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Architecture / Design / Urban Studies
Abbas, Ackbar. “Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City.” Public Culture 6, 3 (Spring 1994): 441-59.
—–. “Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era.” In Mario Gandelsonas, ed., Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, 36-55.
Abramson, Daniel Benjamin. “Beijing’s Preservation Policy and the Fate of the Siheyuan.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 13, 1 (Fall 2001): 7-22.
—- with Michael Leaf and Tan Ying. “Social Research and the Localization of Chinese Urban Planning Practice: Some Ideas from Quanzhou, Fujian.” In John R. Logan, ed., The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Al, Stefan. Villages in the City: A Guide to South China’s Informal Settlements. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014.
Al, Stefan, ed. Mall City: Hong Kong’s Dreamworlds of Consumption. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.
Aldrich, M. A. The Search for a Vanishing Beijing: A Guide to China’s Capital Through the Ages. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2006.
Allen, Joseph. “Reading Taipei: Cultural Traces in a Cityscape” Harvard Studies on Taiwan: Papers of the Taiwan Studies Workshop 3 (2000).
—–. “Tracing of Ethnic Tensions in Public Space: Taipei New Park.” Conference Paper, Remapping Taipei (UCLA, Oct. 13-15, 2000).
—–. “Mapping Taipei: Representation and Ideology, 1626-1945.” Studies on Asia Series III, 2,2 (2005).
—–. “Taipei Park: Signs of Occupation.” The Journal of Asian Studies 66, 1 (Feb. 2007): 159-99.
[Abstract: This essay investigates the configuration of public space in Taipei City using the example of a small urban park. In particular, this essay considers how that space functioned and functions as a site for “occupation”—that is, when and how the public space was produced by, brought under the control of, or performed in by a specific cultural agent, whether a colonial government or skateboarder. Those occupations delineate and transform the space for purposes ranging from the official, macro, and long-lived to the subversive, partial. and fleeting. The park is a shifting pastiche of different moments of occupation, diachronically and contemporaneously layered, existing in a tissue of accommodation and anxiety. The primary focus here is the evolution of the park in the urban plans of the early Japanese colonial government; however, comparisons to both the pre- and postcolonial periods are made, and the contemporary conditions of the park are considered as well.]
—–. Taipei: City of Displacements. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.
[Abstract: This cultural study of public space examines the cityscape of Taipei, Taiwan, in rich descriptive prose. Contemplating a series of seemingly banal subjects — maps, public art, parks –Joseph Allen peels back layers of obscured history to reveal forces that caused cultural objects to be celebrated, despised, destroyed, or transformed as Taipei experienced successive regime changes and waves of displacement. In this thoughtful stroll through the city, we learn to look beyond surface ephemera, moving from the general to the particular, to see sociocultural phenomena in their historical and contemporary contexts.]
Balfour, Alan and Shiling Zheng, eds. World Cities: Shanghai. Wiley, 2002.
Batisse, Cecile, Jean-Francois Brun, and Mary-Francoise Renard. “Globalization and the Growth of Chinese Cities.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 47-59.
Beijing Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (北京市规划展览馆)
[Abstract: Beijing22 is an open, independent, curatorial long-term project, which will investigate the urban processes of Beijing in the five years towards the Olympic Games in 2022. This time span will be accompanied by Beijing22 in the form of exhibitions, publications, talks, conferences and other activities, thereby collecting different positions and perspectives of artists, curators, academics and journalists from China and abroad in order to initiate a cultural exchange and discourse on the topic.]
Belsky, Richard. “The Urban Ecology of Late-Imperial Beijing Reconsidered: The Transformation of Social Space in China’s Late-Imperial Capital City.” Journal of Urban History 27, 1 (Nov. 2000): 54-74.
Ben-Canaan, Dan. Echoes of Harbin: Reflections on Space and Time of a Vanished Community in Manchuria. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024.
Bergère, Marie-Claire. “Shanghai’s Urban Development: A Remake?” In Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, eds., Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China. Prestel Publishing, 2004, 36-53.
—–. Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
[Abstract: the first comprehensive history of Shanghai in any Western language. Divided into four parts, Bergere details Shanghai’s beginnings as a treaty port in the mid-nineteenth century; its capitalist boom following the 1911 Revolution; the fifteen years of economic and social decline initiated by the Japanese invasion in 1937, and attempts at resistance; and the city’s disgraced years under Communism. Weaving together a range of archival documents and existing histories to create a global picture of Shanghai’s past and present, Berg?re shows that Shanghai’s success was not fated, as some contend, by an evolutionary pattern set into motion long before the arrival of westerners. Rather, her account identifies the relationship between the Chinese and foreigners in Shanghai–their interaction, cooperation, and rivalry–as the driving force behind the creation of an original culture, a specific modernity, founded upon western contributions but adapted to the national Chinese culture. Eclipsed for three decades by socialism, the wheels of the Shanghai spirit began to turn in the 1990s, when the reform movement took off anew. The city is again being referred to as a model for China’s current modernization drive. Although it makes no claims to what will happen next, Bergere’s Shanghai stands as a compelling and definitive profile of a city whose urban history continues to be redefined, retold, and resold.]
Bideau, Florence Graezer and Haiming Yan. “Historic Urban Landscape in Beijing: The Gulou Project and its Contested Memories.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 93-118.
Bonino, Michele and Filippo De Pieri, eds. Beijing Danwei: Industrial Heritage in the Contemporary City. Jovis, 2015.
[Danwei—these were urban sectors in China that were characterized by close links between work, residence, and social facilities. They are the material product of socialist city planning and therefore provide an urban experience that forms a stepping stone between the hutongs of the imperial capital and the superblocks of the present-day metropolis. Contrary to the disused industrial sites in western cities that often disrupt the continuity and scale of the urban fabric, the danweis have a much closer relationship to the historical, as well as the contemporary city. In modern-day Beijing, the danweis represent a unique experimental field of urban design. Beijing Danwei looks at the history and future of former danweis and presents exemplary strategies for dealing with industrial heritage. Case studies show the problems that go hand in hand with transformation and present perspectives and potential with regard to usage and the urban regeneration of Beijing. With a visual essay by Jia Yue and Maria Paola Repellino. This publication is the result of a cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and Tsinghua University in Beijing.]
Bonino, Michele, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, and Angela Sampieri, eds. The City after Chinese New Towns: Spaces and Imaginaries from Contemporary Urban China. Basel: Birkhauser, 2019.
Bosker, Bianca. Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
[Abstract: A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysees Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China’s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West.Original Copies presents the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire townships appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities. These copycat constructions are not theme parks but thriving communities where Chinese families raise children, cook dinners, and simulate the experiences of a pseudo-Orange County or Oxford. In recounting the untold and evolving story of China’s predilection for replicating the greatest architectural hits of the West, Bianca Bosker explores what this unprecedented experiment in “duplitecture” implies for the social, political, architectural, and commercial landscape of contemporary China.]
Bracken, Gregory, ed. Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Braester, Yomi. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Breitung, Werner and Mark Gunter. “Local and Social Change in a Globalized City: The Case of Hong Kong.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 85-107.
Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. [MCLC Resource Center review by Daniel Benjamin Abramson]
—–. “Pékin, ville spectacle: la construction controversée d’une métropole Olympique.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Culture Studies 3 (December 2007).
Buck, David. “Railway City and National Capital: Two Faces of the Modern in Changchun.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 65-89.
Callahan, William A. “Cultivating Power: Gardens in the Global Politics of Diplomacy, War, and Peace.” International Political Sociology 11, 4 (2017): 1-20.
Campanella, Thomas J. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Carroll, Peter J. Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2006.
Cartier, Carolyn. “Transnational Urbanism in the Reform-era Chinese City: Landscapes from Shenzhen.” Urban Studies 39, 9 (2002): 1513-32.
Chalana, Manish and Jeffrey Hsu, eds. Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.
Chan, Roger C. K. “The Creation of Global-Local Competitive Advantages in Shanghai.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 229-51.
Chen, Hsiao-Hung Nancy. “New Configurations of Taipei under Globalization.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 147-64.
