference games in each category. A comprehensive survey of historical video games requires a separate study, and what follows is an illustrative discussion.

Strategy Games, Where Rhetoric Meets Procedure The defining characteristic for strategy games is strategical thinking, a “more cerebral, less embodied in their presentation of history-as-experience, but no less interesting in their postmodern complexity and interrogrative historiography.”353 This type of game is particularly event driven, usually including dramatizing battle scenes with levels of decision-making at various historical junctures. Players are offered plausible choices for making decisions in a problematic context with limited resources, unexpected hurdles, and physical or ideological biases. The logic of winner’s history generally suffices with the application of hero-like historical characters. Strategy, as a computational artifact with cultural meaning, rhetoric, and persuasion, lies at the core. One of the most popular historical strategy games, the Romance of Three Kingdoms (RTK), a game series originally developed in 1985 by a Japanese game company called Koei Co., Ltd. as an offline, turn-based strategy game, has enjoyed immense popularity in China. The story of RTK adopted the story of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most tumultuous historical periods in Chinese history in which three emperors separately claimed that they, individually, were the legitimate successors of the previous Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD). The period witnessed hundreds of heroes who have been worshiped since then, an idea of brotherhood applauded, and wars remembered as major parts of public discussions. Historian Chen Shou documented the history in his brilliant Records of the Three Kingdoms, written in literary Chinese.354 Records of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most important historical documents for the study of ancient Chinese history, provided extensive material for a more popular novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by novelist Guanzhong Luo in the fourteenth century. As one of the four classical novels in Chinese literature, Romance of the Three Kingdoms spans the time from the end of the West Han period (202 BC–8 AD) until the beginning of the East Jin period (317–420 AD).355 Skillfully integrating the classic 36 military strategies into historical narratives, plots, and characters,356 the novel    

De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 141. Chen, Records of the Three Kingdoms (San Guo Zhi). Luo, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San Guo Yan Yi). Sun, The Art of Warfare (Sun Zi Bing Fa).

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presents a panoramic view of the political conflicts, complicated battles, and nuances of the cultural codes and rituals of the time. Despite the work’s unchallenged literary status, perusing approximately 800,000 words poses a practical challenge. RTK incorporated historical settings, characters, and narratives, while creatively changing the context, images, and judgments to be made. Ever since the release of its first edition, the production of 11 evolving editions has attracted millions of gamers in Asia. The subsequent waves of technological revolutions may have improved the delivery technologies and formats, but the original storyline remains largely the same. In RTK, players can choose to play the role of any emperor, manage the economy, command the military forces of the governed cities, summon military counselors and generals, and expand their territory by fighting against other emperors. They can also choose a commoner to defeat the warlords and unite China, thus virtually realizing the failed aspirations depicted in the novel.357 Various systems designed to help players situate the historical events in a broader context influence players’ strategy choices. If a player is more familiar with the particularities of each character and of the surrounding terrain, the player can win the war more efficiently by deploying appropriate strategies. For example, when designers add a free-deployment system, players can enjoy the liberty of changing routes and destinations during the procession. The battles are dramatized with a series of surprises that require the players to deploy corresponding strategies. Ancient military wisdom, such as “luring enemies to the deep” (you di shen ru), “deception is fair in war” (bing bu yan zha), “taking the enemies by surprise” (chu qi bu yi), and “horizontal and vertical alliances” (he zong lian heng), among other strategies, offers modern insights. With different types of resources at one’s disposal for a creative combination contingent upon the actual battles, the 36 strategies inform RTK and require a more sophisticated gaming rhetoric and problem-solving skills. The key design philosophy of the first generations of RTK relied on historical certainty through the quantitative calculation of historical elements such as characters, fortresses, armies, weapons, and battles. The more recent installments have added what-if components, for example, Dynasty Warriors (しん・さんご くむそう), first released in 2001, has integrated many counterfactual elements since the seventh edition to allow players to reconsider necessity and contingency, challenging historical certainty as an alternative to reality. Playing coun-

 Kwon, “Historical Novel Revived: The Heyday of Romance of the Three Kingdoms RolePlaying Games,” 121–134.

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terfactuals acknowledges past contingences,358 and more importantly, how these multiple possibilities affect our understanding of the present and the past.

Simulation Games: Virtual Space, Virtual Reality Simulation games offer a dynamic real-time experience of intervention. It uses sets of algorithms that model any environment or process; it deals with “the ambiguous boundaries between rule-based playable systems that model the past accurately—simulations—and those that do not—games.”359 It thus occupies that “middle ground as games—dynamic, rule-based and quantifiable conflicts—that provide playable models of a historical event, system, or process.”360 Uricchio explores the possibilities and implications of historical representation and simulation, when “point of view, domains of knowledge and access, and motivation all speak to the construction of the role playing subject, just as the text situates that construction within the possibilities and constraints of “authorized” period detail (spatial and visual regimes, temporal cycles).”361 Similarly, Elliott views video games’ status as “dynamic models allows them to act as simulacra. The suggestion that the model is dynamic and not static means that players’ interactions with a historical model form ways of engaging with past simulations.”362 In this type of game, players work on an alternate semiotic structure with parameters and variables to recreate virtual historical environments, events, or processes. Most simulation games are pedagogically mediated, as is the case with the historical Chu City simulation game. Designed with a virtual game engine and 3D technology, specifically the 3DsMAX and Maya (Polygon, NURBS), the game utilizes a range of material cultural symbols, such as bronze wear, crossbeams, deer, and pagodas, to simulate Chu city. Reenacting history in a virtual space and interacting with historical figures in the simulated scenes requires some level of understanding of historical geography, architecture, culture, folklore, totem worship, and more. Players can choose architectural objects and models, freely shuffling and adjusting different elements, working with historical material culture, geology, architecture, and landscapes and drawing connections among these discrete chunks as simu-

 Apperley, “Modding the Historians’ Code: Historical Verisimilitude and the Counterfactual Imagination,” 185–98.  McCall, “Teaching History with Digital Historical Games: An Introduction to the Field and Best Practices,” 517–542.  Ibid., 523.  Uricchio, “Simulation, History, and Computer Games,” 334.  Elliott, “Simulations and Simulacra: History in Video Games,” 34.

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lated, yet authentic, historical units that provide adequate background information, a technology tree, working models of the environment, agents, goals, hurdles, and constraints. Within the simulated space, players become city builders, addressing public and local concerns in urban development. The hurdles, obstacles, rules, and priorities represent the designers’ logic and narratives, but it is up to the players to interpret these choices, exploring probabilities in various directions, which eventually leads to dramatically different outcomes—one’s own version of Chu City. Here we see historical video games are most effective in terms of historical simulation when they are being played, instead of being incorporated into traditional pedagogical practices as an afterthought.363 A handful of simulation games are commercially driven. Take the classic RPG, Prince of Qin (Qin Shang), as an example. The game simulates the end of the Qin dynasty (221 BC–207 BC) back to approximately 2,200 years ago, when Chinese society was oppressed and faced immanent tensions and violence. Simulation is conflated with role-playing here: the players reconstruct an accurate ancient China by playing different roles, including peasants, soldiers in insurgent forces or the Qin army, labor workers, civilians, and, of course, the main character, Prince Fu Su, in various systems. All of the models constitute a constant battle between life and death, leading to the ultimate doom of the Qin Kingdom. What the game offers is the potential opportunity to understand historical processes through the psychology of a multitude of people from all social statuses. Accurately modeling the past through variables populated in the systems remains the hallmark of simulation games, however, a simulated game world goes beyond literary authenticity; it provides an infinite possibility for creating alternate reality or virtual reality. As the closest to mimicry-type games, simulation games strike home on the idea of “liberty, conventions, suspension of reality, and delimitation of space and time. However, the continuous submission to imperative and precise rules cannot be observed.”364 While sharing some common ground, such as historical figures, settings, and events, with representation, simulation games proceed with different mechanics. In reenacting Chu City and the Qin kingdom, for example, the players engage with producing a deeper sense of reality, from characters, events, and sites to the physical landscapes, rituals, etc., as Köstlbauer demonstrates that the single defining characteristics of simulation games is realism and authenticity.365 The mechanics, procedures, and rules are designed to invite rational imagination regarding

 Ibid., 38.  Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 20.  Köstlbauer, “The Strange Attraction of Simulation: Realism, Authenticity, Virtuality,” 169–83.

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alternative historical possibilities, which are mathematically structured and determined. The experience of playing the game is one of interacting with a profoundly different kind of environment. These maps are not maps of any territory but are instead interfaces to a database and the algorithms of the computer simulation. While certainly artificial, synthetic, and fabricated, simulation is not “false” or “illusory”; it is processual and algorithmic media. A dynamic simulated world involves its own spatial and temporal dimensions and dynamic relationships of virtual forces and effects; digitally simulated environments are thus sometimes proven to be more provocative and engaging.

Chinese-style Games, Where Old and New Media Converge Chinese-style (Zhong Guo Feng) games, based on Chinese imperial histories, myths, legends, folklore, and literature, adopt Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and IChing, among other philosophical and religious elements, for the stories, roles, procedures, strategic passes, and rules of the game. With an element of myth and an inescapable tone of nostalgia, this type of game is designed to provoke cultural sympathy, yearning for one’s roots, and a search for identity. Players not only interact with pure aestheticism in the rich layers of audio and visual symbols but also imagine and create their own virtual Chinese world of mystification and suspense. Most Chinese-style games generously borrow from literary classics that epitomize a seamless fusion of wuxia epics, classic Chinese literature, and ancient myths, legends, and rituals. The games situate the stories in the world of jiang hu, which literally translates to rivers and lakes but metaphorically refers to a swashbuckling society where martial arts practitioners travel across China trading blows, teaching skills and upholding a strict code of honor. Jianghu represents a battleground of fear and curiosity, of the real and the imaginative, of justice and evil, and of the conservative and the entrepreneurial. Wandering around jianghu involves a series of adventures that challenge established moral values. The stories often take place in a secluded fairyland where one finds a traversed reality that fires up the new imagination, releases pent-up emotions, or pursues a different set of persuasions beyond one’s accustomed ways. Chinese Paladin (Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan) is one of the most popular Chinesestyle games. The game includes six interfaces, i.e., god, fairy, demon, human, devil, and ghost, and covers a vast time span from time immemorial (ca. 2070 BC) to the North Song period (1123 AD) blending ancient myth and fairy tales (xian). One of the main characters, Zhao Ling’er, is descendant of the Mother of Mankind, Nvwa. The story the game is based on originated from the well-known legend of Pangu, who created the heavens and the earth. After Pangu died, his spirit

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took shape in Fuxi, Shengnong, and Nvwa and then branched out into being god, beasts, and mankind, respectively. His soul, the legend goes, was transformed into water, fire, thunder, wind, and earth. Nvwa was the only one empowered to call upon the above five elements, scattering around the earth. The six interfaces embody the conflicts among god, beasts, and mankind. The idea of the five elements comes from the theory of the five xing, i.e., metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, from ancient Chinese philosophy. Unlike the traditional jianghu, which is depicted as a morally intense setting in which people can wander and adventure, seeking brotherhood, love, justice and identity, xia represents the mastering of the highest moral values. Jianghu, in this story, involves strong mythical and imaginative elements. Li Xiaoyao, another main character, wanders around jianghu. By a series of fortuitous circumstances, he is involved in a tangle of love, mystery, and danger. A knot of tensions is designed to dramatize the stories, and resolving the precipitating tensions requires personal wisdom along with knowledge of the inner social world that players carry around with them. Jianghu, as a virtual space for broad thinking and unconventional behaviors, for “emergent narratives,”366 creates a virtual reality that players happily escape to when fleeing from actual reality, thus the “(hi)story-play-space” emerges.367 Here, all seems possible with speculative eyes or moments of foresight; all things are manipulable through the players’ interaction. Additionally, the interactive treasure hunt represents a constant exploration into an unsettled past. Players are perplexed and fascinated but experience immense gratification, hence the game provokes a passionate longing for the next treasure, or rather, a search for individual and collective identity. In Chinese-style games, old and new media converge to create multiple experiences through trans-media storytelling, with the same content to flow through many different channels and assume many different forms at the point of reception enabled by new media.368 Storytelling walks freely across the various media. One of the early Chinese style games, Dragon Quest (Xia Ke Ying Xiong Zhuan), released in 1991 and based on the DOS system, adopted a wuxia novel written by Liu Liang in 1986. A series of Chinese-style games followed. Games originating from wuxia novels, especially written by the wuxia guru, Louis Cha (Jin Yong), have attracted wide popularity and attention ever since. A Step into the Past (Xun Qin Ji), released in 2001, became the first game based on a time-travel novel of the

 Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative,” 123.  Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice, 111.  Murray, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game; Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

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same name. When games become popular, TV series based on games flourish, as was the case with Swords of Legend (Gu Jian Qi Tan), The Legend of the Swordsman (Jian Xia Qing Yuan), and Chinese Paladin, to name but a few. With different stories adopted from various historical periods, a distinct Chinese sense of wisdom and beauty prevails in these games. The basic values and moral tenets embedded in these games, including good versus evil, eternal love, the secular and the profane, and brotherhood and feudal obligations, find their origin in quintessential Chinese history, culture, and traditions.

Educational Games: Game-based Learning or Indoctrination? Edutainment integrates play and education to create new models of learning. The games developed for educational settings find their most practical applications in fields such as language and math. History-themed educational games have just started to appear in Chinese classrooms. Carefully staying within the parameters of official historical narratives, this type of game, at its best, complements official history; at its worst, it is relegated to being another tool for instilling patriotism and citizenry. Many historical games have been developed in recent years, and I will make passing reference to a few of them. Zheng He’s Sailing into Uncharted Water (Zhenghe xia xiyang) is situated within the great era of sailing, from approximately the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Following history textbooks, the stories in the game take place during the Ming Dynasty, when Zheng He adventured to approximately 30 countries through a grand sailing initiative. For an immersive experience, the game is designed with historical maps and contemporary parallel systems, i.e., a historical communication system, sailing system, battle system, and trading system. The idea of technology and progress predominates. Similarly, the Legend of the Silkroad records major historical narratives that took place along the Silk Road, including the story of the prominent diplomat Qian Zhang exploring the western region of China, governing structures of the frontier (the west), state rule (Han), cultural exchanges along the silk road, etc. Following basic chronology and topography, the game aims to cultivate patriotism, an adventurous spirit, and a sense of national pride. To kindle the imagination regarding the remote western regions, the game adds a few counterfactual questions to the role-playing. Another, more interesting, role-playing game, Chibi Battle (Chibi zhizhan), is designed for middle-school history teaching. To reenact the history of the Chibi Battle (208 AD), the game utilizes a range of historical materials such as ancient maps and key documented cities and towns, including Xudu, Jianglin, Xinye, and Jianye, to spatially orient the players. All of the material culture, from garments,

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dialects, and rituals to urban architecture, weapons, and means of transportation such as horse-drawn carriages, are testified to by written documents, giving the game an aura of authenticity. The characters are classic figures, and the resources are mathematically evaluated. The scenarios follow Cao, Sun, and Liu—three parallel narrative lines. The models, strategies, and systems are carefully designed to lead to the Sun Liu collaboration and to eventually defeat Cao Cao, as described in history textbooks. The game does encourage a small amount of rational imagination, with players overcoming hurdles along the road and coming to understand some abstract historical lessons, such as strategy mapping (yun chou wei wo) and conspiracy (shang bing fa mou). In this context, games step beyond being problems to be solved, and become “microworlds, and in such environment students, develop a much firmer sense of how specific social processes and practices are interwoven and how different bodies of knowledge relate to each other.”369 If ancient history offers many non-contentious topics, recent and modern history present some cautionary tales. Take the First Collaboration of CCP and Nationalist Party (KMT), for example. The game was developed to help students learn about this significant event in 1924 from three aspects, i.e., the reasons for the collaboration, the first assembly of the KMT, and the new and old versions of the Three Principles of the People, all of which are stipulated in the national standards. The game claims to cultivate the ability to analyze, compare, infer, and conceptualize the reasons, policies, implementation, consequences, and significance of the collaboration. Less visible but more important are emotional and value positioning, an enthusiasm for history, and, ultimately, patriotism, national identity, dignity, and confidence in the young and their growing minds. The provided textual information and images of the CCP and KMT sides are grossly unbalanced for ideological reasons. In such a deterministic narrative structuring, the story follows a linear sequence, with fixed emplotment and limited choices. As such, it emphasizes discovery over creation, therefore “these kinds of ludonarrative decisions do not significantly alter the broader narrative trajectory and structure, which remains closed.”370 The Xinhai Revolution (Xinhai Geming) presents another example. The 1911 movement for railroad protection in several provinces, especially in Sichuan, triggered the revolution at a much larger scale. On September 25, Rong County declared its independence and became the first local government to be independent from the Qing Dynasty. The crescendo of railroad protection movements reached its climax on October 10 when the revolutionaries took over three key cities in  McCall, “Teaching History with Digital Historical Games: An Introduction to the Field and Best Practices,” 535.  Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice, 128.

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Hubei Province: Hanyang, Hankou, and Wuchang. Then, the People’s Republic was established. The game tries to virtually reenact this eventful period, but, like most educational games, it ends up providing a rather unsophisticated and determinstic storyline, with predictable procedures and interactive strategies. How can one inspect historical truth only from one side and not from the reverse side as well? Despite most educational games conforming to the official version of history, rarely questioning the dominant narratives about the past, all games engage the playfulness and imagination on some level. Players need to understand the algorithmic layer as well as the ideological one, and the process per se offers opportunities of critical thinking and reflections on the form over the content.371

The Power of Historical Video Games A free and voluntary activity standing distinctly outside the regular part of many people’s everyday lives, video game-playing is utterly absorbing. Ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds have spent real money and time on game worlds, with practically no material interest or profit returns. Johan Huizinga brilliantly explains that play “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.” Thus, the fun of playing “resists all analysis, all logical interpretation.”372

Many cultures around the globe have enjoyed enormous self-confidence born of the playful spirit of fun. Integrating elements of play in education has a long history in China. Confucianism values “happy learning” (kuai le xue xi), adopting rituals (li) and music (yue) to shape the moral outlook of individuals. “Knowing something is inferior to liking it; liking something is inferior to playing it,” as the saying goes. Games, as cultural artifacts, condense time and space. They are “extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism.”373 The dramatic models of altering one’s psychological makeup represent an alternative world, inviting people of various backgrounds to participate, to explore the infinite possibilities of the past. Most importantly, games, “as a form of playing,”374 are fun; play matters.375

 Chapman, “Privileging form over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames,” 1–2; Kapell and Elliott, Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, 194–95.  Huizinga, Homo Ludens; A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 3–4.  McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, 208.  Von Lünen et al., Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian.  Sicart, Play Matters.

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However, playing the past remains egregiously offensive to scholars in China. There is extraordinary mental resistance to the playful, counterfactual, and anachronistic nature embedded in even wildly successful historical video games. Why? Video games have tilted the temporal and spatial balance that historians desperately try to achieve. In a more disparaging tone than E. H. Carr’s description of “a parlour game with the might-have-been of history,”376 Chinese scholars are abashed at the thought of learning serious history through imaginative play, and predictably so. One eminent Chinese historian once asked with brutal directness, “who will be stupid enough to turn to video games for learning history?” Even “playing poses intriguing methodological and theoretical potential,”377 and video games provide innovative representations of historical data; analysis thus drives debates,378 the tension between playfulness and seriousness, what may have happened and what actually happened, and the counterfactual and the factual, seems too aberrant from historians’ core pursuit. Despite the objections from academic world, many historical video games are intellectually engaging and emotionally satisfying. Players are mesmerized by a tangible sense of experiencing history and feel empowered to participate in making and writing their own history. This intense interaction sets minds astir with infinite possibilities and challenges the semiotic production of “historic events” that have shaped historical consciousness. Uricchio discusses this creative tension as “the interaction between a player and the representation of a historically specific world would seem to challenge any notion of a unique configuration of historical “fact” and “fixity,” giving way instead to the historically inconsistent and ludic.”379 Here, a player, in direct control of a historically situated agent, fully engages the virtual historical environment where “the ludic capacity of historical video games allows for an-depth understanding not just of facts, dates, people, or events, but also of the complex discourse of contingency, conditions, and circumstances, which underpins a genuine understanding of history.”380 The unique charm of historical video games, I argue, lies in their methodological value and pedagogical virtue of counterfactual thinking and their capability to digitally and collectively shape the historical consciousness of players.

 Carr, What is History?.  Von Lünen et al., Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian.  Houghton, “Structure and Play: A Framework for Games as Historical Research Outputs, Tools, and Processes,” 11–43.  Uricchio, “Simulation, History, and Computer Games,” in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, 327.  Kapell and Elliott, Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, 13.

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Counterfactual Thinking: The Alternative Worlds Historical video games, as counterfactual thought experiments,381 encourage players to rethink, reinterpret, and reconstruct history in a virtual environment. Let me unpack this point in two respects. First, well-designed games involve procedural rhetoric, the practice of using the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.382 As a technique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking computational arguments that others have created, procedural rhetoric is the deliberate practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular. When Kenneth Burke asserts that rhetoric, in a classic sense, a part of the practice of identification, has a formative effect upon the attitude, such as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents,”383 he actually argues the more radical view that rhetoric facilitates human action. A procedural authorship, writing the rules by which the text appears as well as writing the texts themselves, emerges from this interaction. The procedural author creates not just a set of scenes but a world of narrative possibilities.384 To illustrate how this works in video games, I will give an example. In RTK, players choose to become governor of the Wei, Shu, or Wu Kingdom to build up their own fortresses or mini-kingdoms. They need to collaborate at all levels to ultimately win the war and rule the country. First, the battlefield no longer relies on natural geography but becomes a more calculated battle environment. It offers one of the most important opportunities for player to exercise the sense of agency, spatial navigation, “orienting ourselves by landmarks, mapping a space mentally to match our experience, and admiring the juxtapositioning and changes in perspectives that derive from moving through an intricate environment.”385 The second aspect concerns resource deployment. Players can shuffle all types of armies, including cavalry, archers, heavy cavalry, hussars, and infantry equipped with blade shields or spears. The generals, top-ranking military officers, are deployed in an optimal way through ranking. In addition, the modes of attack and charging move in a more fluid space. The players, from three kingdoms, i.e., jinzhou, yizhou (Shu), yanghzou, jiaozhou (Wu), yongliang, qingxu, and youji (Wei), es-

 Lebow, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Teaching Tool,” 153–76; Maar, “Possible Use of Counterfactual Thought Experiment in History,” 87–113.  Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, 10–15.  Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 50.  Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 187.  Ibid., 162–63.

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tablish a base in one of their chosen territories. Once they reach a certain capacity through the strategy-based system, they can initiate attacks or collaborate with other forces. Last, the three core forces of Wei, Shu, and Wu launch the ultimate attack on the city of Luoyang, and the winner will rule the country and rewrite history with his/her wisdom and vision. The implications of this game can be interpreted from two aspects: on the one hand, the mathematical equations and concrete reward systems, such as system-based strategic passes and the numbering of all sorts of resources, encourage players to think about history with a quickness and clearness; on the other hand, players make a series of choices, using persuasion and expression, based on an assessment of each situation and collaboration with their chosen parties. Second, the procedural rhetoric invites counterfactual thinking—what-ifs. Players are offered choices, then narrow those down to the ones that are plausible and examine real alternatives. This echoes Trevor-Roper’s comments about how we can draw useful lessons from history by placing ourselves before the alternatives of the past: “At any given moment in history there are real historical alternatives . . . how can we ‘explain what happened and why’ if we only look at what happened and never consider the alternatives?”386 When historians ask themselves about the probability of a past event, they actually attempt to transport themselves, by a bold exercise of the mind, to the time before the event itself in order to gauge the possibilities as they appeared upon the eve of the event’s realization. Hence, probability remains properly in the future. However, since the line of the present has somehow been moved back in the imagination, it is a future of bygone times built upon a fragment of what, for us, is actually the past.387 In game-playing, counterfactual thoughts may influence emotions and judgments by way of a contrast effect, which is based on the juxtaposition of reality versus what might have been: “There is no better way of understanding what did happen in history than to contemplate what very well might have happened.”388 The plausible alternatives that are explicitly contrary to the facts may also imply causal inference, which may have psychological consequences that are independent of contrast effects.389 In causal analysis, if the occurrence of B depends on the occurrence of A, if A does not occur, B will not occur either. When game design treats causation as counterfactual dependence, the reasoning process requires further thought: if A had not happened, then B would not have happened either, and C would probably have occurred instead. Thus, game designers often try to provide a few plausible alternatives to the situation. When the player makes a choice, he or    

Trevor-Roper, History and Imagination. Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Cowley, What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, xix. Roese and Morrison. “The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking,” 16–26.

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she enters a virtual past, working through the rest of the game based on the initial point of entry—a chosen historical representation. Good strategy games demonstrate this process. As discussed earlier, since its seventh edition, Dynasty Warriors has added what-if routes that parallel the factual routes in all of the battles. Once the conditionals are realized, they become antecedents for the real options of subsequent battles. While counterfactual thinking exists in various inflections in all games in the RTK series, it finds its most vivid expression here. For example, in Lv Bu’s biography, if Xiong Hua had successfully escaped during the Hulao battle and if Wang Yong had survived the Chang’an coup, Yuan Shao’s army would have been rescued three times in the Changshan battle, and Lv Bu would have won the Dingtao battle. In the Wei narratives, if Wei Dian had survived the Wancheng battle and Guo Jia had survived the Bailangshan battle, then Cao Ren would have defeated Xu Shu in the Xinye battle, and Cao Cao would not have been trapped in the Chibi battle. Similarly, in the Wu and Shu narratives, if Lu Su had been protected in the Jinzhou battle, then the Sun Wu collaborative force would have won the Hefei battle in order to occupy Hefei city. These counterfactual routes, eventually leading to drastically different outcomes, invite players to entertain what-ifs based on the calibration of their forces and resources. For example, the historical ending of Lv Bu’s biography, in which Lv Bu was killed by Cao Cao and Liu Be, can be overturned; in the Wei narratives, the fate of the Cao Wei collaboration is not left to Cao Pi, but the collaborative forces can defeat Liu Bei and unify the country if all of the conditionals are fulfilled in the game world. Players have to work through what-if routes to witness different outcomes and reinterpret history, a similar process in which one adopts causal reasoning but in a counterfactual fashion. The importance of the historical “ifs,” as Franco Cardini emphasizes, is to bring out the infinite possibilities of the past, to capture the variability of the structured or institutionalized processes.390 The infinite possibility of the past may also lead to a chaotic history, which reconciles the notions of causation and contingency.391 Here, a bridge from rationality to imagination is built upon counterfactual conditionals, which combine both rational and imaginative elements.392 Jianghu, in Chinese-style games, epitomizes such a chaotic, pugilistic world, combining reenactment and counterfactual reasoning. As a logical extension of historical explanation, this alternate reality challenges historical

 Cardini, La Storia al condizionale.  Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals.  Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality.

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inevitability.393 Players can analyze the pulling forces of events, weigh different causes of actions, and highlight historical particulars and accidents. Many scholars have analyzed the value of counterfactual history in video games. Tom Apperley acknowledges that counterfactual history becomes a powerful tool for examining both the past and present, and it acknowledge past contingencies. This approach opens up the past to heterogeneous and multiple possibilities.394 He further points out “the core critical element of counterfactual play is the focus on feasibility and the possibilities provided by imagining things “differently.”395 Similarly, Adam Chapman emphasizes counterfactual historying, the narrative agency involved in games, Players are offered the possibility of becoming player-historians, experiencing freedom to engage in historical practices and yet doing in so in a structured story space in which much of the groundwork is already complete.396 While this study echoes many of their assumptions, it probes a larger issue that these analyses eschew: does this visible sense of empowerment in the game world carry any practical value or generate any useful insight in understanding actual history? The answer is a qualified yes. Game playing certainly evokes a more serious enthusiasm for history, as one respondent from a mini-survey about the RTK game series expressed: “I am an avid reader of history about the Three Kingdoms simply because of playing RTK games. Some events were glossed over in historical textbooks, but in games, they are much more intriguing!” However, no direct correlations between game-playing and its impact on historical thinking, much less its contribution to the process of knowledge acquisition, have been established yet. Actually, the counterfactual historical statements and thought experiments have been in use, knowingly and unknowingly, since before the birth of history as an academic pursuit. However, the psychological power of counterfactual thinking in games has not yet received its due attention. Chinese historians claim that they only care about what actually happens and leave what might have happened to psychologists, novelists, and media professionals. It is more the thinking processes, rather than the historical content, that are at stake. To think counterfactually, as Byrne claims, is to think causally, as “the causal assertion and the counterfactual differ in their syntactic form, but their meaning is the same.”397 She expounds that counterfactual and causal assertions mean the same thing and are consistent with the same possibilities. When people imagine a counterfactual

 Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, 79.  Kapell and Elliott, Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, 189.  Ibid., 195.  Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice, 232–33.  Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality, 101.

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alternative, it can help them work out a causal relation. And conversely, casual beliefs influence people’s judgments of the plausibility of counterfactual conjectures.398 Therefore, the counterfactual thoughts run in parallel with rational reasoning, both involving rationality and imagination. The dual nature actually dovetails with analogical thinking, and drawing analogies from the past to address present needs has been an important part of Chinese historical thinking.399 The Chinese perceive time in a continuum along which the past, present and future are seamlessly integrated. Historical time does not literally mean time exists in the past; instead, it implies continuity, with a particularity in the constancy of change. Hence, historical events happened in the past but exist in the present and point to the future. Confucius (551–479 BC) metaphorically interpreted time as a “river” and stood at the bank of the “river of time,” noting how it flows day and night without ceasing. The flowing, continuous, and irrevocable nature of time is embedded in Chinese historical thinking. Historical video games break that continuity, and presents a contrast mechanism, or a potential to imagine alternatives. Moreover, the counterfactual thinking echoes the desires, the fantasies, and the inner senses of the players, thus they feel gratified, unsettled, or fulfilled. In simulation and strategy games, players enjoy wide latitude in creativity in building historical places and managing historical progress. Educational games often take advantage of role-playing as historical figures by adding scenarios about their motives and emotions but in an unsophisticated and prejudiced way. Prince of Qin takes this further, as players can experience and interpret the mental structures of a variety of characters, even those in the lowest social totem poles. Once liberated from the false dilemma of choosing between a single deterministic past and an infinite number of possible pasts, players imagine more rationally if the counterfactual scenarios are based on meticulous calculations about real probabilities. Video games also allow players to enter the mental world of the historical figures, explore plausible causes of why they make certain decisions, and better analyze a complicated historical situation or period. This can be helpful for historians who value understanding of historical subjects “from the inside,”400 especially the nostalgia provoked in playing with the past.401 In line with this reasoning, counterfactual arguments, like any historical argument, are only as compelling as the logic

 Ibid., 127.  Huang, “The Defining Character of Chinese Historical Thinking,” 180–88.  Nolan, “Why Historians (and Everyone Else) Should Care about Counterfactuals,” 317–35; Rejack, “Toward a Virtual Reenactment of History: Video Games and the Recreation of the Past,” 411–25; Vorderer and Bryant, Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences.  Taylor and Whalen, Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games.

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and “evidence” offered by the researcher to substantiate the links between the hypothesized antecedent and its expected consequences. Every good counterfactual thus rests on multiple factuals, just as every factual rests on counterfactual assumptions and these assumptions too often go unexamined.402 Playing counterfactuals, players can use this process as part of discovering what are important and controlling factors, or at least illuminating assumptions about such factors, suggesting new hypotheses and driving debate; counteracting hindsight bias and increasing appreciation of contingency; and enabling a better appreciation of historical actors’ situation.403

Shaping Historical Consciousness A mix of imaginative, playful, interactive and immersive elements, historical video games combine spatiality, virtuality, and simulation. As discussed earlier, playing historical video games involves touching and feeling the past. The process of establishing emotional sympathy affects the players’ “structure of feelings,”404 or rather, affect:405 Historicity means little to me, though about eighty percent of the RTK games are true history. What I enjoy most, frankly, is a deep sense of being part of history while playing games. For example, you choose a humble origin as Liu Bei, then you overcome all the hurdles and win over the ruling power. If you walk the process, you are part of that process. Something within my inner heart is stirred!406

The voice echoes the very core of “affect,” the aspects of emotions, feelings, and bodily engagement that circulate through people and things but are often registered only at the interface—at the moment of transmission or contact—when affect gets called up into representation.407 In the digital age, “it is not professional history that will shape historical consciousness in the future but the yet-to-be-defined relationship between its own highly specialized representational strategies and the unconstrained profusion of popular histories that are being thrown up by various indigenous cultures around

 Lebow, “What’s So Different about a Counterfactual?” 550–85, esp. 556.  Nolan, “Why Historians (and Everyone Else) Should Care about Counterfactuals,” 323.  Williams, Marxism and Literature, 1, 128–35. Also refer to Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, 20–25.  Anable, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, xii.  Interview data, Li Liaolong, June 12, 2019. Source: The Center for Public History, Zhejiang University.  Gregg and Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, introduction.

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the around.”408 The formation of collective memories or historical consciousness will differ dramatically in a “thoroughly interactive cultural environment in which individuals will no longer depend on centralized institution to develop their collective memories.”409 Video games, as expressive cultural media, supersede representation with simulation. Uricchio poignantly notes “the outer ends of a spectrum of historical computer games as sites to tease out the possibilities and implications of historical representation and simulation. These two extremes have different historiographic appeals.”410 In an analogical simulation, video games create immediacy and immersion, which further defines historical experience as the virtual reenactment of the past. This shift from representation to redefinition challenges the semiotic production of historical process and events, and constitutes an essential part of the modern construction of historical consciousness. In both simulation games and other types of video games, a virtual sense of history or a digital historical consciousness are taking shape. How does this work? Let me start with what does not: historical video games cannot be analyzed based on the textual semantics of the game. They represent untilled ground where old and new media converge.411 New media, which are digital, interactive, simulated, and virtual by nature, are new precisely because they embody a new relationship, new representation, and new experience for the users and media technologies.412 Convergence represents a cultural shift, as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content to create their own narratives. Game designers become “procedural authors” who create procedural models of external or imagined systems and impose sets of rules that create particular possible spaces for play. If history is always narrative, with different modes of representation,413 and historical consciousness is a distinctive mode of thought,414 inviting constructive imagination,415 then a new narrative competency and historical consciousness

 Harlan, “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History,” 108.  Kansteiner, “Alternate Worlds and Invented Communities: History and Historical Consciousness in the age of Interactive Media,” 143–60.  Uricchio, “Simulation, History, and Computer Games,” 328.  Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.  Lister et al., New Media: A Critical Introduction.  White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” 1193–99; Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History; Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History.  White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.  White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism.