Chen, Wen, Junbo Xiang, Wei Sun, and Shenghin Chu. “Globalization and the Growth of the New Economic Sectors in the Second-Tier Extended Cities in the Yangtze River Delta.” In Fulong Wu ed.,Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 1252-70.
Chen, Xiangming. “Beyond the Reach of Globalization: China’s Border Regions and Cities in Transition.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 21-46.
Chen, Xiangming, ed. Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
[Abstract: Until around 1990, Shanghai was China’s premier but sluggish industrial center. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the joint impact of global forces and state power has turned Shanghai into a dynamic megacity. Shanghai’s remarkable growth in economy, infrastructure, and global presence has prompted questions about the Shanghai “miracle.” This collection places the city’s unprecedented rise in a rare comparative examination of U.S. cities, as well as with Asian megacities Singapore and Hong Kong, providing a nuanced account of how Shanghai’s politics, economy, society, and space have been transformed by macro- and micro-level forces. Contributors: Stephen W. K. Chiu; K. C. Ho; John D. Kasarda; Hanlong Lu; Tai-lok Lui; Ann R. Markusen; Anthony M. Orum; Yuan Ren; Saskia Sassen; Jiaming Sun; Fulong Wu; Pingkang Yu; Tingwei Zhang; Zhenhua Zhou].
Cheng, Edmund W. “City Slums as a Recognition of Migrants’ Rights: A Proposal from Qin Hui.” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 84-89.
Cheng, P. H. A Century of Hong Kong Roads and Streets. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2000.
Cheung, Juanita and Andrew Yeoh. Hong Kong: A Guide to Recent Architecture. London, 1998.
China Planning Network [CPN was initiated by groups of professors, scholars and students from two American universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, which have devoted substantial resources to the development of china’s cities and its urbanization process. Over the years, CPN has grown into an influential communication platform between the East and West in urban development and planning fields and a significant ligament for the world to focus on China’s urbanization process. ]
China’s Globalized Cities, special issue. Habitat International 30, 2 (2006).
Chongqing Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (重庆市规划展览馆)
Chow, Renee Y. Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.
Chu, Nellie, Ralph Litzinger, Mengqi Wang, and Qian Zhu, eds. “Villages Make the City: Displacement, Disposession, and Class in China’s Urban Villages,” special issue of positions: asia critique 30, 3 (Aug. 2022).
[Abstract: Essays by Qian Zhu, Jane Hayward and Malgorzata Jakimow, Nellie Chu, Mengqi Wang, Tong Lam, Minhua Ling, Megan Steffen, Yang Zhan, and Tzu-Chi Ou]
Chung, Chuihua Judy, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong, eds. Great Leap Forward. Cambridge: Harvard Design School Project on the City, 2001. [focus on cities in the Pearl River delta]
Chung, Wah-nan. Contemporary Architecture in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1989.
Clausen, Soren and Stig Thogersen. The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.
Cody, Jeffrey W. “American Planning in China 1911-1937.” Planning Perspectives 11, 4 (Oct. 1996): 339-377.
—–. “Striking a Harmonious Chord: Foreign Missionaries and Chinese-style Buildings, 1911-1949.” Architronic 5, no. 3 (Dec. 1996).
—–. Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914-1935. Seattle: University of Washington, 2001.
—–. Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000. London: Routledge, 2003.
Cook, Ian G. “Beijing as an ‘Internationalized Metropolis.'” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 63-84.
Csejdy, Julia. “From Besztercebanya to Shanghai: The Life of Architect L. E. Hude (1893-1958).” Hudec Heritage Project.
Cui, Jinze. “Heritage Visions of Mayor Geng Yanbo: Re-creating the City of Datong.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 223-44.
Cummer, Katie and Lynne D. DiStefano, eds. Asian Revitalization Adaptive Reuse in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2021.
Curien, Remi. “Chinese Urban Planning: Environmentalising a Hyper-Functionalist Machine?” China Perspectives 3 (2014): 23-31.
Davis, Deborah et al., eds. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China. NY: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Davis, Deborah. “Reconfiguring Shanghai Households.” Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson, ed., Re-drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
—–. “When a House Becomes His Home.” Perry Link et al., ed. Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002, 231-250.
—–. “Talking about Property in the New Chinese Domestic Property Regime” In Frank Dobbin, ed., The Sociology of the Economy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, 288-307.
Demgenski, Philipp. Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in, shaping, and being shaped by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials— and particularly foregrounds the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.]
Denison, Edward and Guangyu Ren. Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.
[Abstract: The first half of the twentieth century was fraught with global tensions and political machinations. However, for all the destruction in that period, these geopolitical conditions in Manchuria cultivated an extraordinary variety of architecture and urban planning, which has completely escaped international attention until now. With over forty carefully chosen images, Ultra-Modernism is the first book in English that illustrates Manchuria’s encounter with modernity through its built environment. Edward Denison and Guangyu Ren take readers through Russia’s early territorial claims, Japan’s construction of the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), and the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932. The book examines in detail the creation of modern cities along the SMR and focuses on three of the most important modern urban centres in Manchuria: the Russian-dominated city of Harbin, the port of Dalian, and the new capital of Manchukuo, Hsinking (Changchun). Like so much of the world outside ‘the West’ during the twentieth century, Manchuria’s encounter with modernity is merely a faint whisper drowned out by the deafening master narrative of Western-centric modernism. This book attempts to redress an imbalance in the modern history of China by studying the impact of Japan on architecture and planning beyond the depredations of the Sino-Japanese War.]
Des Forges, Alexander. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.
—–. “Shanghai Alleys, Theatrical Practice, and Cinematic Spectatorship: From Street Angel (1937) to Fifth Generation Film.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 4 (2010): 29-51.
Dirlik, Arif. “Architectures of Global Modernity, Colonialism and Places.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, 1 (Spring 2005): 33-61.
DnA Architects (Beijing based architecture firm)
Dong, Madeleine Yue. “Defining Beiping: Urban Reconstruction and National Identity, 1928-1936.” In Joseph Esherick, ed, Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 121-38.
—–. Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [MCLC Resource Center review by Timothy B. Weston]
Douay, Nicolas. “Shanghai Urban Planning Styles in Evolution: Emergence of a ‘Harmonious Urbanisation.'” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 16-25.
—–. “Urban Planning and Cyber-Citizenry in China: How the 2.0 Opposition Organizes Itself.” Tr. Jonathan Hall. China Perspectives 1 (2011): 77-79.
Doulet, Jean-Francois. “Where Are China’s Cities Heading? Three Approaches to the Metropolis in Contemporary China.” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 4-14.
Dreyer, Jacob. “Shanghai and the 2010 Expo: Staging the City.” In Gregory Bracken, ed., Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 47-58.
Elvin, Mark and G. William Skinner, eds., The Chinese City between Two Worlds. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974.
Empson, Hal. Mapping Hong Kong: A Historical Atlas. Hong Kong: Government Printer, 1992.
Esherick, Joseph, ed. Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: Universtiy of Hawaii Press, 1999.
—–. “Modernity and Nation in the Chinese City.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: Universtiy of Hawaii Press, 1999, 1-16.
Evans, Grant and Maria Tam, eds. Hong Kong: The Anthropology of a Chinese City. Surrey: Curzon, 1997.
Fairbank, Wilma. Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Farrer, James and Andrew Field, guest editors. Special issue on “Play and Power in Chinese Nightlife Spaces.” China: An International Journal 6, 1 (March 2008). [essays by Field, Anouska Komlosy, Tiantian Zheng, adn Tamara Perkins]
Feichang Jianzhu (Beijing architectural atelier, run by Yung Ho Chang, son of Zhang Kaiji and now head of the Architecture School at MIT)
Feuchtwang, Stephen, ed. Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China. London; Portland: UCL; Cavendish, 2004.
Field, Andrew David. Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. HK: Chinese UP, 2010.