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will be acquired through fully interactive media which will provide consumers of history products with an unprecedented degree of cultural agency.416 In Chinese-style games, adventures in jianghu represent the process of persuasion, with assumptions overturned, choices made, and decisions reverted, which has had a visible impact upon the consciousness of the players through the careful maneuvering of levels of hurdles, producing speculations, adding or subtracting conditionals, challenging assumptions, and exploring what-ifs. Players are immersed, transported, and unsettled. Similarly, in simulation games, when players reenact Chu City or the Kingdom of Qin, they stop acting like an ordinary citizen obeying what comes from the higher governing powers. Instead, they rule the city with their own resources, wisdom, and vision, regardless of how their prior knowledge or a muddled grasp of documented history influence their choices. The interaction becomes a personal adventure, a free experience, and an imaginative point of entry into the past. The interactive nature of digital media also reveals such media’s social significance, where grassroots creativity, authority sharing, and empowerment converge in the virtual space: “the established differences between author and reader, performer and spectator, creator and interpreter become blurred and give way to a reading writing continuum that extends from the designers of the technology and networks to the final recipient, each one contributing to the activity of the other.”417 In this convergence, “the player is offered a chance to interpret the narrative experiment with counterfactual positions, or alter the narrative wholesale. In this sense the games . . . all digital games offer the possibility of a democratization of the process of creativity, of the control of the narrative, and of allowing the individual player, group of players, or modders to take part in the shaping of both history and myth.”418 MMRPGs well demonstrate a broader and deeper level of collaboration in the virtual space. Many Chinese-style MMRPGs, such as New Semi-Gods and SemiDevils (Xin Tian Long Ba Bu), Fantasy Westward Journey (Meng Huan Xi You), and Grand Narrative of Westward Journey (Da Hua Xi You), have attracted a growing crowd in the past ten years. The integration of history and morality remains the most recurrent theme in MMRPGs, and resolving the moral dilemmas requires collective intelligence or, in James Surowiecki’s words, the wisdom of crowds,419 a quality that is rarely valued or properly trained in traditional history classrooms. In the

 Kansteiner, “Alternate Worlds and Invented Communities: History and Historical Consciousness in the Age of Interactive Media,” 144.  Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace.  Kapell and Elliott, Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, 366.  Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations.

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age of interactive media, we experience “community” differently, as Wulf Kansteiner explains, video games produce the uncanny ability to communicate with oneself while creating the impression that there is a real other involved in that communication. Inscribed into the new media is a persistent simulation of collectivity which will permit us to reproduce collective memories without friction, resistance or the occasional reality check that tended to intrude into our private worlds and memories in the age of linear, centralised media.420

An Emergent Form of Public History If we look beyond the specific content of individual games, and begin to consider the form of historical video games, along with dynamic possibilities related to historiography, they enact a new form of storytelling, an emergent form of public history. As “a process by which the past is constructed into history and a practice which has the capacity for involving people as well as nations and communities in the creation of their own histories,”421 public history under various guises and via diverse routes has evolved rapidly. Premised on the past being essentially open-ended,422 it focuses on forms of historical consumption with a view to understanding contemporary culture and nuancing our understanding of the relationship between the public and its history.423 Central to public history lies the idea of “a shared authority.”424 In the context of video games is the issue of whom history is for and who has the right to do it, i.e. to represent the past according to their own means and concerns. Games exacerbate these issues by handing history over to unconventional historians (game developers), who in turn share authorship with a popular audience, allowing them to do history. Once a game is released to the public, the main wave of historical play and interpretation begins. McCall further elaborates that, when it comes to simulating the past with a historical game, authority is likewise shared between designers and players in a sort of active, constructive dialogue about the past.425 Well-designed games are structured and provide challenges for players: that of emergence (a number of simple rules combining to form interesting varia-

 Kansteiner, “Alternate Worlds and Invented Communities: History and Historical Consciousness in the Age of Interactive Media,” 141.  Kean and Martin, The Public History Reader, xiv.  Jordanova, History in Practice (London and New York, 2000).  De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2.  Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.  McCall, “Video Games as Participatory Public History,” 409.

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tions) and that of progression (separate challenges presented serially).426 The interactivity finds a range of expressions in the design of the games themselves; in the way we perceive and use games; and in the way we discuss games. This interaction gives players a choice between imagining the world of the game and seeing the representation as a mere placeholder for information about the rules of the game,427 which means they can influence both the form and the content of the mediated presentation or experience.428 Consequently, a shared authority, a sense of agency in virtual collaboration, become incredibly empowering: “I genuinely feel I am contributing historical processes. See, I can shape the space, rule the kingdom, make a difference in history!” This idea of agency carries a special significance, because even with seemingly coherent and linear narratives delivered through traditional media at the point of distribution, consumers selectively absorb events, figures, and plot structures from linear media, subsequently integrate them into a different narrative context, and in the process radically alter the political, ethical or aesthetic impetus of the original media story. A shared historical meaning making takes place between the developer-historians’ production and the playing reception/construction of players. The communal dimension, which gives a deep sense of gratification in finally winning the battle by collaborating with other players, also stands out. The empowering game-playing experience illuminates, in a roundabout fashion, the massive cultural fascination with what-might-have-beens. The new media ecology, characterized mostly by digital but also by trans-media storytelling, has already stirred a multitude of germinating minds and has already provided new possibilities for the past. Despite such a strong potential, problems remain nevertheless, and it may be worthwhile to point out two of the major ones. First, when tapping into the psychology of historical figures, game design should go beyond the technical and procedural levels and ruminate on the why and how. Most video games in China have not effectively integrated historical content into game design: they are either predominantly market driven by overly fictionalizing history or pedagogically and ideologically mediated by simplifying games as another venue for indoctrination. While they may make history come alive, however factually authentic the simulation is, many simulation games developed for pedagogical purposes miss one critical component. They provide, at best, a fixated authentic historical setting. The variety of ways of modeling dynamic systems do not create “defensible

 Juul, Half-real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, 6.  Ibid., 2.  Lombard and Ditton. “At the Heart of it All: The Concept of Presence,” JCMC321.

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explanation mechanism,”429 or “problem space”;430 thus, these games may fire up players’ imaginations, but cannot engage them in critical historical thinking. However, simulation games return us to the assertion that the player’s experience in cyberspace is one not only of exploration but also of realizing, bringing the game world into being in a semiotic and cybernetic circuit: the distinguishing quality of the virtual world is that the system lets the participant observer play an active role in which he or she can test the system and discover rules and structural qualities in the process. While technology has not yet transformed into a cultural agency to deliver a sense of empowerment and emancipation, the potential is visibly felt and waiting to be tapped. A more solid grasp of history and a better design logic that combines causal explanation and counterfactual thinking should lend some help in this regard. Further along this line of thinking, the second problem, which seems more urgent, is a deep inadequacy of the historical thinking process, the real interpretive power, and practical defensible explanatory factors in educational games. If video games are merely taken as an interactive technology and as another means of confirming what history textbooks have already said, or if educational games continue to be evaluated by the same standards as historical textbooks, they will not provoke students to question, critique, or engage in historical thinking. The real potential of educational games has to go beyond novel software design.431 Instead of replacing history textbooks and teaching, the games should create a virtual interpretive space that invites bright and imaginative minds to experiment, interact, critique, and question—skills and qualities that have not been properly trained in traditional history education so far. The intellectual, cognitive, and pedagogical virtue of historical video games calls for a more active, thoughtful, and responsible intervention of a new generation of public historians. As earlier adopters of the new technology, these historians are more sensitive to historical consciousness being increasingly digitally shaped and are thus more prepared for the challenges. I invite them to think further in three directions. First, engage in game design. Historical thinking and historical research methodologies can inform the design process.432 Those who truly understand the historical content involved have a better chance of meaningfully participating in innovative game design, which involves defensible explanatory models, logical reasoning, and counterfactual thought processes. Second, teach

 McCall, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History.  McCall, “Navigating the Problem Space: The Medium of Simulation Games in the Teaching of History,” 9–28.  Champion, Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage.  Spring, “Gaming History: Computer and Video Games as Historical Scholarship,” 218.

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history with well-designed games, and integrate historical thinking into the digital environment. Third, generate more local case studies about game-based history learning. Groundbreaking studies focusing on how game play affects the historical consciousness of players, reorients or facilitates history learning, and impacts their historical thinking are urgently needed. As the challenge is not unique to China, thus genuine cross-disciplinary dialogues on using the video game as a platform to communicate the past at a global scale,433 especially its pedagogical potential to improve historical understanding with digital technology, seems not only necessary but urgent. ✶✶✶✶✶ Digital media represents, or in some cultures, a potential for, the unmediated and creative presence of humanity. When everything is possible in a virtual space, mankind’s instinctive aspiration for freedom is revitalized. Historical video games, an emergent form of public history, have already created legions of aficionados and impacted players at a scale unbounded by traditional archives and unmeasured by existing academic or professional standards. They are here to stay. Historians may comfortably dismiss them as irrelevant, but they cannot stay utterly blind to the incalculable impact of video games and remain as incurious as if business as usual. The media ecology is gradually shifting: when “the monograph is no longer the medium,”434 when “everything is already on the phone,”435 when “the Game Boy generation is growing up. And, as they seek a deeper understanding of the world we live in, they may not turn first to the bookshelves”:436 the new spirit of enterprise and creativity has visibly revolutionized the way in which historical information flows, and it will continue to do so with or without professional recognition. The future of playing with past lies in a new generation of strategically savvy public historians to intervene, creatively and responsibly.

 See Boom, et al., “Teaching through play: Using video games as a platform to teach about the past,” 27–44.  Rigney, “When the Monograph is no Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age,” 100–17.  Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).  Ferguson, “How to Win a War.”

Chapter 8 Public History: The Future of Teaching the Past As we have seen across previous chapters, history is going public in China. The history written in textbooks, published in academic journals, and taught in classrooms has become only one of many forms of representing the past and is often not the most effective form. Into the twenty-first century, monographs have stopped being the only medium. History – depending on how one interprets it – is “already on your phone,”437 and no one needs a license to write history on digital platforms. So the previously unquestionable authority has become questionable. The traditional history education, an integral part of the national nine-year compulsory education in China, is at a crossroad: memorizing established facts, names, numbers, and dates and treating historical knowledge as a privilege for only a chosen few is no longer the status quo. A more sophisticated public yearns for history that surprises and startles. This chapter tackles this challenge. It argues that public history, as an emergent and reflective practice, constitutes an effective intervention into the traditional history education. With an in-depth analysis of three national public history faculty training programs (2014–2019), I suggest that public history points to the new direction in teaching the past.

When Traditional History Education is Challenged Why learn history? The National History Curriculum Standards, also known as the Standards for History in the National Compulsory Education (Yiwu Jiaoyu Lishi Kecheng Biaozhun) (referred to as the Standards),438 issued by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, states that “The purposes of learning history include: to cultivate a national spirit, to inherit the excellent tradition and culture of Chinese civilization, to provoke a national spirit and patriotism, and to build a

 Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).  According to the Standards, history education includes six key parts, i.e., ancient Chinese history, modern Chinese history, contemporary Chinese history, ancient world history, modern world history, and contemporary world history. The Standards is part of the 19 subjects required by the national nine-year compulsory education, and applies to all schools across China. See The Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, The Standards for History in the National Compulsory Education (Yiwu Jioayu Lishi Kecheng Biaozhun) (Beijing Normal University Publishing Group, 2011). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-010

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sense of pride, mission and social responsibility for being Chinese.”439 In reportstyle language, the Standards leave vague terms such as “national spirit,” “tradition and culture,” “a sense of pride,” and “social responsibility” largely undefined and offer no concrete advice on how to evaluate core competencies. Using history as a booster for national myth, civic passion, and social cohesion is certainly not unique to China, as cultures, ideology, and patriotism constitute an indispensable part of history education around the globe. However, in China where the state has played a paramount role, history education has long been engineered to shape collective historical consciousness. Wang Zheng details an example, speaking of “China’s one hundred years of humiliation when it was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists and how this historical memory has been reinforced by the regime’s educational socialization of the Chinese citizenry.”440 The teaching of history has been integral to the national compulsory education administered by the Ministry of Education of the PRC. According to the Standards, history curriculum should be designed from three aspects (knowledge and capability; process and methods; and empathy, attitude, and value system). The Ministry of Education exercises direct authority over both the content of history textbooks and teaching methodology. Since 1992, modern and contemporary Chinese history has become a required core course in high school. The official version of modern Chinese history is stated as the following: “Chinese modern history is a history of humiliation that China had been gradually degenerated into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society; at the same time, it is also a history that Chinese people strive for national independence and social progress, persisted in their struggle of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism, and was also the history of the success of New-Democratic Revolution under the leadership of the CCP.”441 In 2011, the Standards’ core competence was updated to include five components, i.e., historical materialism, the ideas of time and space, historical source analysis, historical explanation, and family-state empathy.442 Following the Standards, history has been consistently taught in essentially the same manner over a substantially long period of time. In the Chinese Virtuoso Model, a term coined by Lynn Webster Paine, the teacher resembles a musi-

 The national compulsory education in China refers to 1–9 education.  Wang, “National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory: Patriotic Education Campaign in China,” 784.  The Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, Teaching Guideline for History Education (Lishi jiaoxue dagang).  Empathy (qing huai) means an empathetic connection between family and state, and it is alternative way to express ideological and humanistic patriotism.

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cian.443 She or he performs for the whole class, and the students become the audience. The focus in teaching is on performance, and the goal is to produce an outstanding and virtuoso performance. The goal of such a model is to transmit knowledge to students, with the textbook as the source of knowledge, and the teacher represents that knowledge.444 As a result, history classrooms are generally characterized by rote memorization and a lack of critical thinking.445 Historical thinking is frequently measured against the holy grail of memorization: as long as students collect and remember a large number of facts, they are more ready to make historical judgments and generalizations or offer analysis and explanations. Controversial histories are either glossed over or eliminated in the history textbooks. The materials are carefully selected and presented based on ideological concerns, and students are indoctrinated to trust that history is about answering questions and disagreement is socially appalled. Students stand out in the process of memorizing certain factual statements and rarely bother to inquire about how or why. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the nature and purpose of history-making has altered in a rapidly changing Chinese society. A florescence of historical activities, under the umbrella term “public history,” emerge, ranging from oral history, family history, historical performance, and historical video games to live interpretation at museums and heritage sites. These activities represent a sobering and urgent reality: history is thriving outside of traditional classrooms. Students taught and trained in the traditional way simply cannot live up to the new expectations or are ill equipped to intervene in history-making responsibly and meaningfully. The traditional pedagogy has met unprecedented challenge.

How Can Public History Contribute? Public history in China, an emergent and reflective practice, has come of age by remarkably diverse routes: unofficial sources and presentations prevail; oral history, as a methodology and historiography, enjoys enormous popularity; the memory of various scales reveals visuals that speak boldly and challenge the evidentiary status of written documents; heritage, from a pastime to an industry, plumbs the same historical truth; and virtual history, fueled by media technology, whets the public appetite for immediacy and efficiency. It is emergent, because if  Paine, “The Teacher as Virtuoso: A Chinese Model for Teaching,” 49–81.  Guo, “Exploring Current Issues in Teacher Education in China,” 73.  Zhao, “Zhuixun Lishi Jiaoyu de Benyi – Jianlun lishi kecheng biaozhunde gongneng,” Kecheng, Jiaocai, Jiaofa 3 (2004): 59–65.

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we situate history learning and teaching as a dynamic and complex adaptive system,446 the process of public history making generates outcome from action and interaction of agent, or generators of emergent behavior; it is reflective, because it “tends to focus interactively on the outcomes of action, the action itself, and the intuitive knowing implicit in the action.”447 How can public history contribute to traditional history education? I will explore the issue from three significant respects, all of which are undervalued and poorly incorporated into training in traditional educational settings in China. I make no claim of originality in raising these three points but ask the questions from a somewhat different angle and offer thoughts on how public history can provide practical advice.

Historical Thinking Chinese historical thinking is closely associated with moral thinking, with a strong belief in the ultimate good, justice, and beauty: “Chinese historical thinking is ultimately a moral thinking.”448 At the very core lies the notion that connotes both heavenly principles and human norms: Dao means principles or norms, and Li refers to pass judgment upon historical actuality. The Li and Dao obtained by observing history became the concrete general norm and lever whereby historians judged, admonished, and even remonstrated with rulers. The intense sense of the meaning of history can be extrapolated and appropriated from historical facts.449 The Chinese perceive time in a continuum along which the past, present, and future are seamlessly integrated. Historical time does not literally mean time exists in the past; instead, it implies continuity, with a particularity in the constancy of change. Hence, historical events happened in the past but exist in the present and point to the future. Confucius (551–479 BC) metaphorically interpreted time as a “river” and stood at the bank of the “river of time,” noting how it flows day and night without ceasing. The flowing, continuous, and irrevocable nature of time is embedded in Chinese historical thinking. Thinking historically, one simultaneously connects time at three intimate scales: past, present, and future. The unbroken continuity of past-present-future is not unique to China, as in Western historical thinking, the past is also inter   

Holland, Emergence: From Order to Chaos (New York: Basic Books, 1998). Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, 56. Huang, “The Defining Character of Chinese Historical Thinking,” 188. Ibid., 180.

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preted as a living present: there is the “logical necessity of the past-of-the-present, and the present is the-past-of-a-future-living present.”450 It is in China that personal experience is legitimately blended into national history: “National history awakens the soul of a nation, for history is the whole experience of our life, the whole life past. We can understand our life by referring ourselves to history. History can thus allow us to appropriately project our life into the future.”451 In other words, history in China is taken as the crystallization of past personal life experiences. “Personal” means that the meaning of one’s life is discovered, interpreted, and shaped by the history in which one is situated. To live humanly is to be historically oriented; thus, historical thinking is analogical-metaphoric thinking as an organic whole: “The basics of historical research is this: identify the questions from the present, while find[ing] the answers from the past.”452 The moral bent in Chinese historical thinking is culturally conditioned. Chinese philosophy emphasizes the harmony of the heavens and the earth in a poetical pursuit of immortality. Zhuang Tsu believes in the ultimate unity between body and spirit in which spirits symbolically and aesthetically morph into butterflies, or hua die. Chinese painting, filled with metaphors and breathtakingly beautiful, leaves those who do not understand the historical narratives behind the brushes and strokes strangely perplexed. Chinese characters, based on hieroglyphs, are intimately connected with visual and graphic thinking; inference, judgment, and calculation are a set of purely abstracted symbols from which we derive meaning and significance. Historian Ge Zhaoguang explains that this kind of historical thinking takes little note of logic, rules, and order.453 Chinese poems and prose are a well-nigh perfect blending of the signifiers and the signified, of text and images, and of actual meaning and metaphorical significance. None of these implications are directly related to history, but all of them, in various capacities, influence the Chinese modes of historical thinking, which are essentially diffusive, divergent, analogical, metaphoric, and, fundamentally, tacit. When the abstract and universal rule over the empirical evidence of historical facts, the reasoning process is premised on a morally prejudged right or wrong, and rest of the analysis follows or justifies that judgment. The intricate connection with moral history defies a clean and clear logic. In historical documents, one encounters more statements and fewer arguments precisely because moral judgment takes precedence over causal explanation embedded in these documents. Furthermore, nothing is intrinsically historical, and not all facts are    

Dewey, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, 374. Qian, The Spirit of History (Zhongguo lishi jingshen) (Jiuzhou Press, 2012), 18. Ibid. Ge, Chinese Intellectual History (Zhongguo sixiangshi), 44.

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historical facts. Any fact may be promoted to the status of historical fact once its relevance and significance is discerned. History begins with the selection and marshaling of facts by historians to become historical facts, so historical inquiry is an affair of selection and arrangement, controlled by the dominant problems and conceptions of the cultures of the period in which the inquiry is written. With new materials for constructing knowledge and a shifting analytical frame, new presents emerge; thus, the past becomes a past of a different present, and arguing by analogy becomes questionable. If we situate Chinese historical thinking in a broader intercultural context, as Jörn Rüsen454 advocated that culturally different manifestations of the logic of historical thinking ought to be framed in such a way that they do not exclude one another but rather interpret one another, public history can help students develop reasoning skills, cultivate analytical thinking, and ignite historical imagination, all of which tangibly contribute to historical thinking. For example, teaching with historical video games as a counterfactual thought experiment, developing museum exhibits based on certain historical themes, and doing live interpretation at museums and historic sites all stir historical imagination and even boast of potential for a new mode of historical thinking.

Methodological Implications Morality rules over historical facts, revealing an uneasy relationship between theory and practice. Traditional Chinese education favors the theoretical over the empirical and rules and laws over facts and information, as if the latter are selfevident, while the former require intellectual engagement. While the Standards state that students should “acquire a sense of history through a variety of venues,” it does not specify the possible ways of doing so. Suggestions for educational activities to reach the goals listed in the Standards indicate that practicum such as visiting museums with certain historical themes, watching historical movies and documentaries, and completing group work based on collecting historical artifacts should be incorporated. Some even raise the idea of doing history: guiding students to actively participate in historical field investigations, discovering problems in practice, and then applying the knowledge that has been acquired to resolve the problems. This practice can include, for example, engaging with the historical analysis of nearby historical sites, communities, villages, and en-

 Rüsen, “Crossing Cultural Borders: How to Understand Historical Thinking in China and the West,” 191–92.

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terprises; collecting relevant materials and information; and organizing, analyzing, narrating, and formulating one’s own interpretation. As positive as these statements are, none provide actual guidance on how to do history, and in reality, very little has been achieved. Similarly, while field work has earned an official status in students’ overall evaluation, it lacks clearly defined project goals, much less systematic step-by-step guidance. The practical dimension built into public history, reflective by nature, may not be a novel addition to textbook reading in the West, but is in China. When public history was first introduced a concept and a discipline, the tension between discipline- and professional-oriented faculties, which was not all unfamiliar, loomed large. However, instead of seeking pure and abstract theories, public history encourages history educators to “shovel for dirt” through practicum to develop substantial local cases, then develop theories out of them. A reflective practicum lies at the core of a public history curriculum: working with the public in various settings has demonstrated that a legitimate public space exists for citizen dialogues and for authority sharing.455 For example, family history and oral history projects, pushed with a democratic impulse, have become new modes of inquiry. Additionally, students now learn how to mount a museum exhibit that ties into certain historical subjects and work with local museums to use primary sources to do historical work while engaging historical thinking. In other words, they learn how to “analyze, comprehend, summarize, [and] compare,” to formulate their own idea and interpretation of history, discern patterns in historical changes, and, eventually, generate a more sophisticated understanding of past and present. Practicum and fieldwork push the burning question of the day upfront, encouraging students to participate in the intelligent discussions of a debating society instead of treating history as something that is antique and irrelevant to contemporary needs and wants.

Ethics and Professionalism In Chinese historical thinking, ethics are grounded in metaphysics. The morality and ethics of historians mean “moral integrity.” “One who possesses historical insight must already have a historian’s moral integrity” (neng ju shi shi ze bi ju shi de), so the morality of the historian has to be at the core of “historical insight.”. The “historian’s moral integrity” (shi de), according to historian Zhang Xuecheng, is embedded in classic arguments about objectivity and evidence-based argu-

 Li, “Public History in China: Is it Possible?” 35–36.

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ments. Such integrity also helps historians discern the relationships of events and agency in people’s lives. In light of this logic, if historians are objective, i.e., if the meaning they attach to an historical incident is able to present the Dao correctly, that objectivity depends on how the historians treat themselves as human beings, in other words, how they treat their naturally equipped “emotions” (qing) and “temperament” (qi). The process of connecting reason to human nature is regarded as the “nourishment” (yang) of the “moral constitution of the heart-and-mind” (xinshu), and nourishment can only be achieved by gradual accumulation. Here lies the main difference with the Neo-Confucian School: the morality and “nourishment” of the “moral constitution of the heart-and-mind” can be achieved neither by speculation nor by interpretation and textual criticism of the Six Canonical Books. Instead, it has to be acquired through practice. Zhang explains the practical implication as the “nourishment” of the “moral constitution of the heart-and-mind” that he believed could only be acquired through practical work. That is, a person can only acquire and develop such moral constitution by studying history: “One has to study history in order to accumulate morality” (du shi yi xu de).456 Historical impartiality was established in a circular process of studying historical examples, understanding the universal truth of dao, and, after a period of accumulation, once more returning to the interpretation of history to further ensure the objectivity of historical writing. However, this process does not present the moral tension between what one should do and what one actually does, and the ethical issues rarely take priority in traditional history teaching, simply because what one should do seems deceptively obvious. Educators diligently promote the lofty idea of authenticity and objectivity and walk around telling their students that the primary ethical responsibility of historians is to “never utter an untruth.” What these educators often refuse to acknowledge is that, despite all good intentions, it is not easy to tell the truth. When history goes public, it gets messy. How can one work in a complicated situation and resolve real problems without losing one’s moral and intellectual integrity? This is one of many challenges that today’s students face after they leave school. For example, when students investigate historic districts, interviewing original residents on the one hand while meeting with developers and planning officials on the other, they are stuck in a paradoxical relationship between their avowed professional goals and what truly matters for local residents. Which side should they represent? How can they forge a compromise among multiple stakeholders while still holding up their ethical responsibility? Oral history proj-

 Huang and Rüsen, Chinese Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Discussion, 68.

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ects with family members, for example, often reveal emotionally difficult histories and memories. How can these projects be approached in an ethical manner? At what point should the students push forward or stop? Public history foregrounds many ethical issues that require more than a mechanical and naïve textbook approach towards truth, objectivity, and authenticity, such as moral choices to be made on a case-by-case basis. Compromises are inevitable, and students should not see inevitable compromises as demoralizing. The past is inherently complicated, and public history exposes students to that complexity. Public history also embraces the idea of professionalism. While a minority of students will seek further education and eventually teach in educational settings, the majority will live a life with a professional calling. A certain level of professionalism should be taught and trained prior to that point. However, professionalism is not easily taught in classrooms with the artificial assistance of hallowed rights and wrongs. Developing professionalism requires a real historical context with real guidance from professionals. Such training also occupies a specific public role in society. Edward Said elegantly argues that being public is essential for the intellectual who is “unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say . . . not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.”457 The public quality of history demands requires a true spirit of service, for a greater good and for the needs of the present. Can the aforementioned three aspects be taught and trained? The answer is a qualified yes. Better-informed and better-resourced individuals make learning decisions based on the kind of information available, previous knowledge structures, and personal experience—also known as tacit knowledge, which that cannot be easily summarized or conveyed to others.458 History learning is no longer the same old familiar business it was in the preceding few hundred years, as is the case with history teaching. The real questions boil down to who is capable of teaching history with public history thinking and skills? If the spirit of a shared interpretive authority runs against an authoritative climate, and if public history challenges some of the basic epistemic beliefs about the nature of history along with some of the fundamental assumptions of traditional history education in China, the remedy has to come from outside the established frame of reference, i.e. history teachers equipped with public history knowledge and skills.

 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 23.  Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension.

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Educating the Educators: National Public History Faculty Training Programs Since the first National Public History Seminar held at Chongqing University in 2013 and the first national conference on public history in Suzhou later that year, the discussions within the academy have transformed from theoretical debates into more practically oriented exploration. A small group of intellectual visionaries are sounding the call for educating the educators. Three National Public History Faculty Training Programs (referred to as Programs) have since taken place in this context to conceptually, practically, and pedagogically introduce public history, to create the first generation of university-based public historians in China (Table 2). Table 2: An overview of Three National Public History Faculty Training Programs. Theme

Time

place

 History, Memory and the Urban Future

July –, Shanghai 

 Public History and the Urban Environment  Public History, Oral History and Digital Humanities

Host Partner Institution

Participants

Princeton University, Department of History at the Shanghai Normal University



July –, Chongqing Chongqing  University

Institute of the Advanced Humanities and Social Sciences at the Chongqing University



July –, 

Center for Public History, the World History Institute at the Zhejiang University



Hangzhou

Shanghai Normal University

Zhejiang University

Source: the author.

The Programs were funded and hosted by three key universities. Central to the program rationale is the idea of authority and reflexivity. A shared authority invites a genuine dialogue between the professionals and the public,459 and reflexivity calls for the practice of actively locating oneself within the research process.460 Both require a critical understanding of power in a space of convergence. The Programs broke down the barriers between academics and professionals, between professio-

 Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.  Hesse-Biber, Nagy, and Leavy, eds., Emergent Methods in Social Research.

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nals and the public. The author, working with the host institutions and local community partners, designed the training themes and organized the Programs. The participants came from a diverse range of colleges and universities across China with good geographic representation. The selection committee, composed of public historians, practitioners, and educators, recruited the participants based on their experience, interest, and plans to teach public history, either starting up a public history course/program, or incorporating public history into the existing history curriculum. Approximately 90 percent of the participants came from history departments, and the remaining 10 percent came from the fields of journalism, anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, archival management, film studies, and comparative literature. The participants were at various phases of their professional lives, with assistant professors accounting for 60 percent, associate professors accounting for 25 percent, and professors accounting for 15 percent. Museum studies, archival management, and library/information studies in China are entirely separated from history, each working within a closed system. However, these public institutions are increasingly facing a much better-informed public, and a few have realized that the old ways may not work effectively. Though many did not use the term “public history,” the programs, designed with an inclusive mentality and broad thinking, covered key themes about the definition, theories, debates, and methodology of using public history, including public memory, oral history, archival management, museums and historic site interpretation, library/information studies, media representations, environmental history, historic preservation, historical performance, digital humanities, and ethics.

Key Modules The two-week Programs zeroed around four key modules. Each key module includes approximately three-day lectures, seminars, workshops, and debates on a wide range of public history issues, along with field visits to selective local historical sites and institutions. First, new approaches to old contested or difficult histories. This type of history, censored by the State, has traditionally been shunned by professional historians due to a lack of access to proper archives, or has not yet found a way into the official narratives due to draconian political censorship, but nevertheless has already made visible appearance in the public space. One example was oral history projects about the Cultural Revolution (CR). History textbooks provided scant description of the CR, with the grisly details glossed over, but oral histories of those who witnessed and survived the CR revealed a complicated psychological world. He Shu, a prominent Chongqing-based historian, discussed his experience with interviewing 147 survivors

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of the CR and demonstrated how oral history worked as an effective tool for understanding the CR. Intense emotions or a victimized mentality can sometimes cloud rather than illuminate truth of such difficult chapters in Chinese history, so the work has to be approached with methodological rigor and professional ethics.461 Second, public history as an emergent methodology. “Emergence” begins with the empirical world and builds an inductive understanding of it as events unfold and knowledge accrues. It is “inductive, indeterminate, and open-ended,” and the method resides within the research process.462 Methodology, for the purpose of our discussions, refers to “a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed.”463 Public history, in this vein, offers fresh perspectives, or “theory of social reality.”464 This module focused on wildly popular public history subjects that nevertheless lacked proper methodologies in China. For example, oral history and digital humanities have caught on during the past decades. Among the noise of writing history from the bottom lies the tendency to transform history into a form of populism. Many oral histories are conducted without methodological rigor or a sufficient level of professionalism, so what people hear in public oral history pieces may skew toward propaganda without anyone fully realizing that stories from individuals only hold as much truth as other corroborating stories told. When should one probe further or stop asking questions when dealing with emotionally difficult issues? How can the narrators be informed of their rights in oral history projects? What kind of questions should one ask and in what way? How can we deal with discrepancies between what is officially taught and what is communicated anecdotally or tacitly? How can we discern nuances and hesitation, and how can we interpret what is left unsaid? Factually incorrect statements may still be psychologically or emotionally true, but the narrators – including the victimized, the vulnerable, and the marginalized – all have their own agenda for telling a story in a certain way, as do the interviewers when asking their questions. Third, the ethical responsibilities of the historians. As Wineburg writes with a slightly cynical tone, “in an age when no one regulates the information we consume, the task of separating truth from falsehood can no longer be for extra credit. Google can do many things, but it cannot teach discernment. Never has so much information been at our fingertips, but never have we been so ill-equipped to deal with it.”465 How can one work in a complicated situation and resolve real

 He Shu’s lecture on Oral History and Local Memory: Voices from Eye-witnesses of the Cultural Revolution, July 13, 2015, Chongqing.  Hesse-Biber, Nagy, and Leavy, eds. Emergent Methods in Social Research, 155, 161.  Harding, Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, 2–3.  Hesse-Biber, Nagy, and Leavy, eds., Emergent Methods in Social Research, 28.  Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), 8.

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problems without losing one’s moral and intellectual integrity? This is one of many challenges that today’s students face after they leave school. Oral history projects with family members, for example, often reveal emotionally difficult histories and memories. How can these projects be approached in an ethical manner? At what point should the students push forward or stop? Another workshop, moderated by an academic historian commissioned by the municipal government to document and interpret local heritage resources, engaged intense moral debates on historians’ role in preserving and selling heritage: how to balance truthseeking, ethical responsibility, and making profit. This module foregrounded many ethical dilemmas, and invited heated debates among the participants. Fourth, utilizing local historical resources. This module was locally grounded and elicited a tangible sense of past and present at three cities at different regional scales. It also aimed to train the participants to teach at particular historical sites where learning interacts with material culture and where one’s intellectual capacity was expanded and potential fulfilled. The 2014 program incorporated a one-day walking tour around colonial architecture in British and French concessions in Shanghai. Narrated by two historians from Princeton University and one Shanghai-based architect, the tour explored a range of issues concerning preserving urban built environments. The participants learned how to investigate and interpret historical architecture, and how to communicate that interpretation with the public. In 2015, the program collaborated with Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum, one of the key urban museums in Chongqing, to help participants acquire exhibit and site interpretation skills. Traditional exhibit design in China rests on the assumption that visitors come to museums as passive recipients of information, ready to absorb whatever is presented. Public history perspective reveals the flaws in this assumption. Exhibitions fail if they do not engage with what the visitors bring to the museum. The workshop focused on one of the permanent exhibits, the Journey towards a City, which records changes in the urban landscape and in doing so triggers local memories and collective nostalgia. As the only exhibit in the museum that attracted mostly by local residents, it offered an inspiring space for engaging local voices and teaching interpretation skills. The question of how museums can make exhibits more relevant generated some fruitful conversations from the participants. In 2019, a workshop was designed to analyze the dredging history at the Museum of West Lake in Hangzhou. With dredging, West Lake has evolved from a natural lagoon into a cultural landscape. The process represents an unfolding history, a sustained, intentional human intervention, and a fluctuating journey subject to political whims and intellectual visions. The workshop provided multiple perspectives on public environmental history in the local context: how can environmental history be interpreted with the public? How can environmental his-

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tory be communicated in the public space? How can a well-informed public be imbued with growing environmental consciousness?