[Abstract: Drawing upon a unique and untapped reservoir of newspapers, magazines, novels, government documents, photographs and illustrations, this book traces the origin, pinnacle, and ultimate demise of a commercial dance industry in Shanghai between the end of the First World War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Delving deep into the world of cabarets, nightclubs, and elite ballrooms that arose in the city in the 1920s and peaked in the 1930s, the book assesses how and why Chinese society incorporated and transformed this westernized world of leisure and entertainment to suit its own tastes and interests. Focusing on the jazz-age nightlife of the city in its “golden age,” the book examines issues of colonialism and modernity, urban space, sociability and sexuality, and modern Chinese national identity formation in a tumultuous era of war and revolution.]
Fleischer, Friederike. Suburban Beijing: Housing and Consumption in Contemporary China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
[Abstract: In the last decade of the twentieth century, one of the most fundamental changes in urban China has been the expansion and privatization of housing, with per capita housing space increasing by more than 50 percent. As a result, ordinary citizens in urban China have started to cultivate personal space and have a new incentive to make more money, and wealth is being stratified. Suburban Beijing documents this process, analyzing its underlying forces and its ramifications for redefining the Chinese social landscape. Friederike Fleischer depicts the way Chinese residents in Wangjing, a Beijing suburb, have been affected by the recent transformation in their housing, showing how the suburb developed from its antecedents as a Maoist industrial production zone to its present status as China’s first middle-class residential area. The new suburban middle class lives side by side with retired workers and with rural-to-urban migrants. Fleischer describes how all three groups share the same neighborhood, highlighting both the similarities and the growing differences among these groups of suburban residents in a rapidly evolving China.]
Foret, Philippe. “Globalizing Macau: The Emotional Costs of Modernity.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 108-24.
Free Architecture Report (Ziyou jianzhu baodao)
Friedmann, John. “China’s Urbanization.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 273 (2003): 745-58.
—–. China’s Urban Transition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
[Abstract: Though China’s urban history reaches back over five thousand years, it is only in the past quarter century that urbanization has emerged as a force of widespread social transformation while a massive population shift from country to city has brought about a dramatic revolution in China’s culture, politics, and economy. Employing a historical perspective, John Friedmann presents a succinct, readable account and interpretation of how this transition—one of the most momentous phenomena in contemporary history—has occurred. China’s Urban Transition synthesizes a broad array of research to provide the first integrated treatment of the many processes that encompass the multilayered meaning of urbanization: regional policy, the upsurge of rural industries, migration, expanding spheres of personal autonomy, and the governance of city building. John Friedmann’s detailed analysis suggests that the nation’s economic development has been driven more by social forces from within than by global capital. This leads directly to the epic story of rural migration to major urban regions, the policies used to restrain and direct this “avalanche” of humanity on the move, and the return of many migrants to their home communities, where the process of urbanization continues. Focusing on everyday life in cities, the author also shows how this social transformation extends to the most intimate spheres of people’s lives. In conclusion, he raises the question of a “sustainable” urban development and its relation with China’s own past, values, and institutions.]
Fu, Chao-ching. “Taiwaneseness in Japanese Period Architecture from Taiwan.” In Yuko Kikuchi, ed. Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2007, 169-91.
“Future of Chinese Cities.” Urban China Research Network Conference (Shanghai, July 1999). With links to conference paper abstracts.
Gandelsonas, Mario, ed. Shanghai Reflections. Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
Gao, James Z. The Communist Takeover Of Hangzhou: The Transformation of City and Cadre, 1949-1954. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.
Gaubatz, Piper Rae. “Changing Beijing,.” Geographical Review 85, 1 (1995): 79-96.
—–. Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformation on the Chinese Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
[Abstract: This study of cities on China’s inland frontiers from ancient times to the present charts new territory in both geography and Chinese studies. As a work of geography, it integrates the approaches of urban geography, cultural historical geography, and frontier studies to assess the form and function of cities on the Chinese frontiers. In Chinese studies, it is the first work to explore the nature of urbanism on Chinese frontiers, and the first work in English to present comparative case studies of a group of Chinese frontier cities.” “Beyond the Great Wall focuses on five cities, all originally established as frontier garrisons, which now flourish with populations of over a million as capitals of the ethnically diverse regions in which they are located. The cities are Kunming, Lanzhou, Xining, Hohhot, and Urumqi. The author explores how the urban ideals and practices of eastern China were adapted to the natural and human conditions of the frontier regions, and in the process she analyzes the interaction of Chinese and non-Chinese peoples in frontier cities in outlining the historical development of each city]
—–. “China’s Urban Transformation: Patterns and Processes of Morphological Change in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.” Urban Studies 36, 9 (1999): 1495-1521.
—–. “New Public Space in Urban China: Fewer Walls, More Malls in Beijing, Shanghai and Xining.” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 72-83.
Giroir, Guillaume. “A Globalized Golden Ghetto in a Chinese Garden: The Fontainbleau Villas in Shanghai.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 208-25.
Gluckman, Ron. “Flash City.” www.gluckman.com.
Go West Project: The Changing Face of China’s Invisible Cities [an interdisciplinary research lab tracking the development of emerging metropolises in the heart of China, founded in February 2009 by journalist Michiel Hulshof and architect Daan Roggeveen. The project analyzes urban and social developments in the world’s fastest urbanising region.]
Guannian 观念 (Concept) [Online architecture magazine]
Guinot, Benjamin. “Atmposheric Pollution and Urban Development in China.” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 63-70.
Guo, Qinghua. “Changchun: Unfinished Capital Planning of Manzhouguo, 1932-42.” Urban History 31, 1 (May 2004): 100-17.
Hangzhou Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (杭州市城市规划展览馆)
Harter, Seth. “Hong Kong’s Dirty Little Secret: Clearing the Walled City of Kowloon.” Journal of Urban History 27, 1 (Nov. 2000).
He, Guangsen. Olympic Architecture: Beijing 2008. Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press and Birkhauser Publishers, 2008.
Hershkowitz, Linda. “Tiananmen Square and the Politics of Place.” Political Geography 12, 5 (Sept. 1993): 395-420.
Hibbard, Peter. The Bund Shanghai: China Faces West. HK: Odyssey Books and Guides, 2007.
—–. Peace at the Cathay. Shanghai: China Economic Review Publishing, 2011.
[Abstract: Shanghai was a frenzy of development in the early 20th century as businessmen, thrillseekers and refugees poured in from all corners of the globe. The Far East’s most cosmopolitan city exuded luxury, style and excitement, and one building on Shanghai’s waterfront Bund captured it all: the Cathay Hotel (now called the Peace Hotel). This art deco masterpiece’s fortunes have mirrored those of the city, weathering war, revolution and radical social upheaval. Peace at the Cathay chronicles the fascinating stories and personalities behind the city’s most iconic building. ]
Hietkamp, Lenore. “The Park Hotel in Shanghai: A Metaphor for 1930s China.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.
—– and Luca Poncellini. “Forms of Modernism in Shanghai: The Work of Hungarian Architect Laszlo Hudec Between the Two World Wars.” Hudec Heritage Project.
Ho, Virgil K. Y. “Images of Houses, Houses of Images: Some Preliminary Thoughts on a Socio-Cultural History of Urban Dwellings in Pre-1940s Canton.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 171-228.
Hou, Renzhi. “The Transformation of the Old City of Beijing.” In Michael P. Conzen, ed., World Patterns in Modern Urban Change. Chicago: Department of Geography Research Paper, no. 217-18, 1986, 217-39.
Hsing, You-Tien. “Global Capital and Local Land in China’s Urban Real Estate Development.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 167-89.
—–. “Brokering Power and Property in China’s Townships.” Journal of Pacific Review 19, 1 (2006): 103-124.