Authority and Reflexivity Approximately one third of each program involved professionals. Public history professionals were either invited to the training site or activities took place at their workplace so that they could share their experience: for example, workshops on historical video material analysis, historical performance, site visits, and mock interviews at television stations in Shanghai and in Chongqing, and workshops at Shanghai Audio Visual Archives. The training created an interactive and reflective ambiance, something that the participants would later emulate in their own specific teaching environment, such as “From a Shared Authority to the Digital Turn in Oral/Public History,” the three-day workshop on oral history and digital humanities.466 It integrated discussions on a shared authority in the digital age, nature, and skill of oral history interviewing into hands-on work with free Web app PixStori, a digital platform adding voice to photos, recording brief stories, memories, or comments prompted by and played along with the photo. The short-form photo-response mode, with other forms of digital storytelling, stirred instant enthusiasm.467 Such workshops can be modeled at various scales. In a well-designed practicum, students learn how to “analyze, comprehend, summarize, [and] compare,” to formulate their own idea and interpretation of history, discern patterns in historical changes, and, eventually, generate a more sophisticated understanding of past and present. The practical implications in history education may not be a novel addition in the West, but they are in China. In a culture long dominated by state power and historiography as an inseparable part of statecraft, despite the liberty of discussion and suggestion still being in peril, the authorities have talked at an increasingly diminished volume during the past decade. Willingly or unwillingly, with the issue of authority and authority-sharing in an authoritative regime becoming prominent, independent and broad thinking about historical issues become more critical.

 The workshop was run by Michael Frisch from July 10–12, 2019, as part of the third National Public History Faculty Program in Hangzhou.  www. pixstori.com.

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A Global Perspective When history goes public, it also goes global. Cross-cultural elements were built into each program to encourage cross-referencing public history issues in the transnational context. Participants could interpret public history in a convergent space for broader and deeper historical thinking. The first training program was an institutional collaboration between Shanghai Normal University and Princeton University. It was a bold experiment for a cross-cultural exploration of how public history is interpreted in two different cultures. A trip to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum in 2014 with the group from Princeton provoked an animated cross-cultural debate.468 Is it possible to achieve a shared historical understanding that transcends national boundaries and possibly other fault lines?469 Places as controversial, traumatic, and highly political as the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum should have the opportunity to confront the very complexity of their histories, to teach students how to tolerate complexity, cherish nuance, challenge moral judgment, and gain the ability to deal with controversies with confidence. Unfortunately, the exhibits failed to encourage multiple perspectives, provoke the audience to meditate and ponder, or present multiple understandings, insights, and interpretations. It also failed to provide a public space that engaged critically thinking citizens. Displaying the actual bones of the victims generated a “cultural war” between the Chinese and American participants. For the Chinese, these were artifacts, forensic evidence that proved that the massacre actually happened, despite denial from the Japanese. For the Americans, the display of human remains constituted disrespect for the dead. In a group of only Chinese visitors, with an emotional assumption of a shared community, the issue would never have even been raised, but it became a source of conflict and misunderstanding in the transnational dialogues, as certain historical messages become confused when cultural values cross paths. While it takes some goodwill to achieve a shared understanding or mutual recognition of history that transcends national borders, historical events often embody distinct moral and cultural assumptions that do not travel across borders, and any interpretation has to go beyond simple comparisons.470 Additionally, senior public historians from the United States were invited to the Programs. The cultural differences humbled both the lecturers and the participants. One American public historian candidly acknowledged that his interpretation of his A visit to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum, July 27, 2014, Nanjing.  For more discussions, see Li and Sandweiss, “Teaching Public history: A Cross-Cultural Experiment,” 78–100.  Ibid.

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tory and his experience with oral history are shaped by the culture in which he lives, elaborating that “the same holds true for all of you. I would never presume to tell you what to do. I hope that you will find some of the things that I am going to share with you to be helpful and useful. I also expect to learn a great deal from you.”471 Here, the spirit of sharing-authority presented a radically different perspective to the traditional history education in China that authority is rarely challenged. It also inspired the participants to work with an increasingly more demanding and educated public, to explore alternative historical narratives, and to create more complex public history products in a range of settings from museums, archives, heritage sites, and historical reenactments to virtual space that embraces digital humanities. The cross-cultural sharing also highlighted many similar challenges that public historians encounter globally. For instance, another American public historian reflected upon the second program, saying, “In my Chongqing lectures, I explained how in the early 1980s we built a program at my home institution. Two keys to success were first, to tailor the program to the urban setting, civic resources, and community needs of Chicago, the metropolis of the American Midwest; and second, to align our program with the philosophy and mission of our host university. Here, it meant making clear how public history fit the educational philosophy of the Catholic Jesuit order which was committed to social justice and a pedagogical system that encouraged students to move from knowledge to reflection to action. In the United States, the basic curriculum is often the same at public history programs but the best programs in various parts of the nation are in some way unique to their setting. The ethics of doing public history is another area for fruitful crosscultural sharing.”472 His reflection resonated with many participants who planned to start public history courses or programs in their own institutions, each with unique disciplinary strength and local historical resources.

Result and Impact Approximately 30 schools have started public history courses since 2014.473 Foundational courses, such as Public History, appeared immediately after the first Na-

 Scarpino, Reflections on Public History in China and the Internationalization of Public History, a reflective essay sent to the author after the Second National Public History Faculty Training Program in July 2015.  Karamanski, A Midwestern American’s Perspective on Public History in China. A reflective essay sent to the author after the second national public history faculty training program in July 2015.  Source: The Center for Public History, Zhejiang University (2020).

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tional Public History Faculty Training Program in 2014, and evolved with the subsequent training programs. Each training program invited participating faculty to share the potential syllabus during the sessions on pedagogy, and the discussions centered around four aspects: different levels of public history courses; curriculum design; program design; and integrating public history into the current course. Based on these fruitful exchanges, a variety of track courses are developed and improved over the years, including oral history, public archaeology, environmental history and public history, museum and heritage conservation, public history and history education, urban landscape and public memory, cultural theory and practice, historic preservation, writing history, and digital history. Unlike their public history counterparts in the United States, top-ranking universities such as Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Fudan University have played an important role in building public history into the current history curriculum and establishing public history programs. ✶✶✶✶✶ When history goes public, what happens inside and outside the classroom has evolved into not merely a gap but rather a gulf. A diverse and dynamic representation caters to a thinking public, especially to brighter and more imaginative minds. Students no longer dance on the wires of the early expectations of their teachers and parents. They absorb and interpret a vast amount of information in unaccustomed ways. Historians and history educators are facing a better-informed and technically savvy young public who are more empowered than ever to participate more meaningfully in history-making. When the basic pedagogical assumption of traditional history education is challenged in this liberal ethos, public history presents an effectual intervention. The newly emerged public history courses and programs, as the result of the Programs, have testified this. The extent to which these emerging public history courses prove effective and sustainable remains uncertain for the moment. What does matter however, is that, after three faculty training programs many history educators have continued to engage in open and stimulating debates on a wide range of historical issues, and to exchange their teaching experience both in classrooms and in the field. The way they approach these issues and involve students has been significantly different. At the bottom, public history represents a vision of reality in which lies the future of teaching the past.

Part III: Prosuming History: A Paradigm Shift

As chapters in Part II have shown, a dazzling range of public histories emerged in China at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Consider the following: – A diverse group of professionals, including journalists, historians, museum curators, archivists, librarians, film makers, etc., work with the historically conscious public to produce oral histories with cutting-edge audiovisual media. Oral history at all social scales goes public. – Ordinary people passionately build their family trees and meticulously trace their genealogies. Previously, strictly personal, private, and intimate stories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and family ephemera became available, representing a shifting combination of history and memory, and of the private and the public. Family history has taken a populist turn. – A spectacle of modern people takes an imaginative leap into the past, and engages in dialogue with an ancient past in a strangely intimate way. History is performed and reenacted in dynamic genres, such as living histories, ritual reenactment, documentary films, festivals, pageants, parades, and dramas. – Legions of history aficionados play historical video games, which have impacted their historical consciousness at a scale unbounded and unmeasured by any existing academic or professional standard. Across China, we see a growing public co-creating and co-curating exhibits with museum curators or devoting their time and hearts to working with archivists to build family history, oral history, and local history archives. We also see a plethora of creative user-generated histories on new media platforms, including digital history, visual history, online commemoration, and citizen walking maps. A handful of such activities have grown out from the established field of history, including oral history, family history, and genealogy, though they remain at the fringe, shunned by most academic historians. An overwhelming majority, however, are not attached to any discipline: the past is everywhere, and it defies pigeonholing. What threads these seemingly disconnected phenomena? What lies behind purely emotional or aesthetic satisfaction? More poignantly, why do such amateurish and mostly unpaid forms of history possess such a mobilizing effect upon ordinary Chinese people? When the past is repeatedly and creatively reenacted, performed, narrated, and explored in various ways, even the most conservative academics would acknowledge that the business of history is not business as usual any longer. Public histories have offered an ever-expanding space of dissidence and possibilities for historical inquiry; all seem to have initiated a profound change in how people see, feel, engage with the past. On the surface, these histories appear to be merely a passing fad, appealing more to emotion than to intellect. No wonder that most scholars in China choose

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to ignore such patently amateurish phenomena.1 Some of the more serious scholars hastily discard them as an empty rhetoric with no real intellectual substance. Back to the question we asked in Part I, is this . . . history? I use ellipses here not only to indicate the hesitance but to reveal a genuine thinking gap. Ignorance and arrogance naturally result in academic inertia. Despite inspiring voices from the field, academic historians react slowly and ineffectively. Historical Research (Li Shi Yan Jiu), one of the most premier academic journals in the field, has so far published only one article about public history and that piece mainly discusses how public history originated and has since developed in the United States.2 A few more enterprising and less orthodox scholars have tried to apply traditional historical research methods acquired from schools to analyze fragmented novel data, only to find they are confused and frustrated. These forms of history fit into neither the theoretical nor the methodological frames that currently exist. They dutifully borrow and translate, dabbling with the idea of public history within a long and proud tradition of Chinese history. Most of their works remain informational, introductory, or at best exploratory with little original rigor.3 Even when discussing populist impulses and civic engagement, the tone is domineering and pretentious, the language wooden and opaque. A genuine communication between scholars and the public remains one-way traffic, as if the public were not in a position to fully comprehend the recondite scholarly works. The chasm, however, should not be automatically interpreted as the public lacking historical consciousness. Quite the contrary: the grassroots consciousness has evolved and matured over the past two decades partly because media technology has revolutionized the way that ordinary Chinese people access information. The real issue is that folk-level historical consciousness rarely finds a legitimate space in the scholars’ ivory tower. Academic historians may passionately advocate a more accessible version of hardcore historical scholarship, assuming that if the media professionals could streamline the dissemination, scholarly works could reach a broader public. It rarely occurs to them to involve the public in the knowledge production process. They remain the authors who produce, the ultimate gate-

 The word “scholars” in the Chinese context generally means “academic scholars.”  Wang, “Who Owes History: The Origin, Development and Challenge of American Public History,” 34–47.  Examples include: Jiang, “Basic History and Applied History”; Yang, “An Overview of Public History in the United States”; Zhou, Everyone His Own Historian: A Collection of Essays on Mass History; Chen, “Disciplinary Framework of Public History”; Chen, “Public History in the Age of Digital Media”; Meng, “Possible Route to Public History: Lessons History Education Reform in Germany.”

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keepers of knowledge, while the public passively consumes. This separation is unfortunate. What has gone almost unnoticed is that, rather than a cosmetic change in the patterns of participation in history-making, there has been a fundamental shift in the entire process of history-making. As long as we examine various public histories as isolated evidence, we cannot detect a coherent pattern, much less design an effective response. However, if we take a closer look beneath the jumble of seemingly dispersed activities, we discern a larger social significance. A variety of forms of public history suggest that never in Chinese history have there been so many reasonably educated individuals collectively armed with so incredible a range of information and ideas; never in Chinese history have so many people spent so much of their energy, time, and money, among other resources, exploring the past at such a scale and in such depth. Instead of sitting passively at the consuming end and accepting what the authority produces, the public have become prosumers who actively engage with the production and consumption of history. At the core, a growing public is prosuming history. This book has argued that prosuming history works in a novel structure. It is a new social fact, a consciously collective phenomenon, and an intricate code system of signs. Once various forces push the prosumption of history to the tipping points, they explode into a new model, reverse directions, and initiate a paradigm shift in the field of history.

Prosuming History Prosumption, a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, refers to the interrelated process of production and consumption, the fusion of production and consumption. In his classic The Third Wave, Toffler defines prosumption as “the principle of production for self-use, either by individuals or by organized groups” and sees it as coexisting alongside production and consumption, as both production and prosumption are “forms of production.”4 Situated in his grand scheme of social waves, Toffler traces prosumption back to preindustrial societies, or, in his words, the “first wave.” This was followed by a “second wave” of marketization that drove “a wedge into society, that separated these two functions, thereby giving birth to what we now call producers and consumers.”5 Thus, the primordial economic form is neither production nor consumption, but rather prosumption. Contemporary society

 Toffler, The Third Wave, 278, 289.  Ibid., 265–66.

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is moving away from the aberrant separation of production and consumption and toward a “third wave” that, in part, signals the two processes’ reintegration into “the coming prosumer explosion.”6 The essence of being a prosumer, in this light, is to prefer producing one’s own goods and services; this externalizes the labor cost, thus holding economic meaning as well. For much of recent history, especially since the industrial revolution, the popular and academic focus within the economy has been on production.7 More recently, especially after the end of World War II, the focus has begun to shift to the increasingly dominant process of consumption.8 With waves of technological revolution, production and consumption have converged. Much production takes place in the process of consumption, or rather, there is no consumption without some production. Thus, prosumption subsumes production and consumption as a single generic process. Writing in 1986, Philip Kotler urged business scholars to consider prosumers as a new market segment,9 but his voice was largely ignored for nearly 20 years. George Ritzer’s work broke this silence around 2000. Ritzer situates the concept of prosumption within the sociology of consumption and tries to break the production– consumption dichotomy. He argues that even during the Industrial Revolution, production and consumption were never fully distinct, and a wide range of processes existed along a continuum. The poles of the continuum involve production redefined as “prosumption-as-production” (p-a-p) and consumption as “prosumption-asconsumption” (p-a-c). Ritzer’s extensive work on prosumption focuses on its significance for capitalism from a neo-Marxist theoretical perspective.10 His “prosumer capitalism” as a new socioeconomic formation prophezies “the coming age of prosumers,”11 or the “new world of prosumption.”12 Nevertheless, as academics keep adding footnotes to Toffler’s visionary idea,13 they increasingly present prosumption in their own disciplinary jargon. This, counterintuitively, turns them away

 Toffler and Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change Our Lives, 172.  Marx, Capital, vol 2.  See Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1970/1998); Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).  Kotler, “The Prosumer Movement: A New Challenge for Marketers,” 510–13.  Ritzer, “The ‘New’ World of Prosumption: Evolution, ‘Return of the Same,’ or Revolution?” 1–17.  Ritzer and Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital Prosumer,” 13–36.  Ritzer, Dean, and Jurgenson, “The Coming Age of the Prosumer,” 379–98; Ritzer, “The ‘New’ World of Prosumption: Evolution, ‘Return of the Same,’ or Revolution?” 1–17.  Ritzer, Dean, and Jurgenson, “The Coming Age of the Prosumer,” 380.