—–. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Hu, Richard. Reinventing the Chinese City. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Since the late 1970s, China has undergone perhaps the most sweeping process of urbanization ever witnessed. This is typically understood as a story of growth, encompassing rapid development and economic dynamism alongside environmental degradation and social dislocation. However, over the past decade, China’s leaders have claimed that the country’s urbanization has entered a new stage that prioritizes “quality.” What does China’s new urban vision entail, and what does the future hold in store? Richard Hu unpacks recent trends in urban planning and development to explore the making and imagining of the contemporary Chinese city. He focuses on three key concepts—the “green revolution,” “smart city movement,” and “great innovation leap forward”—that have become increasingly influential. Through case studies of Beijing, Hangzhou, and Hefei, Hu analyzes how attempts to achieve greater sustainability, promote data-driven governance, and foster innovation have fared on the ground. He also considers the experimental city Xiong’an in terms of China’s idealized vision of the urban future and investigates how the recent experiences of Hong Kong relate to regional and national development projects. Reinventing the Chinese City provides a careful accounting of the ideas that have dominated urban policy in China since 2010, emphasizing key continuities underlying claims of novelty. Shedding light on the transformations of the Chinese city, this book offers a new perspective on the factors that will shape the trajectory of urbanization in the coming decades.]
Hu, Richard and Wenjie Chen. Global Shanghai Remade: The Rise of Pudong New Area. Routledge, 2020.
Hua, Xiahong. “Analysis on Hudec’s Architectural Works in Shanghai.” Hudec Heritage Project.
Huang, Xuelei. “Smellscapes of Nanjing Road: Cognitive and Affective Mapping.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 71-98.
Huebner, Jon W. “Architecture on the Shanghai Bund.” Papers on Far Eastern History 39 (March 1989): 127-65.
Hudec Heritage Project. [provides information on the architectural works of L. E. Hudec (Hugyecz). Its aim is to make the studies, articles, archived pictures and other important documents on Laszlo Hudec accessible to the public.]
Hulsholf, Michiel, and Daan Roggeveen. Go West: Emerging Megacities in the Heart of China. Amsterdam: Sun, 2011.
John Portman and Associates [architecture firm that has built significant projects in China, particularly Shanghai]
Johnston, Tess and Deke Erh. A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai. HK: Old China Hand Press, 1993.
Kim, Won Bae, et al. eds., Culture and the City in East Asia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
King, Anthony and Abidin Kusno.”On Be(Ij)Ing in the World: ‘Postmodernism,’ ‘Globalization,’ and the Making of Transnational Space in China.” In Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds., Postmodernism and China. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, 41-67.
Kongjian 空間 (Space) [Taiwan architecture and design magazine]
Koss, Stephen. Beautiful Su: A Social and Cultural History of Suzhou. San Francisco: China Books, 2015.
—–. By the Hills Embraced: A Social and Cultural History of Hangzhou, China. San Francisco: China Books, 2023.
The Kunming Project: Urban Development in China–A Dialogue. Basel: Birkhauser Publishers for Architecture, 2002.
Kwan, Man Bun. “Topics in Chinese Urban History: A Selected Bibliography.” The Urban History Newsletter 7 (March, 1992), 9-10.
—–. “Order in Chaos Tianjin’s hunhunr and Urban Identity in Modern China.” Journal of Urban History 27, 1 (Nov. 2000).
Kwok, Reginald Yin-Wang, ed. Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development. NY: Routledge, 2005.
Kwok, Reginald Yin-wang, and Annette Kwok. “Le mausolee de president Mao.” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 210 (Feb. 1979): 51-53.
LaCouture, Elisabeth. Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960. NY: Columbia University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world’s most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house. Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin’s urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today’s middle-class real estate boom. Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women’s magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.]
Lai, Guolong, Martha Demas and Neville Agnew.” Valuing the Past in China: The Seminal Influence of Liang Sicheng on Heritage Conservation.” Orientations 35, 2 (March 2004).
Lee, Edward Bing-Shuey. Modern Canton. Shanghai, 1936.
Lee, Haiyan. “The Charisma of Power and the Military Sublime in Tiananmen Square.”Journal of Asian Studies 70, 2 (May 2011): 397–424. [Deals in part with Chen Kaige’s 1985 film The Big Parade.]
Lewis, Steven W. “Political and Economic Implications of New Public Spaces in Chinese and Asian Global Cities.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 271-91.
Li, Baihua and Yan Xin. “Practice and Thoughts on Urban Renovation of Xiamen City amid Early Modernization (1920-1938).” China City Planning Review 17, 4 (2008): 64-72.
Liang, Samuel Y. 2008. “Amnesiac Monument, Nostalgic Fashion: Shanghai’s New Heaven and Earth.” Wasafiri 55: 47-55.
—–. Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City 1853-98. London: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: This book argues that modernity first arrived in late nineteenth-century Shanghai via a new spatial configuration. This city’s colonial capitalist development ruptured the traditional configuration of self-contained households, towns, and natural landscapes in a continuous spread, producing a new set of fragmented as well as fluid spaces. In this process, Chinese sojourners actively appropriated new concepts and technology rather than passively responding to Western influences. Liang maps the spatial and material existence of these transient people and reconstructs a cultural geography that spreads from the interior to the neighbourhood and public spaces.]
—–. Remaking China’s Great Cities: Space and Culture in Urban Housing, Renewal, and Expansion. NY: Routledge, 2015.
[Abstract: China’s rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation’s political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the economic and financial powerhouse; and Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and the regional center of south China. All are historical cities with rich imperial, colonial, and regional heritages, and all have been drastically transformed in the last six decades. This book examines the cities’ continuous urban legacies since 1949 in relation to state governance, economic reforms, and cultural production. By adopting local historical perspectives, it offers more nuanced accounts of the current urban change than the modernization/globalization paradigm and conceptualizes the change in the context of the cities’ socialist, colonial, and imperial legacies. Specifically, Samuel Y. Liang offers an overview of the urban planning and territorial expansion of the great cities since 1949; explores the production and consumption of urban housing, its spatial forms, media representations, and socio-political implications; and examines the state-led redevelopment of old urban cores and residential neighborhoods, and the urban conservation movement.]
Liang, Sicheng. A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: The Development of its Structural System and the Evolution of its Type. Ed. Wilma Fairbank. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
Liang, Sicheng and Whei-yin Lin. History of Chinese Architecture. Chongqing, 1943.
Lincoln, Toby. Urbanizing China in War and Peace: The Case of Wuxi County. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.
Liu Erming and Yi Feng. Chinese Architecture Since 1980-Selected Works of Well-Known Chinese Architects. Bilingual edition. Beijing: Zhongguo da baiku quanshu, 1999.
Liu, Xinmin. “Spectacles of Remembrance: Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Art.” In Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 257-68.
Liu, Yisi and Xinying Wang. “A Pictorial History of Changchun, 1898-1962.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 5 (Dec. 2012).
Logan, John R., ed. The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
Logan, William S., ed. The Disappearing ‘Asian’ City: Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage in a Globalizing World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Lu, Hanchao. “Away from Nanking Road: Small Stores and Neighborhood Life in Modern Shanghai.” Journal of Asian Studies 53, 4 (Nov. 1994): 93-122.
—–. “‘The Seventy-two Tenants’: Residence and Commerce in Shanghai’s Shikumen Houses, 1872-1951.” In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commerical Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 133-84.
—–. “Becoming Urban: Mendicancy and Vagrants in Modern Shanghai.” Journal of Social History (Fall, 1999)
—–. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
—–. Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Lü Junhua, Peter G. Rowe and Zhang Jie, eds. Modern Urban Housing in China: 1840-2000. Prestel Publishing, 2001.
Luo, Gang and Li Yun. “Shanghai as a Socialist City and Spatial Reproduction.” In Xueping Zhong and Ban Wang, eds. Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, 21-56.
Luna, Ian, ed. On the Edge: Ten Architects from China. New York: Rizzoli, 2006.
[Abstract: Critical anthology of new architecture in China, exploring the development and maturation of an indigenous approach to modern architecture and urbanism. Includes completed buildings, proposed projects and urban master plans by Tong Ming of TM Studios, Jiakun Architects, Xu Tiantian of DnA Beijing, Yung Ho Chang, Rocco Yim, Ai Weiwei, Gary Chang, Ma Quingyun, Atelier Zhang Lei, and Urbanus.]
Lye, Liang Fook and Gang Chen, eds. Toward a Livable and Sustainable Urban Environment: Eco-Cities in East Asia. World Scientific Publishing, 2010.
[Abstract: With cities rapidly encroaching onto surrounding lands, the notion of “eco-city” proposes an innovative yet pragmatic approach to designing, building and operating cities in a way that the destructive impact of human urban activity upon nature will be significantly reduced. This book comprises of papers from a workshop organized by the East Asian Institute on Eco-cities in East Asia on 27 February 2009 in Singapore. Contributed by scholars, officials and environmental specialists from Japan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, the papers focus on how individual governments in these countries undertake eco-city projects. The book also highlights best practices that are useful to policy makers and anyone else who seeks to learn from the experiences of other countries in order to reduce their ecological footprints.]
Ma, Laurence L. C. “The Chinese Approach to City Planning: Policy, Administration, and Action.” Asian Survey 19, 9 (Sept., 1979): 838-855.
Ma, Laurence J. C., ed. Special Issue on Urban China. China Information 20, 3 (Nov. 2007). [with essays by Ma; Liu Haiyan and Kristin Stapleton; Shenjing He, Zhigang Li, and Fulong Wu; William Hurst; Alan Smart and Li Zhang; Xiangming Chen and Jiaming Sun; Michael Leaf and Li Hou]
Ma, Laurence J. C. and Edward W. Hanten, eds., Urban Development in Modern China. Boulder: Westview Press, 1981.
—–. Cities and City Planning in the People’s Republic of China: An Annotated Bibliography. Washington: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research, 1980.
Ma, Laurence and Fulong Wu, eds. Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Ma, Rong. “Han and Tibetan Residential Patterns in Lhasa.” The China Quarterly 128 (1991): 814-835
MacKinnon, Stephen R. “Wuhan’s Search for Identity in the Republican Period.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: Universtiy of Hawaii Press, 1999, 161-73.
MacPherson, Kerrie L. “Designing China’s Urban Future: The Greater Shanghai Plan, 1927-1937.” Planning Perspectives 5, 1 (January 1990): 39-62.
MAD [Beijing-based design firm founded by Ma Yansong]
Mann, Susan. “New Perspectives on Chinese Urbanization, The Last Two Hundred Years.” Journal of Urban History 13 (Nov. 1986): 72-81.
Marinelli, Maurizio. “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror: Colonial Italy Reflects on Tianjin.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Culture Studies 3 (Dec. 2007).
Mars, Neville. The Chinese Dream: A Society Under Construction. Beijing: Timezone 8, 2007. [“maps what urban China will look like in 2020, nad investigates the alternative scenarios that are feasible]
McDuie-Ra, Duncan. Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
McIsaac, Lee. “The City as Nation: Creating a Wartime Capital in Chongqing.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: Universtiy of Hawaii Press, 1999, 174-91.
Meng, Yue. The Invention of Shanghai: Cultural Passages and Their Transformation, 1860-1920. Ph.D. diss. Los Angeles: UCLA, 2000.
—–. “Re-envisioning the Great Interior: Gardens and the Upper Class between the Imperial and the ‘Modern.'” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, 1 (Spring 2002): 1-49.
—–. Shanghai and the Edges of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [MCLC Resource Center review by Alexander Des Forges]
[TOC: Introduction: The Border of Histories; Part I. Cosmic and Semiotic Centers of Knowledge: 1. The Shifting Locations of the Translation of Science; 2. Semiotic Modernity: The Politics of Philology and Compilation. Part II. The Carnival and the Radical: 3. Urban Festivity as a Disruptive History; 4. In Search of a Habitable Globe. Part III. Interiors Projecting the Globe: 5. Reenvisioning the Urban Interior: Gardens and the Paradox of the Public Sphere; 6. The Rise of an Entertainment Cosmopolitanism; Conclusion: Chinese Cosmopolitanism Repositioned]
Meyer, Jeffrey F. The Dragons of Tiananmen: Beijing as a Sacred City. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
Mitrasinovic, Miodrag and Timothy Jachna, eds. The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay AreaApproaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion. Routledge, 2021.
[Abstract: Through illustrated case studies and conceptual re-framings, this volume showcases ongoing transformations in public space, and its relationship to the public realm more broadly in the world’s most populous urban megaregion—the Greater Bay Area of southeastern China—projected to reach eighty million inhabitants by the year 2025. This book assembles diverse approaches to interrogating the forms of public space and the public realm that are emerging in the context of this region’s rapid urban development in the last forty years, bringing together authors from urbanism, architecture, planning, sociology, anthropology and politics to examine innovative ways of framing and conceptualizing public space in/of the Greater Bay Area. The blend of authors’ first-hand practical experiences has created a unique cross-disciplinary book that employs public space to frame issues of planning, political control, social inclusion, participation, learning/education and appropriation in the production of everyday urbanism. In the context of the Greater Bay Area, such spaces and practices also present opportunities for reconfiguring design-driven urban practice beyond traditional interventions manifested by the design of physical objects and public amenities to the design of new social protocols, processes, infrastructures and capabilities.]
Moving Cities [a Beijing-based think-thank investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city. Established in 2007 by Bert de Muynck [BE] and Mónica Carriço [PT], movingcities publishes, collaborates, talks and walks, and operate as embedded architects.]
Musgrove, Charles D. “Building a Dream: Constructing a National Capital in Nanjing, 1927-1937.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 139-57.
—–. China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
[Abstract: China’s Contested Capital investigates the development of the model capital from multiple perspectives. It explores the ideological underpinnings of the project by looking at the divisive debates surrounding the new capital’s establishment as well as the ideological discourse of Sun Yat-Sen used to legitimize it. In terms of the actual building of the city, it provides an analysis of both the scientific methodology adopted to plan it and the aesthetic experiments employed to construct it. Finally, it examines the political and social life of the city, looking at not only the reinvented traditions that gave official spaces a sacred air but also the ways that people actually used streets and monuments, including the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum, to pursue their own interests, often in defiance of Nationalist repression. Contrary to the conventional story of incompetence and failure, Musgrove shows that there was more to Nationalist Party nation-building than simply “paper plans” that never came to fruition. He argues rather that the model capital essentially legitimized a new form of state power embodied in new symbolic systems that the Communist Party was able to tap into after defeating the Nationalists in 1949. At the same time, the book makes the case that, although it was unintended by party planners who promoted single-party rule, Nanjing’s legitimacy was also a product of protests and contestation, which the party-state only partially succeeded in channeling for its own ends.]
Nanjing Urban Planning and Construction Exhibition Hall (南京市规划建设展览馆)
Naquin, Susan. Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Pannell, Clifton. “Recent Growth and Change in China’s Urban System.” In Laurence J. C. Ma and Edward W. Hanten, eds., Urban Development in Modern China. Boulder: Westview Press, 1981.
Patchell, Jerry. China’s Greater Bay Area: Agglomeration, External Economies, Governance and Urbanization. Routledge, 2023.
[Abstract: China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) – previously referred to as the Pearl River Delta – is one of the world’s largest mega-city regions and China’s foremost technological, economic, social and cultural node. Patchell integrates agglomeration concepts with the GBA’s distinctive features to explain the region’s rise, innovativeness, and resilience. He reveals how the GBA works as differentiated and interdependent systems, providing a window into the GBA and China, while also providing the basis for a comparative approach to mega-cities and mega-regions. Key topics discussed in the book include: (1) The early development of the GBA, its mix of indigenous and exogenous investments and expertise and the forces that compelled its upgrading from process manufacturing; (2) The regional strengths in clusters, transportation networks and regional innovation system; (3) The role of multi-level governance in balancing national directives, municipal autonomy and regional complementarities; (4) Consequences of the GBA’s agglomeration for land allocation, planning, social structure and mobility, communities, sustainable development and resilience for the future
Poncellini Luca. Laszlo Hudec a Shanghai (1919-1947). Ph. D. diss. Politecnico di Torino, Italy.
Poon, Shuk-wah. “Religion, Modernity, and Urban Space: The City God Temple in Republican Guangzhou.” Modern China 34 (2008): 247-275.
Pridmore, Jay. Shanghai: The Architecture of China’s Great Urban Center. NY: Abrams, 2008.