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from the prosumers with whom they are trying to communicate, and leads to scholarship that risks losing the original analytical power of Toffler’s idea.14 Prosumption has so far received scant attention from the field of history, and this seems unsurprising. Historians, who focus primarily on the past, are more likely to close their minds prematurely to something futuristic, something with no archival records to substantiate. As mentioned earlier, various public history practices in China, though existing as ancient as the discipline of history, have suddenly gained immense popularity during the past two decades. The ways in which people relate to the past and the scale on which that happens have changed profoundly. The production and consumption of historical knowledge, bypassing political and academic bureaucracies, has gradually converged. This grand convergence has led to a changing relationship between raw materials of various formats and a newly emerged public equipped with new technology, skills, and aspirations. It also reveals a fundamental dissatisfaction with the established order in Chinese society, where a persistent need is palpably felt and waiting to be filled, yet academic historians are not prepared to answer the call. When the public takes this on, they tilt the balance between production and consumption, change the whole equation, and become the prosumers of history: they ask new questions that often are less cumulative and linear; they draw different points of contact between newly available data; they question the status of existing canons. Prosumers challenge, if not altogether overthrow, the rules governing the prior practices of historical inquiry, which emphasize chronology and archives. Most of the subjects that grab their attention simply do not have a corresponding archive to start with; the public is prosuming what academic historians call “primary sources,” which is far more than an increment to an already articulated body of knowledge. Rather than applying old rules to solve a puzzle, prosumption offers an analytical tool to redefine the puzzle. How to approach such a radical and rapid process of constructing, interpreting, and disseminating historical knowledge? In democratic cultures, public historians praise user-generated history and encourage crowd-sourcing for audience participation, for authority sharing.15 In this light, the world of prosumption shares a similar logic with today’s user generated culture, defined as generated by individual users or peers that has the potential to create engagement and/or drive conversations. Both involve the active participation of consumers in production, both are unpaid, both externalize the labor costs, and both favor participatory culture, making them net After Ritzer, rarely does a groundbreaking work on consumption appear to shock the public consciousness.  Refer to: Adair, Filene, and Koloski, eds., Letting go? Sharing Historical Authority in a UserGenerated World (Routledge, 2011).

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worked and collective in nature. However, in cultures where authority is not supposed to be shared and history is highly controlled and censored, if we bring the core of prosumption—a fusion of production and consumption—into a sharper focus, we will find that it offers a new reality, and a new tool for analyzing that reality.

An Uncommon Ground In the new era of media convergence, the line used to separate the producers and consumers of history is progressively blurring. The knee-jerk reaction from academic historians is to incorporate public history into the established knowledge structure. Thus, they are busy analyzing public history practices with traditional historical methodology or establishing public history programs within history departments. However, they soon realize that old methodologies, concepts, and models do not accommodate these novel types of history. In the traditional model of historical inquiry, or what I call the old model, history is produced by a central agency, the state, or the state-sanctioned educated elites, then passively consumed by the public, mostly students. The official history, uniformed and legitimized by the state, enters the national compulsory educational system, first indoctrinated then constantly reinforced and legitimized through a vast invisible network of state-controlled agencies. The old model produces a tribe of salaried historians self-authenticating themselves as professionals. They serve primarily political and professional interests, which often mean the same thing in China. In this model, the rift between the production and consumption of historical knowledge is a norm. By contrast, this book has argued for a new model, a model of presumption. History starts outside the institutional boundaries, and appears in bedrooms, cafes, cars, airplanes, parks, to name but a few places. It originates and thrives as hobbies, drives, emotional pursuits, or simply leisure; it takes place at one’s own pace, often outside of the monetary system, but carries tremendous tangible and intangible values; it works in a collective, cooperative, socially cohesive, and efficient milieu. In short, it does not belong to any recognized academic category, nor is it merely an intellectual quest. For scholars who have survived and thrived in the old model, the new model brings a definite sense of unreality. Scholars are groping words for it: gong zhong shi xue, gong gong shi xue, da zhong shi xue, ren min shi xue.16 All attempt to cap-

 The English word public can be literally translated into Chinese language as gong zhong (公众) and gong gong (公共), but with different connotations. Gong zhong is more people oriented, indi-

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ture the spirit of public history academically, though the traditional vocabulary does not even have a proper semantic equivalent for it. Some approach these practices from a professional vantage point, even attempting, out of instinct, to direct or control the emerging prosumers, only to realize that the old expert-led structure does not work the same way any longer. The new model quickly shatters existing boundaries and rules. In fact, it has evolved so fast that it obsoletes the old one. Prosuming history is not an extension of any particular historical research tradition; rather, it shares two essential characters of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm,17 implying a change in the rules that have governed prior historical research. In what follows, I will probe the fundamental novelties in three interrelated concepts, i.e., data, inquiry skills, and effects. First, traditional historical data are predominately in written form and heavily textual, with an aura of authority and permanence. Public histories, on the other hand, have produced audio, visual, digital, and big data through a range of venues.18 These new data inevitably generate new questions or cast doubt on the old ones, thus leading us to the basic question of what historical data are. When Claude Levi-Strauss explores that any historical episode can be resolved into a multitude of individual psychic moments.19 Therefore, historical data are in no sense “given” to the historian but are instead “constituted” by historians who must ‘choose, sever and carve them up’ for narrative purposes, and inevitably interpretive: History for whom? Who owes history? Further to the nature of such data, the full import of these contiguously related conceptual fragments involves more than historical implications: they are simultaneously cultural, psychological, and contextual. New data available in various formats illuminate, illustrate, support or disapprove historical issues or situations; they also pose new research questions or re-

cating a strong civic engagement, while gong gong refers more broadly to things happening in the public space. Chinese scholars use both terms interchangeably. For Da zhong shi xue (大众史学 popular history), which originated with scholars in Taiwan, see Zhou, Everyone His Own Historian: A Collection of Essays on Mass History. Ren min shixue (人民史学 people’s history) owes its origin to the Marxist tradition, and indicates working-class people writing their own history. The citizenry implication is often discouraged in the one-party authoritative regime, so the term is rarely adopted by Chinese scholars.  In his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn stated two essential characteristics of what he refers to as a “paradigm”: “their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 10–11.  Big data, a term applied to data sets that are high in volume, velocity or variety, and whose size or type is beyond the ability of traditional relational databases to capture, manage, and process.  Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

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define the old ones. The conventional wisdom that in every field of historical investigation there exists a body of documents that are clearly delimited and readily accessible does not stand up to scrutiny anymore. Many prosumers of history do not have an existing archive to start with, and what they do is, in fact, construct primary sources to fill the gaps for the silenced or marginalized groups in Chinese society. In redefining the problems, new opportunities for reinterpretations merge. In this way, new data challenge the old rules in two fronts. First, the old rules, created to analyze a well-defined historical period or a limited amount of historical materials, do not live up to the expectation of analyzing big historical data generated with new media technology, qualitatively and quantitatively. Second, at a more sophisticated level, with a more liberal power of language, the ideological and cultural implications, including nuances, biases, and preconceived frameworks, have modified or expanded the historical interpretive space. Second, when monograph is no longer the only medium, different genres of presentations, including museum exhibits, performing history, oral history, and family history, among others, are thriving. The massive prosumption of history starts to fire up collective imaginations and encourages cross-disciplinary collaborations, both of which are rare in the old model of inquiry. Prosumers work from a different set of assumptions, and generate a whole new range of questions that explore the past in various ways. The nature of historical inquiry and the skills involved in knowledge production thus become more generic, less proprietary.20 Skills in other disciplines, including archeology, anthropology, museums studies, journalism, media studies, urban planning, and computer science, etc., also contribute. Some may still hold on to the cliched image of historical inquiry of how history corroborates the factual data, and historians enjoy an exclusive right to the archives, and therefore are gatekeepers of the past. However, with a vast amount of new data, and a grand fusion of academic disciplines, the past is redefined, and so too are the skills to grasp a radically different version of the past. Third, prosumers have developed a more psychic, cognitive, and even idiosyncratic relationship with the past. Emotional and bodily processes penetrate into their historical consciousness. The effects of the new model are thus intimate, psychological, curiously invisible, hard to fathom, and often lead to action. “Language is more adequately characterized as neither as a free creation of human consciousness not merely a product of environmental forces acting on the psyche, but rather the instrument of mediation between the consciousness and the world

 For more details on inquiry skills, see Dewey, Logic, The Theory of Inquiry; Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

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that consciousness inhabits,”21 now that world and that consciousness are changing. Sometimes, a new historical consciousness is taking shape, while at other times, sometimes a suppressed or arrested one is released and transformed into a new one. Even more subtly, a changing attitude toward the past has rapidly evolved. The past, far from being uniform and static, as taught in previous generations, becomes infinitely diverse and fluid. The inward-looking mentality that focuses on an obscured issue does not work effectively in an open and collaborative culture. When prosumers thrust burning contemporary issues into a historical light, the past becomes inescapably contemporary in a warped time scale. As a result, prosuming history involves a strong sense of social and public responsibility that has gradually been lost in an increasingly cloistered academic world. While the old model continues to provide some of the skills and resources for the new model, the new model cannot function within the old. It topples the fundamental assumptions on which the old model works, and worst of all, it makes the old one increasingly irrelevant. Being out-of-date does not necessarily mean that the old model is bad: it was built to a different scale, caters to a different mind, and was meant for a different time. It runs out of sync with the accelerative pace of new knowledge building; it is also too undifferentiated to accommodate the inevitable diversity of public history.

Deep Fundamentals Now, we come to the deep fundamentals of the new model. A perspective of prosuming history rests on four key themes: goal, process, means, and structure. First, if the goal of historical inquiry is to acquire knowledge about the past, prosuming history aims for tacit knowledge of the past. For approximately two thousand years, Chinese history chronicles what happened in the past through state-appointed or professionally trained historians. Such knowledge, authoritative in both nature and process, has long claimed an indisputable official status. It remains external to the actual historical events, witnesses, or people who have been involved. However, when history is prosumed, it is internalized. It is internalized to correspond not with the raw and hard historical data, but with an inner sense, “a congeries of psychiochemcial impulses.”22 Prosumers are largely driven by a conviction that there are historical truths to be discovered, thus, they

 White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 126.  Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 257.

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commit only their time and money but also their creative energy and inner psychology to such a conviction. Precisely because of this sympathy with the deep psychology of the public, for the first time, history acquires personality and becomes irresistibly attractive. Embedded in such a diverse landscape of public history, albeit its amateurish and transitory nature, are a profound sense of ownership, an unflagging pursuit of historical truth, and a strong yearning for collective identity. For example, the recent waves of studies on the Cultural Revolution, discussed in Part I, reveal professional rigor, nuanced judgment, and intellectual complexity. With personal connections to the event, prosuming history in this context epitomizes a different kind of commitment, which goes beyond the educational and occupational realms. One can neither formalize nor quantify such persuasion. Here we see a nuanced transition from expertise to experience, in which a personal judgment is involved in seeking a historical truth, a reciprocal construction of identity and historical knowledge. As a result, historical knowledge is internalized, and points to a true knowledge of a theory that can be established “only after it has been interiorized and extensively used to interpret experience.”23 Ontologically, such historical knowledge always involves a tactic dimension. Epistemologically, such historical knowledge is acquired tacitly. It is acquired not through conventional venues such as books or in specific locations such as classrooms, but through a vast network of informal and freely available sources, including museums and heritage sites. How subjects are selected, questions are formed, interviews are conducted, responses are interpreted, results are made public—in short, all the key steps in the chain of prosumption—involve some level of sensory engagement, local narratives, and emotional stimuli. In prosuming history, stimulus turns into sensation, manifested in bodily participation that corresponds with prosumers’ inner senses. As we see from various historical performances analyzed in Chapter 6, prosumers engage an inward journey of soul searching in an outward reenactment. Prosumers thus embrace a deeper reality, a previously unexplored reality that has remained tacit. Furthermore, in establishing this connection with the inner sense in an intimate spatial structure, prosumers acquire not only emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic satisfaction, but also a new collective identity. In these large-scale ritual reenactments, a teeming spectacle of ordinary people attempts to explore the past with their intellect, creativity, and passion. It is this raw, intense and palpable yearning from below that works as a social surgery that probes the psychology of the very past that the reenactors genuinely care about.

 Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 21.

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History thus becomes history of, not just history for. The old model is incapable of filling such a deep yearning, nor does it care to. Yet situated in the new model, the discrete emotional, empathetic, psychological connections with the inner sense of multitudes grip the innermost emotions at their very roots: they motivate and mobilize a historically conscious public. Second, prosuming history includes the process of co-creating values. Popular forms of prosumption involve unpaid work, as we see in most user-generated history projects. Do this work possess any value? If we differentiate values into two categories, values for use, and values for exchange, we realize that prosumers engage in a process of co-creating values, be it historical, social, or monetary. That process echoes the spirit of a shared authority. Michael Frisch has recently elaborated on the issue of “audience,” indicating “the notion that in public history “we”—whoever that is—generate historical “products” and “communicate” these to “them,” whomever they may be”. This is certainly an improvement over the conventional assumption that it is normal—literally, the norm—for academics or professionals or intellectuals to talk exclusively to each other. But it is a limited and limiting notion of public history, with the flow of intelligence, information, and insight understood as unidirectional—a one-way street. It is immaterial whether “we” understand ourselves to be using history to uplift and socialize the masses, or rather to subvert elites and de-center dominant cultural frames. Whether top down or bottom up, the always implicit and sometimes explicit assumption is similar: public history involves a unidirectional flow from “us” to “them.”24 While prosuming history shares some fundamental elements with a shared authority, it is more than interactive, collaborative, and sharing. Out of the prosumption emerges a brand-new social bound, knitted together and sustained by collective intelligence in both physical and virtual space. The ideal of collective intelligence implies the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization.25 It is constantly enhanced and coordinated in real time, and results in the effective mobilization of skills. Within the vastly complicated yet almost invisible network of collective intelligence, knowledge of the past is more than shared: it is reciprocal, interpenetrating, and self-generative; it creates and multiplies values.

 Frisch, Public History is Not A One-Way Street, Keynote Presentation at the Inaugural Conference of Associazione Italiana di Public History, Ravenna, Italy, June 5–9, 2017.  Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, 15.

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Consider today’s historical video games we see in Chapter 7. As an odd admixture of imaginative, playful, interactive, and immersive elements, they combine spatiality, virtuality, and simulation. Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMRPGs), for example, demonstrate a broader and deeper level of collaboration in the virtual space. The interactive nature of digital media reveals that grassroots creativity, authority sharing, and empowerment converge. Many Chinese-style MMRPGs, such as New Semi-Gods and Semi-Devils (Xin Tian Long Ba Bu), Fantasy Westward Journey (Meng Huan Xi You), and Grand Narrative of Westward Journey (Da Hua Xi You), integrate history and morality into fun, and have attracted a growing crowd of users. The new media ecology, characterized mostly by digital but also by transmedia storytelling, has already stirred a multitude of germinating minds and provided new possibilities for the past. Consequently, a shared authority and a tangible sense of ownership in virtual collaboration become incredibly empowering. Third, if prosuming history is so pervasive, taking root in such a myriad of forms, and seemingly unstoppable, what is the means of prosumption? One critical agent stands out: media technology. The convergence of the new and old modes of media provides a novel model of revealing.26 Whether media technology is merely a neutral tool offering a neutral space, or possesses an intrinsic, autonomous power to shape and transform society, remains debatable. But one thing is certain: if the emergence of new technologies, particularly new communications systems, is a result of complex interactions among technological, social, cultural, political, legal, and economic forces, different cultures and different political regimes are experimenting and exploiting nascent technologies in radically different ways. Chinese culture is no exception. Yet “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological,”27 media technology empowers and enfranchises; it spurs creativity, sparks collective imagination, and cultivates collective intelligence; it has progressively redefined prosumers and their relationship to the past. The social consequences and psychological effects of these technologies are tangible. Socially, with extensive use of the Internet and creative experiments with digital tools and platforms, prosumers start to create and disseminate their own historical narratives. A virtual, disembodied community—history aficionados, practitioners, amateur historians—directly engages with its own history, develops skills related to information management and preservation, and builds up its own archives. Virtual history, born in the era of digital media, possesses a renewed and active sense of identity, ownership, and citizenship. The past adopts a plural form: how are diverse versions of the past expressed and how do they mul-

 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 12.  Ibid., 4.

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tiply? Which version of the past enters public attention? Psychologically, when prosumers start to access information from their personal digital devises, technology extends their consciousness; as Marshall Mcluhan brilliantly claimed more than half a century ago, the technological extension of human consciousness has altered the patterns of thought and valuation, or the sense-ratio of the psychic and social complex.28 This extension also collectively affects prosumers’ thinking process and their sense of history. However, one mystery remains: how have previous waves of technological breakthroughs failed to ignite such sparks while the most recent one has succeeded in reaching the tipping point? The answer lies in the nature of the interactivity of digital media. When information flows vertically, it is consumed uncritically. In China, until the era of digital media, communications technologies worked in a unidirectional, hierarchical, highly centralized, and largely closed system. Print media, for example, has long been controlled and censored by the state to build up “imagined communities.”29 However, when history flows horizontally, multiplied by audience interaction, as the popular social media has powerfully demonstrated, it becomes self-generative, and a liberal public space is released. This newly released space presents prosumers with infinite possibilities that the previous forms of media technology lack: interactivity sparks the pent-up democratic impulse in the grassroots movement within an authoritative regime, unleashes an outpouring of fresh ideas about the past, and provides practical venues and tools to quench the thirst for history. In such an evolving virtual space, if an inchoate anticipatory democracy is yet to take shape, a different public has already formed. Last, prosuming history takes place in an open structure. It exists in an infinite continuum. This is directly related to the decentralized, participatory, recycling, efficient, and accelerative nature of digital media. The structure of prosumption involves a strong spatial implication. From the tacit dimension of historical knowledge to the anthropological space of knowledge, or cosmopedia,30 the released space invites dynamic engagement with different types of expressions. For example, private museums in China are taking a lead in creating sites of prosumption. The Shanghai Propaganda Posters Art Centre, a private museum in Shanghai, presents a telling case. The gallery exhibits posters from the Maoist period of communist China, and a significant portion comes from the CR period. The collection, as discussed in Part I, reflects how state-appropriated and manufactured knowledge has impacted the ordinary Chinese lives. The Museum of Family Letters, discussed in Chapter 3, presents

 McLuhan, Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man, 33.  Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, 215.

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another impressive example. These family letters record personal narratives and family stories. Analysed collectively, the letters provide fresh insights into broader social changes, for example, the letters of Zhang Faxu, a peasant from south Shanxi Province with merely half a year of formal education. In a family letter dated December 17, 1989, he described his first flying experience with a somewhat choppy and humorous tone in which the thrilling joy of gratification mingles with a sanguine expectation for a brighter future and surfaces so naturally. Upon his arrival, he sent a six-word telegram to his son that can be translated as: “Arrived safe and happily.” What an appropriate and emotional six words! We catch a glimpse of how Chinese peasants enjoyed an improved living standard after the reform-and-open policy began in the early 1980s. With a strong focus on civilian family letters, the museum demonstrates the power of storytelling in ordinary families. The interpretive space of the museum brings personal narratives and family memories together as a form of public history, thus, prosuming history functions in a perennially reciprocal, fluid, and evolving structure.

Two Caveats Am I granting too much power to the public? Probably. Across the book, I have worked not for them, but with them, as fellow-travelers. I have enjoyed the space that sparks some genuine dialogues about historical issues, and been excited by a visible amount of positive energy released from that space, from the public’s presuming history. That said, two caveats deserve further deliberation. The first concerns human psychology. The impact of digital technology on the human brain and on the thinking process is not all positive. When the knowledge of the past is mechanized, first through print, then through new media, and when it grows too fast and too vast, it simply cannot be thoroughly absorbed by human intellect. Graham Wallas argued persuasively that creative thought was dependent on the oral tradition and that the conditions favorable to it (personal contact and a consideration for others) were gradually disappearing with the increasing mechanization of knowledge.31 When vast amounts of unidentified historical images become available through social media, they should, ideally, increase the possibility of original research, and provide a novel model of revealing historical truth. Unfortunately, in most cases, prosumers are overwhelmed by floods of information, yet they are poorly prepared to

 Wallas, Social Judgment (George Allen and Unwin, 1934). Also refer to Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (Solis Press, 1926/2014).

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interpret the information critically and historically, much less engage in deeper analytical thinking and decision-making. The easy repeatability of the unidentified visual materials through digital platforms dramatizes the ephemeral and the superficial, and simultaneously deprives social judgment and creative thought. It is one thing to be able to know and read more, yet it is quite another to think, analyze, and judge. A reading public may not necessarily be a thinking public. When media technology loads us with a vast amount of undifferentiated information, it exercises “a benevolent tyranny over us”32 and often cripples our capacity to think. Benjamin Barber reminds us that “spectrum abundance, the multiplication of conduits and outlets is not the same as pluralism of content, programming, and software. In an information age, technology may simply help reinforce the conventional wisdom, diversity.”33 More subtly, we experience a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity with the information cascade. Wallace Stegner laments that “bright as the media are, they have little memory and little thought . . . Thought is neither instant nor noisy . . . it thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience.”34 Let us take a closer look at a booming number of user-generated history projects. Most of them are more information based rather than knowledge based. They often lack critical judgment, and they do not generally present a coherent historical narrative; they involve far too little actual thinking, especially historical thinking, which always requires an attentive and critical mindset. In other cases, when the subjects of inquiry are contested, unsettled, or difficult, such as oral histories of traumatic events, they can become visceral and emotionally charged, arousing feelings and sentiments and avoiding genuine argument based on reasoning. Sifting, analyzing, critiquing the information freely available from various digital platforms should be a critical component of prosuming history. This is precisely why public history skills need to intervene, a point I will return to in the final section. The second issue is more specific to Chinese culture. When the cult of documents turns into the cult of amateurs, the social power of media can backfire. At first glance, digital technology, especially social media, has released some positive energy, representing a new social reality and presenting possibility for a new collective imagination and intelligence, as we have seen in many cultures. However, whether the grassroots consciousness poses a serious challenge to the existing po-

 Jenkins, Thorburn, and Seawell, eds., Democracy and New Media, 25.  Ibid., 34–35.  Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West, 278.

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litical and cultural structures, or even constitutes a viable alternative to them, needs further deliberation. One needs to ask: who is in actual control over the past? Or, rather, will an increasingly liberal access to abundant information inevitably lead to a more democratic ethos? The early media conveyed news, gossip, opinion, and ideas within particular social circles or communities, with little distinction between producers and consumers of information; they were an earlier version of social media. The vertical distribution of news, from a specialist elite to a general audience, had a decisive advantage over horizontal distribution among citizens. The new technologies of mass dissemination can reach large numbers of people with unprecedented speed and efficiency, but simultaneously put the control of the flow of information into the hands of a selected few. Though both types of information control lead to public ignorance, the earlier one is visible, expected, and accepted, while the more recent one is invisible, pervasive, subtle, and, ultimately, more effective. To better control its more resourced citizens, China has started an ambitious and systematic experiment of digital dictatorship at a massive scale. The social credit system, which monopolizes personal big data, aims to score not only the financial creditworthiness of citizens, but also their social and possibly political behaviors. Despite two large technical hurdles, the quality of the data and the sensitivity of the instruments to analyze it,35 the system reinforces censorship and fuels nationalism. Private Internet firms have long played an important role in censoring the content they and their users produce. More recently, censorship from the bottom-up has appeared. Increasingly, ordinary Chinese citizens are joining in to help the officials look out for “harmful” content related to several broad categories.36 Pierre Lévy has made a bold point in his claim that “totalitarianism collapsed in the face of new forms of mobile and cooperative labor. It was incapable of collective intelligence.”37 No centralized power can completely control and censor what is essentially decentralized digital media. Even if such a power wants to, the attempts to do so, obviously futile, will eventually fail. ✶✶✶✶✶ Prosuming history has radically redefined the concept of history and altered the dynamics of constructing the knowledge of the past. It could offer a creative space in which to integrate history into an interactive and communicative experience. In such space, time becomes less linear, and the very idea of historical knowledge takes on a tacit implication. Also in such space, historical thinking is

 China’s Digital Dictatorship. The Economist, December 17, 2020, 14–20.  The party’s priorities are, in order: “political,” “terrorist,” and “pornographic.”  Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, 3.

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constantly affected and reshaped. However, despite the old model working at a snail’s pace, the new model has not yet come to constitute a viable alternative. A new generation of trained public historians is critical for accomplishing that transition. When the public prosumes history because of psychological impulses and the inner sympathies with the past, we need public historians who can feel history, urgently. Here, two essential characteristics of public historians become critical. First, they need to be trained as good historians, who can professionally work with a variety of historical materials. This means that traditional historical inquiry skills are still important and relevant. However, a new set of skills from a variety of fields including media, communications, graphic design, and computer programming also needs to be integrated into their training in practicums. Second, they need to learn to be public intellectuals, who can tactfully incorporate a citizen element into their professional calling. This means a public role of representing and communicating to and with the public on complicated historical issues.38 It also means a genuine curiosity about history, out of a sense of relevancy and urgency regarding one’s own time. Unlike their closeted, salaried peers who do not care what happens outside the academy, public historians directly address authority, and work closely with the public; they choose to answer the amateurish impulses rather than settle for being a professional supplicant. Historically and socially, the patterns and impacts of the prosumption of history in China at such an unprecedented scale have yet to be evaluated. While there exists a cultural lag—a lapse of time between the changes in the habits of many individuals when they use new inventions and the changes that occur in the organizations comprised wholly or in part of these individuals39—the perspective of prosumption will be significant for projecting the technology-driven public history in the coming decades. The vast amount of newly released, created, curated, and archived historical data have enshrined a new kind of freedom. Rather than being oppressed by the feeling that the major work has already been done, the key documents have already been exhausted, and the canon for interpretation has already been established, prosumers work in a novel terrain. A collective sense of being on the verge of discoveries looms large.

 Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1993), 11.  Ogburn, “How Technology Changes Society,” 84.

Epilogue: The Future of China’s Past

In the new model of prosuming history, a range of seemingly idiosyncratic historical practices either challenge the status quo, or enrich our understanding of the multiple pasts. This book has sought to establish that modern public history, as complex adaptive systems, is history(ing) in the public sphere. Complexity – the notion that complex social phenomena emerge from a collection of interacting agents – enhances our understanding of a wide range of unconventional forms, oral history, genealogy, ritual reenactment, historical site interpretation, historical performances, virtual history, digital humanities, etc., thus complex public history emerges. Various cases and projects discussed in this book have demonstrated the following four core features: 1. Emergence. Emergence is the hallmark of modern public history. It is the idea that a complex system is not controlled from a central node but instead emerges from the interaction of interdependent parts on the basis of a small number of coordinating rules, or rather, much coming from little. A small number of rules or laws can generate systems of surprising complexity.1 The rules or laws generate the complexity and the ever-changing flux of patterns that follows leads to perpetual novelty and emergence (recognizable and recurring).2 Structurally, this is the large number of interacting agents, the spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior, or self-organization,3 which leads to increased complexity. Self-organization from below into a complex whole draws our attention to history making from below, from the socially marginalized. Rather than slapping in the face of traditional history, many public histories, primarily driven by an emergent and self-organizing impulse, simply eschew the central authority. The authority, be it intellectual or political, is either challenged or shared. As we discussed in Chapter 4, private museums in China are booming, as technology has changed how people access information. Subsequently, the very definition of “public” and “history” is modified. The tension between state-controlled cultural enterprise and the public consumption of history fluctuates. Recently, there seems to be a loosening of authority, a more liberal social environment, and a better-informed reading public. Both the government and the public seem to engage with museums, as part of China’s soul-searching. Private museums emerge as sites of prosumption, catering for a different quest for a different history.

 Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order.  Ibid., 4.  Capra, The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-012

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2. Reinforcing feedback loops. As public space is open and dynamic, public history activities form numerous intricately interlinked loops in a large network, with thresh-hold effects or tipping points. Sometimes long periods of stasis are punctuated by sudden changes, which cannot be readily explained as the outcome of discrete causes. Memory, a form of feedback, is essential; it echoes back to an earlier point of time in one’s life. Public history(ing) allows public memory to actively circulate, with feedback loops reinforced. Historical performance through reenactment represents bodily engagement with the past, as we see in Chapter 6. Cultural memory and collective identity are mutually constructed in such engagement. Also in such engagement, historical information is redistributed, aggregated, and reinterpreted, cultural memory is reenacted and remediated, and the past is reanimated through a consciously physical and psychological experience.4 The memory of such collective experience shows the “ongoing result of public communication and of the circulation of memories in mediated form,”5 and a new form of public history is taking shape. 3. Distributed information. Taking a system view, we start to detect how certain information or fact is interpreted as historical, and how they work collectively, or in James Surowiecki’s popularized phrase, the “wisdom of crowds.”6 Here the “brain” of the system is distributed widely across its components, each of which possesses a different perspective that when aggregated produces a more effective entity than would be possible in a centrally directed system. Similar to the ecosystem, knowledge is contained through the trial-and-error evolutionary trajectories of various species in relation to each other. In social systems, this takes place through the reflections and interactions of individuals in relation to each other and the whole, or, in Pierre Lévy’s term, “collective intelligence.”7 When oral history goes public, a diverse group of professionals, including journalists, museum curators, archivists, librarians, and documentary film-makers, etc., work with the socially concerned public to produce historical pieces made for consumption in the public sphere, thus public oral history emerges. It finds expression in a variety of physical or virtual public spaces, and it works in an open structure, with rich interactions between interviewers and narrators. Such oral histories, with active public engagement, are emergent and generative in the sense that the sum is more than all parts patched together. For example, like in most Asian coun-

   

Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience: Cultural Memory in the Present, 243–44, 262. Rigney, “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory,” 16. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds. Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace.

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tries, public history in China is technologically driven and mediated. The expansion of the internet has fundamentally shortened the distances and altered the ways in which people communicate with each other. Freer access to information, massive amounts of digital materials, and dynamic representations by means of cuttingedge audiovisual media all have transformed the rigid, academic idea of history. Multimedia is the method that Chinese culture uses most often to attract, engage, and interest the public in their own history, and oral history is the mostly commonly deployed methodology to ensure that the public engage the past. 4. An open, dynamic, and perpetually novel system. Public history operates in an open structure, in an infinite continuum. This is directly related to the decentralized, participatory, and generative nature of digital technology. The structure of complex public history involves a strong spatial implication, or dubbed by Pierre Lévy as “cosmopedia,” the anthropological space of knowledge,8 where the released space invites dynamic engagement with different types of expressions. We notice that, like all adaptive systems, public history(ing) follows a nonlinear logic, thus causing a disproportional effect. The relationship between cause and effect can only be drawn with curves or wiggles, not with a straight line. Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another. Do these examples of public history constitute simply short-term events due to their contemporary relevance, or can they accumulate into dynamic patterns in the long run? To answer this question, we need to understand the nature of the knowledge generated from complex public history. The knowledge of complex public history is tacit. Let’s examine more closely the nature of knowledge. Jean-François Lyotard presciently observed in 1980s that the technological transformation can be expected to have a considerable impact on knowledge. Its two principal functions – research and the transmission of acquired learning – are already feeling the effect, or will in the future.9 The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. He further defined narrative knowledge as “a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of truth, extending to the determination and application of cri-

 Ibid., 215.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 4.

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teria of efficiency (technical qualification), of justice and/ or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or color (auditory and visual sensibility), etc.”10 A decade later, Michael Gibbon and others advocated for a new form of knowledge, evaluated by standards of applied usefulness, and coined the phrase, “Mode 2 knowledge.”11 Based on a greater diversity of knowledge producers, distributors, and audiences, this type of knowledge, transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, hierarchical, organizationally diverse, and reflexive,12 is thriving in a postmodern society. These knowledge-producing actor-networks have translated the metaphors of complexity to their purposes and then circulated them in these mutated forms. As Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is in fact a description of the network of our society and of the manner in which it produces and reproduces knowledge. The argument for a multiplicity of discourses is not a willful move; it is an acknowledgement of complexity. It allows for the explosion of information and the inevitable contradictions that form part of a truly complex network. In this vein, modern public history epitomizes a different kind of commitment, which goes beyond the educational and occupational realms. Complexity attempts to encapsulate and recast many extant “bottom-up” critiques of public history within the rubric of complexity. The authoritative regime will continue fight for controlling the knowledge as information commodity,13 yet it is (technologically) impossible to know what the state of knowledge is, in other words, the problems of the society within which it is situated, much less to control such knowledge. The “bottom-up” myth is indeed an open structure, interacting with the immediate environment and adapting constant changes. Have I gone too far? Probably. Throughout the book, I have shown that public history(ing) is socially grounded, so knowledge is produced out of such contextual and relational processes. The strong tacit knowledge,14 or known as collective tacit knowledge, is in the domain of knowledge that is located in society – it has to do with the way society is constituted. As the structure of society is an emergent property, we come to the social aspect, or rather, the location of tacit knowledge. Here the individual is not the unit of analysis, the individual merely shares the collectivity’s knowledge. The special thing about humans is their ability to feast on the cultural blood of the collectivity in the way that fleas feast on the

 Ibid., 18.  Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies.  Thrift, “The Place of Complexity,” 33.  Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 5.  Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, 85.

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blood of large animals. We are, in short, parasites, and the one thing about the human brain that we can be sure is special is the way it affords parasitism in the matter of socially located knowledge.15 The knowledge of public history(ing) is tacit precisely because of the re-engineering of the social bonds in a perpetually novel system. Not only has the nature of historical knowledge changed, the way to acquire such a knowledge has also changed. It is acquired not through conventional venues such as books or in a specific location such as classrooms, but through a vast network of informal and freely available sources, such as museums, historical sites, archives, or virtual space. How subjects are selected, questions are formed, interview are conducted, responses are interpreted, results are made public—all involve some level of sensory engagement, local narratives, and emotional stimuli. Such stimulus turns into sensation, manifested in bodily participation that tacitly corresponds with the public’s inner senses. By the similar token, the nature of research is also transformed. In Switching Codes, Ian Foster discusses the role of computation in research, “the rapid decline in the cost of data collection, storage, and analysis and the parallel increase in the quality of instrumentation used for data collection . . . the emergence of new research methodologies based on novel experimental programs.”16 One consequence of this exploding ability to capture data about anything, anywhere, anytime is the question of what data to collect will be of vital importance; the creative challenge is not so much in gathering information as it is in asking the right questions,17 as how to frame and ask the right questions in oral history projects indicate. The convergence of the new and old modes of media provides a novel model of revealing.18 Whether media technology is merely a neutral tool offering a neutral space, or possesses an intrinsic, autonomous power to shape and transform society remains debatable, but one thing is certain: if the emergence of new technologies, particularly new communications systems, is a result of complex interactions among technological, social, cultural, political, legal, and economic forces, different cultures and different political regimes are experimenting and exploiting nascent technologies in radically different ways. However, “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”19 In Chinese culture, media technology empowers and enfranchises; it spurs creativity, sparks collective

    

Ibid., 131. Foster, “How Computation Changes Research,” 24. Lederberg, quoted by Mark Stefik, “We Digital Sensemakers,” 38. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 12. Ibid.,4.