Rademacher, Anne and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds. Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors in this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously experienced sites of interplay between non-human life and materials, and daily human life experiences. Debates and efforts to recover nature in the city provoke moral and ethical evaluations of the human ecology of city life, and direct ecologies of urbanism into new avenues like aesthetics, care, perception, and stewardship.]
Ren, Xuefei. Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
—–. Urban China. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
[Abstract: Currently there are more than 125 Chinese cities with a population exceeding one million. The unprecedented urban growth in China presents a crucial development for studies on globalization and urban transformation. This concise and engaging book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese urbanization, by investigating five key themes – governance, migration, landscape, inequality, and cultural economy. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and original research materials, Ren offers a critical account of the Chinese urban condition after the first decade of the twenty-first century. She argues that the urban-rural dichotomy that was artificially constructed under socialism is no longer a meaningful lens for analyses and that Chinese cities have become strategic sites for reassembling citizenship rights for both urban residents and rural migrants.]
Ren, Yuan. “Globalization and Grassroots Practices: Community Development in Contemporary Urban China.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 292-309.
Rogaski, Ruth. “Hygenic Modernity in Tianjin.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: Universtiy of Hawaii Press, 1999, 30-46.
Rolandson, Unn Malfrid. Leisure and Power in Urban China: Everyday Life in a Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2011.
[Abstract: the first comprehensive study of leisure activities in a medium size Chinese city. Hitherto, studies of Chinese leisure have focused on holidays, festivals and tourism. This, however, is a study of the kinds of leisure that take place on regular workdays in a local environment of Quanzhou city. In doing so, Leisure and Power introduces leisure studies to China studies, and data from China to the field of Leisure studies. Based on interviews with people from all walks of life and case studies from bookshops, internet bars, Karaoke parlours, streets and public squares, Rolandsen brings to attention the importance of fun and socializing in the lives of Chinese urbanites. Central to the study is the contrast between popular practices and official discourse. Rolandsen provides in-depth analyses of the moralist “PRC leisure ethic” so characteristic of official Chinese publications and news media. Using examples from everyday life as a contrast, this study demonstrates that official propaganda has but little influence on how Chinese individuals lead their lives. Taking leisure as a point of departure, this book describes the new kinds of interaction between the local party-state and the population it seeks to govern.]
Roskam, Cole. Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1937-1937. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019.
[Abstract: Improvised City illuminates the interplay between Shanghai’s commercial nature and the architectural forms and practices designed to manage it in the city’s three municipalities. Roskam repositions Shanghai within architectural and urban transformations that reshaped the world over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.]
—–. Designing Reform: Architecture in the People’s Republic of China, 1970-1992. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: In the years following China’s Cultural Revolution, architecture played an active role in the country’s reintegration into the global economy and capitalist world. Looking at the ways in which political and social reform transformed Chinese architecture and how, in turn, architecture gave structure to the reforms, Cole Roskam underlines architecture’s unique ability to shape space as well as behavior. Roskam traces how foreign influences like postmodernism began to permeate Chinese architectural discourse in the 1970s and 1980s and how figures such as Kevin Lynch, I. M. Pei, and John Portman became key forces in the introduction of Western educational ideologies and new modes of production. Offering important insights into architecture’s relationship to the politics, economics, and diplomacy of post-Mao China, this unprecedented interdisciplinary study examines architecture’s multivalent status as an art, science, and physical manifestation of cultural identity.]
Rowe, Peter, ed. Cross-Sections Through the City: Redevelopment of the Hanjiang Riverfront in Wuhan, China. Cambridge: Harvard Design School, Department of Urban Planning and Design, 2004
Rowe, Peter G. and Seng Kuan. Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.
—–, eds. Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China. Prestel Publishing, 2004.
Rowe, Peter G. and Wu Yue, eds. Shan Shui City: Urban Development in Wenzhou, China. Cambridge: Harvard Design School, 2002.
Rowe, William T. Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.
Samuels, M. S. and C. M. Samuels. “Beijing and the Power of Place in Modern China.” In John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations. Boston, 1989, 220-27.
Scheen, Lena. Shanghai Literary Imaginings: A City in Transformation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. [MCLC Resource Center review by Andrew David Field]
Sewell, Bill. “Railway Outpost and Puppet Capital: Urban Expressions of Japanese Imperialism in Changchun, 1905-1945.” In Gregory Blue, Martin Bunton, and Ralph Croizer, eds., Colonialism and the Modern World: Selected Studies. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002,
Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center (上海城市规划展示馆)
Shao, Qin. “Space, Time, and Politics in Early Twentieth Century Nantong,” Modern China 23, 1 (Jan. 1997).
—–. “Tempest over Teapots: The Vilification of Teahouse Culture in Early Republican China.” Journal of Asian Studies 57, 4 (Nov. 1998).
—–. Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890-1930. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
Sheehan, Brett. “Urban Identity and Urban Networks in Cosmpolitan Cities: Banks and Bankers i n Tianjin, 1900-1937.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 47-64.
Shi, Mingzheng. Beijing Transforms: Urban Infrastructure, Public Works, and Social Change in the Chinese Capital, 1900-1928. Ph.D. diss. NY: Columbia University, 1993.
—–. “From Imperial Gardens to Public Parks: The Transformation of Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing.” Modern China 24, 3 (July 1998): 219-54.
—–. “Secondary Sources in Chinese Urban History: A Topical Bibliography.” Journal of Urban History 27, 1 (Nov. 2000).
Shi, Yaohua. “Reconstructing Modernism: The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, 1 (Spring 2006): 3-84.
Shin, Hyun Bang. Making China Urban: Geographical Aspects of Development and Disparity. NY: Routledge, 2015.
[Abstract: This book provides a comprehensive account of the global, regional and urban dimensions of China’s development, and the resulting socio-economic and political outcomes. Shin begins by documenting and analysing China’s changing position in the world economy before turning to the development challenges that urban China faces such as social and geographical disparities, civil society and rights and, in particular, China’s uneven urban and regional development.]
Siren, Osvald. The Walls and Gates of Peking. New York, 1924.
Sit, Victor F. S. Beijing: The Nature and Planning of a Chinese Capital City. New York: Wiley, 1995.
Smith, Brock E. The Tragic Kingdom, or “Prisoner in a Chinese Theme Park.” Virtual Bookworm, 2009.
Soho China (Beijing developer, whose projects Great Wall Commune and Xiandai cheng have put it at the forefront of interesting architecture in China)
Solinger, Dorothy J., ed. Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
[Abstract: This powerful book presents a fresh and compelling set of portraits that bring to life the human dimension of the vast and growing social and economic divides in urban China. Leading scholars explore the increasing rigidity of class and social boundaries, focusing on two new “castes” in contemporary China’s cities—the immensely wealthy and the abjectly poor. Much has been made of the rise in incomes, the elimination of much rural poverty, and the expansion of an urban middle class over almost forty years of spectacular economic growth. But what often has been overlooked is the polarization, exclusion, and exclusiveness in cities that have accompanied this rise, along with the threat that these trends will extend to future generations. The book considers five cases that emblematize these castes and depict their varying degrees of agency. Highlighting the social groups at opposite ends of the social hierarchy, the contributors illuminate the growing inequality in urban China today.]
Song, Weijie. Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
[Abstract: investigates five methods of representing Beijing–a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory–by authors traveling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing’s everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She’s Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui’s popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis-à-vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing native Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and émigré martial arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, Song explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.]
Song, Yan and Chengri Ding, eds. Urbanization in China: Critical Issues in an Era of Rapid Growth. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2007.
Spencer, J. E. “Changing Chungking: The Rebuilding of an Old Chinese City.” The Geographical Review 29 (Jan. 1939): 46-60.
Stapleton, Kristin. “Yang Sen in Chengdu: Urban Planning in the Interior.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 90-104.
—–. Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.
Stapleton, Kristin, Mingzheng Shi, and Mary Lee Mcisaac, eds. “The City in Modern China.” Journal of Urban History 27, 1 (Nov. 2000).
Strand, David. “New Chinese Cities.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 211-24.
—–. “‘A High Place is No Better Than a Low Place’: The City in the Making of Modern China.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 98-136.
Suzhou City Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (苏州市规划展示馆)
Tang, Wenfang and William L. Parish. Chinese Urban Life Under Reform: The Changing Scoial Contract. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Tang, Xiaobing. “Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design, Interiority, and Interiorization.” In Chinese Modernism: The Heroic and the Quotidian. Durham: Duke UP, 2000, 295-315.
Tomba, Luigi. “Making Neighborhoods: The Government of Social China in China’s Cities.” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 48-61.
Tsin, Michael. “Canton Remapped.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 19-29.
Tsui, Carmen. “State Capacity and City Planning: The Reconstruction of Nanjing.” East Asian History and Culture Review 1, 1 (May 2012).
[Turenscape is a design firm founded by Professor Kongjian Yu 俞孔坚. It was officially recognized and certificated as a first-level design institute by the Chinese government. Having over 300 professionals, Turenscape is an integrated team that provides quality and holistic services in: Architecture, Landscape architecture, urban planning and design, environmental design]
Urban China Research Network (sponsored by Mumford Center and Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, University of Albany, SUNY).
Urbane China [English language journal on design, architecture, and urban planning in China]
Urbanus (Shenzhen-based architectural firm of Ma Yan, Lu Xiaodong, and Wang Hui)
Visser, Robin. “Spaces of Disappearance–Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 39 (2004): 277-301. Rpt. in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 223-56.
Visser, Robin. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center Publications review by Paul Manfredi]
Vockler, Kai and Dirk Luckow, eds. Peking Shanghai Shenzhen: Cities of the 21st Century. Frankfurt, 2000.
Wai, Albert Wing Tai. “Place Promotion and Iconography in Shanghai’s Xintiandi.” Habitat International 30, 2 (2006): 245-60.
Wall and Market: Chinese Urban History News (newsletter of the Chinese Urban History Association).
Wang, David. A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future. NY: Routledge, 2017.
[Abstract: examines the impact of Chinese philosophy on China’s historic structures, as well as on modern Chinese urban aesthetics and architectural forms. For architecture in China moving forward, author David Wang posits a theory, the New Virtualism, which links current trends in computational design with long-standing Chinese philosophical themes. The book also assesses twentieth-century Chinese architecture through the lenses of positivism, consciousness (phenomenology), and linguistics (structuralism and poststructuralism). Illustrated with over 70 black-and-white images, this book establishes philosophical baselines for assessing architectural developments in China, past, present and future.]
Wang, Di. Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003.
Wang, Liping. Paradise for Sale: Urban Space and Tourism in the Social Transformation of Hangzhou, 1589-1937. Ph.D. diss. San Diego: University of California, SD, 1997.
—–. “Tourism and Spatial Change in Hangzhou, 1911-1927.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 107-20.
Wang, Mingxian. “Notes on Architecture and Postmodernism in China.” Tr. Xudong Zhang. boundary 2 24, 3 (1997): 163-75.
Wang, Xiaoming and Liu Yang. “From Architecture to Advertising: The Changes in Shanghai’s Urban Space Over the Last 15 Years.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, 1 (2010): 21-44.
Wang Zhenfu 王振复. Zhongguo jianzhu de wenhua licheng 中国建筑的文化历程 (Cultural formations of Chinese architecture). Shanghai: Renmin, 2000.
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. “Comparing ‘Incomparable’ Cities: Postmodern L.A. and Old Shanghai.” Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science 15 (Spring 1996): 69-90.
—–. “Locating Old Shanghai: Having Fits about Where It Fits.” In Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 192-210.
—–. “A Big Ben with Chinese Characteristics: The Customs House as Urban Icon in Old and New Shanghai.” Urban History 33, 1 (May 2006): 65-84.
Williams, Austin. China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-Cities. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
[Abstract: By 2025, China will have built fifteen new ‘supercities’ each with 25 million inhabitants. It will have created 250 ‘Eco-cities’ as well: clean, green, car-free, people-friendly, high-tech urban centres. From the edge of an impending eco-catastrophe, we are arguably witnessing history’s greatest environmental turnaround – an urban experiment that may provide valuable lessons for cities worldwide. Whether or not we choose to believe the hype – there is little doubt that this is an experiment that needs unpicking, understanding, and learning from. Austin Williams, TheArchitectural Review‘s China correspondent, explores the progress and perils of China’s vast eco-city program, describing the complexities which emerge in the race to balance the environment with industrialisation, quality with quantity, and the liberty of the individual with the authority of the Chinese state. Lifting the lid on the economic and social realities of the Chinese blueprint for eco-modernisation, Williams tells the story of China’s rise, and reveals the pragmatic, political and economic motives that lurk behind the successes and failures of its eco-cities. Will these new kinds of urban developments be good, humane, healthy places? Can China find a ‘third way’ in which humanity, nature, economic growth and sustainability are reconciled? And what lessons can we learn for our own vision of the urban future? This is a timely and readable account which explores a range of themes – environmental, political, cultural and architectural – to show how the eco-city program sheds fascinating light on contemporary Chinese society, and provides a lens through which to view the politics of sustainability closer to home.]
Wolff, David. To the Harbin Station: City Building in Manchuria, 1898-1914. Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, 1991.
Woodworth, Max D. “Frontier Boomtown: Urbanism in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.” East Asian History and Culture Review 1, 1 (May 2012).
Wu, Fulong. “The Global and Local Dimensions of Place-Making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City.” Urban Studies 37, 8 (2000): 1359-77.
—–. “Transplanting Cityscapes: Townhouses and Gated Community in Globalization and Housing Commodification.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 190-207.
Wu, Fulong, ed. Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006.
—–. China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism. NY: Routledge, 2007.
Wu, Hung. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Robin Visser]
Wu Jiang. Shanghai bainian jianzhu shi (1840-1949) (A hundred years of Shanghai architectural history, 1840-1949). Shanghai: Tongji University, 1997.
Wu, Jin-Yung. “Amis Aborigine Migrants’ Territorialization in Metropolitan Taipei.” East Asian History and Culture Review 1, 1 (May 2012).
Wu, Liangyong. Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing: A Project in the Ju’er Hutong Neighbourhood. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000.
Wu, Weiping and Piper Gaubatz. The Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2012. 2nd edition, 2023.
[Abstract: This text is anchored in the spatial sciences to offer a comprehensive survey of the evolving urban landscape in China. It is divided into four parts, with 13 chapters that can be read together or as stand-alone material. Part I sets the context, describing the geographical setting, China’s historical urban system, and traditional urban forms. Part II covers the urban system since 1949, the rural–urban divide and migration, and interactions with the global economy. Part III outlines the specific sectors of urban development, including economic restructuring, social–spatial transformation, urban infrastructure, and urban land and housing. Finally, part IV showcases urbanism through the lens of the urban environment, lifestyle and social change, and urban governance. The Chinese City offers a critical understanding of China’s urbanization,exploring how the complexity of the Chinese city both conforms to and defies conventional urban theories and experience of cities elsewhere around the world. This comprehensive book contains a wealth of up-to-date statistical information, case studies, and suggested further reading to demonstrate the diversity of urban life in China.]
Xiao, Geng, Yansheng Zhang, Cheung-kwok Law, and Dominic Meagher. China’s Evolving Growth Model: The Foshan Story. Fung Global Institute, 2015.
Xu, Fang. Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021.
[Abstract: investigates the paradoxical and counterintuitive contrast between Shanghai’s emergence as a global city and the marginalization of its native population, captured through the rapid decline of the distinctive Shanghai dialect. From this unique vantage point, Fang Xu tells a story of power relations in a cosmopolitan metropolis closely monitored and shaped by an authoritarian state through policies affecting urban redevelopment, internal migration, and language. These state policies favor the rich, the resourceful, and the highly educated, while alienate the poorer and less educated Shanghainese geographically and linguistically. When the state vigorously promotes Mandarin Chinese through legal and administrative means, Shanghainese made the conscious yet reluctant choice of shifting from the dialect to the national language. At the same time, millions of migrants have little incentive to adopt the vernacular given that their relation to the state has already firmly established their legal, financial, and social standing in the city. The recent shift in the urban linguistic scene that silences the Shanghai dialect is ultimately part of the state-led global city-building process. Through the association of the use of national language with realizing the “China Dream,” the state further eliminates the unique vernacular characters of Shanghai.]