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imagination, and cultivates collective intelligence; it has progressively redefined the publics and their relationship to the past. The recent waves of revolution in media technology have permanently transformed the public history landscapes. As a result, history making, or more specifically, the nature of history and the process of history making has altered dramatically. A range of unconventional forms of history, such as oral history, genealogy, ritual reenactments, historical site interpretation, historical performances, virtual history, and digital humanities, appear and thrive outside the academy. As the history of ordinary people is rarely represented in the official narratives, modern public history meets a felt and fills an emotional void. It echoes a prevailing cultural anxiety: the traditional history does not live up to an increasingly demanding public appetite for a more sophisticated and relevant history anymore. The very unconventionality also reveals nuances and counter-intuitive implications that make public history original and dynamic. This book makes the case for viewing public history as complex adaptive systems, thus complex public history. If interdisciplinary history means historical scholarship which makes use of the methods or concepts of one or more disciplines other than history, classic historical works have always opened to the possibilities of interdisciplinary exploration.20 Taking a system view of history making may not resolve all the issues of two galaxies, but without it, we will keep missing the creative opportunities from both sides. In this spirit, complex public history suggests an interdisciplinary approach to crossing the academic and the public culture. It opens up some fascinating new potentials: it nourishes serious discussions about core values in historical research; it allows us to envision the possibility for change; it helps us detect some coherent patterns behind such a radical process of historical knowledge building. Creating new projects to explore that potential, asking larger and fresher questions beyond history textbooks, or reframing old questions in a new light is more than an intellectual curiosity. It concerns the future of China’s past.

 Thomas Horn and Harry Ritter, “Interdisciplinary History: A Historiographical Review,” 436, 445.

Glossary (Chinese Characters) bai he liang bai gong guan Beijing ren bing bu yan zha cheng yi Chi Bi Zhi Zhan Chu Jing Ru Bi Tu chu qi bu yi chuan jia bao Chun Qiu ci tang Da Hua Xi You Da Ming Hui Dian Da Xue da zhong shi xue dao di ku du jiang yan du shi yi xiu de duan qiao can xue fu xi gao kao ge wu gong gong shi xue gong ji gong zhong shi xue Gu jian qi tan gu lai zheng zhan ji ren hui guang fu hui Guang xu Guo Yu guo Hai Guo Tu Zhi han ban han ju he zong lian heng History of Qing Dynasty hong yan hua die hua gang guan yu hua xia fu xing, yi guan xian xing hua jia jia bao

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-013

白鹤梁 白公馆 北京人 兵不厌诈 诚意 《赤壁之战》 《出警入跸图》 出其不意 传家宝 《春秋》 祠堂 《大话西游》 《大明会典》 《大学》 大众史学 道 帝喾 都江堰 读史以修德 断桥残雪 伏羲 高考 格物 公共史学 躬祭 公众史学 《古剑奇谭》 古来征战几人回 光复会 光绪 《国语》 国 《海国图志》 汉办 汉剧 合纵连横 《清史稿》 红岩 化蝶 花港观鱼 华夏复兴, 仪冠先行 画 家 家报

266

Glossary (Chinese Characters)

jia miao Jia pu jia shu jia ting jia xin jia xun jia yan jia zu Jian Xia Qing Yuan jiang hu jiang nan Jin Yong jin zong shou zu jing shen wen min jun guo miao jun shi kuai le xue xi lei feng xi zhao li Li Shi Yan Jiu li yue jia mo liang liu he ta liu lang wen ying Meng Huan Xi You Min Bao ming ming de Ming Shi mu nan ping wan zhong neng ju shi shi ze bi ju shi de nian nv wa pan gu pi bian pian wen ping hu qiu yue ping tian xia qi jia qi Qian Tang Hu Shi Ji Qin Shang qin qing qing fu qing huai qu yuan feng he

家庙 家谱 家书 家庭 家信 家训 家言 家族 《剑侠情缘》 江湖 江南 金庸 敬宗收族 精神文明 郡国庙 军师 快乐学习 雷峰夕照 礼 《历史研究》 礼乐嘉谟 两 六和塔 柳浪闻莺 《梦幻西游》 《民报》 明明德 《明史》 亩 南屏晚钟 能具史实则必具史德 年 女娲 盘古 皮弁 骈文 平湖秋月 平天下 齐家 气 《钱塘湖石记》 《秦殇》 亲 情 青服 情怀 曲院风荷

Glossary (Chinese Characters)

ren min ren min shi xue San Guo Yan Yi San Guo Zhi san tan yin yue shang bing fa mou shang shan xia xiang Shao hao She Yi shen nong Shi Ben shi de Shi Ji Shi li er qiu zhu ye shu shuang feng cha yun si jiu Si Shu su di su di chun xiao Sun Zi Bing Fa tan fang tan gou The Twenty-Four Histories tian di tian ye diao cha tu wei wu wu jing wu xia wu zhu xi zi Xia Ke Ying Xiong Zhuan xian Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan Xin Hai Ge Ming xin shu Xin Tian Long Ba Bu xing xiu shen xuan chuan xuan yuan Xun Qin Ji yang yang yao

人民 人民史学 《三国演义》 《三国志》 三潭印月 上兵伐谋 上山下乡 少昊 《射义》 神农 《世本》 史德 《史记》 失礼而求诸野 蜀 双峰插云 四旧 《四书》 苏堤 苏堤春晓 《孙子兵法》 探方 探沟 《二十四史》 天地 田野调查 土 魏 吴 《五经》 武侠 巫祝 西子 《侠客英雄传》 仙 《仙剑奇侠传》 《辛亥革命》 心术 《新天龙八部》 行 修身 宣传 轩辕 《寻秦记》 养 阳 尧

267

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Glossary (Chinese Characters)

Ye Zi Xi Yi Wu Jiao Yu Li Shi Ke Cheng Biao Zhun ying you di shen ru yu han Yu shun yue yun chou wei wo zhao zi dong zheng xin Zhenghe Xia Xi Yang zhi guo zhi yu zhi shan zhi zhi zhong guo feng zhong hua min guo Zhong hua ying xiong Pu zhong yong Zhou Li Zhou Qin Schools of Thought zhu bao Zhuan xu zi ran zong miao zong zhu zong zu zu pu zu xian Zuo Tian Zuo Zhuan

《叶子戏》 《义务教育历史课程标准》 阴 诱敌深入 玉函 禹舜 乐 运筹帷幄 渣滓洞 正心 《郑和下西洋》 治国 止于至善 致知 中国风 中华民国 中华英雄谱 中庸 《周礼》 《周秦诸子》 竹报 颛顼 自然 宗庙 宗主 宗 族 ( 簇) 族谱 祖先 《昨天》 《左传》

Permissions Some chapters in this book have appeared as noted below, in versions modestly revised for publication. I am grateful for the generous supports from the designated publishers for permission to reproduce the materials here. Part I. The Origin of Modern Public History in China Originally published under the same title: “The Origin of Modern Public History in China.” History Workshop Journal 88 (2019): 252–73. Chapter 1, Part II. Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese Originally published under the same title: “Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese – Initial Findings from Chongqing.” In Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field (Making Sense of History), edited by Anna Clark and Carla Peck, 125–41. Berghan Books, 2019. Chapter 2, Part II. Oral History: History, Memory, and Identity Originally published as: “History, Memory, and Identity: Oral History in China.” Oral History Review 47, no. 1 (2020): 26–51. Chapter 3, Part II. Family Narrative, Personal Memory, and Public History Originally published as: “Family History in China at the Crossroads: Family Narrative, Personal Memory, and Public History.” Journal of Family History 44, no. 4 (2019): 449–69. Chapter 4, Part II. Museums and the Public Originally published as: “Museums and the Public: Visions for Museums in China.” The Public Historian 42, no. 1 (2020): 29–53. Chapter 5, Part II. When Environmental History Goes Public Originally published as: “When Environmental History Goes Public.” Nature and Culture 16, no. 3 (2021) 1–28. Chapter 6, Part II. Performing History: Cultural Memory in the Present Originally published as: “Performing History in China: Cultural Memory in the Present.” International Public History 5, no. 2 (2022): 127–41.

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Chapter 7, Part II. Playing the Past: Historical Video Games as Participatory Public History Originally published as: “Playing the Past: Historical Video Games as Participatory Public History in China.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technology 27, no. 3 (2021): 746–67. Chapter 8, Part II. Public History: the Future of Teaching the Past Originally published as: “Public History: the Future of Teaching the Past.” Public History Review 29 (2022): 1–13.

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Index affect 12, 80, 84, 116, 149, 157, 193, 199, 212, 218 agency 14, 112, 140, 179, 181, 207, 216, 226 ancestor worship 94–97, 101, 174 audience 31, 74, 81–82, 124–125, 130, 133–138, 141, 157, 172, 183, 186, 215, 221, 233, 243, 249, 254, 262 authenticity 31, 131–132, 137, 169, 180, 185–188, 200, 204, 226–227 authority 5, 32, 37, 56, 59, 65, 119, 123, 129, 131, 137–139, 166, 173, 176, 183, 193, 215, 219, 228, 232, 242, 244, 255, 259 Bozhou battle reenactment 169–170, 170f, 171f, 179, 185, 187 burial practice 97, 114–115 Center for Green Public History 146 China 1, 9–41, 45–46, 52, 56, 60, 62–98, 113, 122, 127, 137, 140–144, 148, 158, 170–173, 177, 186, 192–196, 200, 205, 216, 219–223, 227, 231, 239, 243, 251, 254 Chinese and the Pasts 12–13, 27, 45–61, 93 Chinese Communist Party 26, 54, 63, 70, 115, 122, 195 Chinese Virtuoso Model 220 Chinese-style games 201–203, 209, 214 Chongqing 13, 22, 29, 30f, 50–51, 59, 73, 76, 83, 124, 126–130, 129f, 228t, 231–232 Chongqing Three Gorges Museum 13, 29, 59, 83, 118, 124, 231 collective remembering 52, 56, 114, 172, 180 commemoration 33, 48, 52, 175–176, 189–190 communicative space 166–168, 179 complex adaptive system 2, 4–7, 9, 180, 222, 259, 264 complex public history 1–16, 234, 259, 261, 264 complexity 3–9, 12, 71, 86, 131–132, 227, 233, 259, 262 Confederates in the Attic 187 Confucius 20, 178, 190, 211, 222 connectedness to the past 55–56 convergence 213–214, 228, 243, 250, 263 counterfactual thinking 15, 193, 206–212, 217 cross-cultural sharing 234 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110983098-016

cultural identity 34, 178, 190 cultural ludology 196 cultural memory 15, 169–192, 260 Cultural Revolution 22, 27, 45, 62, 66, 73, 75, 80, 98, 111, 122, 154, 165, 248 a culturally sensitive narrative approach 3 deep ecology 149 digital humanities 5, 229–230, 232, 234, 259, 264 digital technology 10, 32–33, 136, 218, 252–253, 261 distributed information 9, 260–261 Dredging history 14, 147–150, 153f, 157–159, 160f, 163, 166, 231 ecology 144 educational games 203–205, 211, 217 emergent 4, 6–8, 16, 173, 180, 189, 215–219, 221, 259–260, 262 engagement 3, 15, 88, 102, 130, 142, 146, 243, 260 environmental history 14, 78, 144–168, 229, 231, 235 ethics 94, 97, 106, 225–227, 229, 234 family history 5, 11, 13, 23, 52, 57, 79–80, 93–104, 111, 114–117, 221, 225, 239, 246 family letters 105–110, 252 feedback loops 6, 260–261 Frisch, Michael 62, 89, 249 Fudan University 235 genealogy 5, 13, 33–37, 79, 102, 112, 118–124, 239, 259, 264 global 8, 233 Great Leap Forward 27, 122, 154, 165 Han Cultural Revival 181 Hangzhou 14, 78, 83, 147, 150–152, 158, 228t, 231 happy learning 205 heritage 27–31, 33, 57, 93, 127, 184–185, 221 historic preservation 4, 59, 133, 229, 235 historic site interpretation 229 historical activities 5, 51–52, 186, 221

288

Index

historical consciousness 11–13, 15, 27, 31, 58, 45–61, 63–64, 68, 87–93, 173, 189–193, 206, 212–215, 217–218, 220, 239–240, 246–247 historical knowledge 1–2, 5, 15, 20, 24, 40, 59, 191, 219, 243–244, 248, 251, 254, 263–264 historical reenactment 1, 15, 173, 177, 185–186, 189, 192–193, 234 Historical Studies (Lishi Yanjiu) 144 historical thinking 15–16, 61, 210, 217–218, 221–225, 254 historical video games 1, 11, 15, 31, 193–218, 221, 224, 239 history education 15, 23, 49, 220, 232, 235 history from below 36, 102, 122 history(ing) 2–5, 9, 15, 259–263 history-making 1, 5, 89, 221, 235, 241 HongYan (Red Crag) Circuit 29, 30f Imagined genetic community 113 interdisciplinary 8–9, 144, 264 interpretation 26, 38, 87–88, 114, 131–132, 135–143, 160, 167, 183, 225–226, 231–233 Interpretive space 118, 142, 217, 246, 252 interview(ing) 10, 92, 118, 140, 163, 226 Jianchuan Museum Cluster 28 Kensington Market 3 Landscapes 13, 19–33, 121, 123, 136, 140, 147, 166, 168, 199 Liang Qichao 35, 65, 120–121 Liji 176, 96 living history 15, 55, 170, 193 Liyue Jiamo Cultural Studio 173 material culture 13, 20, 24, 27–29, 54–55, 59–60, 96–97, 131, 136, 147–150, 154, 156, 167, 175–176, 183, 192 media representation 229 media technology 13, 16, 19, 31, 92–93, 145, 189, 213, 240, 250, 253, 263–264 memory 6, 13, 20, 24, 28, 33, 47–48, 62–92, 101, 114, 147, 168, 180, 221, 239, 260 methodological implication 224–225

methodology 10, 65, 78, 81, 84, 125, 173, 192, 221, 229–230 Museum and the Public project 140 My China Roots 103, 105 Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum 233 narrative representation 30 National Conference on Public History 46, 228 National Council on Public History 2, 9 National History Curriculum Standards 219 National Public History Faculty Training Program 10, 15, 219, 228–235 National Youth History Recording Competition 23, 111 nationalism 8, 34, 123, 176, 195 nature 8, 14, 21, 35, 48, 89, 113, 121, 144, 147–148, 160, 221, 227, 232, 245–247, 251, 261, 263 nature by design 151–154 New Cultural Movement 11, 34, 121 New History 35–36, 65, 97, 121–122 new media ecology 216, 250 one-child-per-couple policy 80, 114 oral data/material 88 oral evidence 89–91 oral history 5, 10–13, 20, 23, 33, 62–92, 158, 162–163, 221, 229, 232, 239, 246, 259, 261 oral literature 73, 88, 90 oral testimony 88, 90 oral tradition 34, 62, 73, 87–88, 90, 94, 252 orality 65–66, 84, 87, 90, 92 paradigm 241 past-in-the-present 11, 19, 37–41 Pedagogy 24, 47, 235 performing history 15, 169–192, 246 place-based narrative 163–166 political censorship 32, 177 popular nationalism 177–178 presentation 10, 26, 33, 82, 109, 117, 128, 132–137, 167, 177, 189, 197, 221, 246 Princeton University 231, 233 professionalism 67, 85, 137, 187, 225–227, 230 prosuming history 4, 16, 241–245, 247–254, 259 prosumption 2, 5, 16, 241–244, 248–251, 255

Index

289

public engagement 15, 81, 130, 146, 177 public environmental history 11, 14, 147, 168, 231 public history 11, 14, 16, 19, 25–27, 33, 36–37, 40–41, 45, 49, 60, 67, 79–81, 93–117, 124, 140, 168, 173, 215–235, 240 public memory 14, 114, 142, 147, 157, 260 public space 130, 157, 180, 229, 233, 260

tacit knowledge 16, 177, 227, 247, 262 The Museum of Family Letters 105–106, 110, 251 Toffler, Alvin 1, 16, 241–243 Toronto 3 trustworthiness 53–55 Tsinghua University 14, 22, 146, 235 two cultures 3, 5

Red Tourism 29, 129, 170 reflective practice 219, 221 reflexivity 228, 232 Reform and Opening Up 45 remediation 180, 184 revolution 19, 29, 37, 67, 264 rhetoric 9, 35, 40, 156–157, 197 ritual reenactment 173–174, 181, 184, 186, 190, 239, 248, 259, 264

Under the Dome 146 user-generated history 243, 249, 253

sense of history 25, 46, 50, 56, 170, 178, 251 a shared authority 3, 41, 89, 92, 193, 215–216, 228, 232, 249–250 simulation games 32, 196, 199–201, 213–214, 216–217 sites of public history 13–14, 50, 59, 142 social media 33, 43, 67, 140, 146, 251–254 State Administration of Cultural Heritage 118 storytelling 81, 89, 108, 141, 184, 202, 252 strategy games 196–199, 209, 211

various past 56–58, 93 virtual reality 199–202 virtual space 180, 193, 199–202, 214, 218, 234, 249–251, 263 visual 25–27, 166–167, 186, 221, 223, 245 West Lake 14, 78, 147–158, 160–167, 231 West Lake Memory Project 162–163, 168 Xie Lingyun 147 Zhang Jian 120 Zhang Xuecheng 225 Zhejiang University 14, 158, 162, 228t, 235