Xu, Ting and Tim Murphy. “The City as Laboratory and the Urban-Rural Divide.” China Perspectives 4 (2008): 26-34.
Xu, Yinong. The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in Suzhou. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000.
Xue, Charlie Q. L. Building a Revolution: Chinese Architecture Since 1980. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2006.
Yanarella, Ernest J. and Richard S. Levine. From Eco-Cities to Sustainable City-Regions: China’s Uncertain Quest for an Ecological Civilization. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2020.
Yang, Chun. “Cross-boundary Integration of the Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong: An Emerging Global City-Region in China.” In Fulong Wu ed., Globalization and the Chinese City. NY: Routledge, 2006, 125-46.
Yeh, Wen-hsin, ed. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
[Part One of this book is entitled The City and the Modern, and has articles on urban China, of the late Qing and Republican periods, by Leo Ou-fan Lee, Sherman Cochran, David Strand, William Kirby, Richard Madsen, and Helen Siu].
Yusuf, Shahid and Weiping Wu. The Dynamics of Urban Growth in Three Chinese Cities. Washington, DC: Oxford University Press, 1997. [deals with Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tianjin]
Zhang, Hong. “From a Symbol of Imperialistic Penetration to a Site of Cultural Heritage.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 67-92
Zhang, Li. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
—–. “Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China.” Public Culture 14, 2 (2002): 311-334.
—–. In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Zhang, Limin. “Chinese Research on Urban History.” Republican China 20 (Nov. 1994): 46-82. [excellent survey and good list of literature available in Chinese]
Zhang, Yan and Ke Fang. “Is History Repeating Itself? From Urban Renewal in the United States to Inner-City Redevelopment in China.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 23, 3 (2004): 286-298.
Zhang, Yanshuo. “Tricking Memory, Remaking the City: Trompe l’oeil and the Visual Transformation of a Historic City in China: Chengdu.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6, 1 (2019): 3-29.
Zhang, Yuehong. “Tiananmen Square: The Rhetorical Power of a Woman and a Man.” Anthropology and Humanism 20, 1 (June 1995): 29-46.
Zheng, Jane. “Creating Urban Images through Global Flows: Hong Kong Real Estate Devleopers in Shanghai’s Urban Redevelopment.” City, Culture and Society 4, 2 (2013): 65-76.
Zheng Shiling 郑时龄. Shanghai jindai jianzhu fengge 上海近代建筑风格 (Architectural style in modern Shanghai). Shanghai: Jiaoyu, 2003.
Zheng, Yiran. Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Films. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.
Zhongguo chengshi guihua hangye xingxi wang 中国城市规划行业信息网 (China-up.com) [PRC site devoted to urban planning]
Zhongguo jianzhu wang 中国建筑网 (China architecture net). [excellent site for information on architecture in the PRC]
Zhongguo jianzhu wenhua zhongxin 中国建筑文化中心 (China architectural culture center) [site of the Ministry of Construction of the PRC]
Zhongguo jianzhu xuehui 中国建筑学会 (Architectural society of China) [PRC architecture association; English and Chinese mirror sites]
Zhou, Yu. “Beijing and the Development of Dual Central Business Districts.” Geographical Review 88, 3 (1998):
Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
—–. Architecture of Modern China: A Historical Critique. NY: Routledge, 2009.
Zhu, Pei. Root and Contemporaneity. Ed/intro Brian Carter and Kristin Stapleton. Buffalo: University of Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning, Confucius Institute Distinguished Architecture Lecture, 2019.
Zhu, Zixuan and Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok. “Beijing: The Expression of National Political Ideology.” In Won Bae Kim, et al. eds., Culture and the City in East Asia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, 125-50.
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Creative Industries
Chumley, Lily. Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Postsocialist China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Goldberg-Miller, Shoshahna and Yan Xiao. “Arts Entrepreneurship and Cultural Policy Innovation in Beijing.” Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts 7, 1 (2918).
Jeffreys, Elaine and Jian Xu. “Indenturing Celebrity: Governing China’s Entertainment Industries.” Modern China 49, 2 (2023).
[Abstract: This article examines the governance of China’s entertainment industries using the concept of “indentured celebrities”—famous people who are obliged to serve as ambassadors for Chinese government advertising and public diplomacy. The article introduces the idea of indentured celebrities in relation to Western sociological understandings of major celebrities as “national power elites,” “powerless elites,” and cosmopolitan “Big Citizens” who use their mediatized star power to exert unelected, “stateless” political influence. It then examines the expansion since the mid-2000s of regulatory controls over China’s entertainment industries. Finally, it explores the “Fan Bingbing tax evasion case,” revealing how online public censure, and the associated potential for government action, can coalesce to discipline celebrity behaviors. We conclude that regulatory frameworks and, to a lesser degree, “supervision by public opinion,” indenture major celebrities to aid the ruling Chinese Communist Party, while undermining any scope to exert nongovernmental political influence as per Western celebrities.]
Keane, Michael. China’s New Creative Clusters: Governance Human Capital and Investment. London: Routledge, 2011.
[Abstract: Recognising that creativity is a major driving force in the post-industrial economy, the Chinese government has recently established a range of “creative clusters” – industrial parks devoted to media industries, and arts districts – in order to promote the development of the creative industries. This book examines these new creative clusters, outlining their nature and purpose, and assessing their effectiveness. Drawing on case studies of a range of cluster models, and comparing them with international examples, the book demonstrates that creativity, both in China and internationally, is in fact a process of fitting new ideas to existing patterns, models and formats. It shows how large and exceptionally impressive creative clusters have been successfully established, but raises the important questions of whether profit or culture is the driving force, and of whether the bringing together of independent-minded, creative people, entrepreneurial businessmen, preferential policies and foreign investment may in time lead to unintended changes in social and political attitudes in China, including a weakening of state bureaucratic power. An important contribution to the existing literature on the subject, this book will be of great interest to scholars of urban studies, cultural geography, cultural economics and Asian studies.]
—–. Creative Industries in China: Art, Design, and Media. Polity, 2013.
[Abstract: Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China’s emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation. Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased; creative workers from Europe, North America and Asia are moving to Chinese cities; culture is increasingly positioned as a pillar industry. But what does this mean for our understanding of Chinese society? Can culture be industrialised following the low-cost model of China’s manufacturing economy. Is the national government really committed to social liberalisation? This engaging book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in social change in China. It draws on leading Chinese scholarship together with insights from global media studies, economic geography and cultural studies.]
Leung, Chi-Cheung and Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo, eds. Creativity and Culture in Greater China: The Role of Government, Individuals and Groups. Transaction, 2014.
[Abstract: unveils creative ideas on knowledge transfer from historical references to commercialization of cultural products. It adopts multidisciplinary, cross cultural, and experimental approaches to study cultural industries including art, music, popular culture, psychology, entrepreneurship, and economic studies. These scholarly thoughts and ideas were presented in the two conferences held at the Hong Kong Institute of Education in the summer of 2013. The chapters critically evaluate the current situation of the cultural industries and review the underlying relationships between the different sectors in the field. By assessing the development of the cultural industries, the authors hope that market and government intervention can enhance further consolidation and minimize hindrance to the growth of creativity.]
O’Conner, Justin and Xin Gu. Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China. Bristol: Intellect, 2020.
[Abstract: Explores China’s cultural economy over the last twenty years, particularly through the lens of its creative hub of Shanghai. Takes a long-term historical perspective and raises questions about the nature of contemporary creative capitalism and the universal claims of Western modernity, offering new ways of thinking about cultural policy in China.]
Pang, Laikwan. Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
[Abstract: a sharp critique of the intellectual property rights (IPR)–based creative economy, particularly as it is embraced or ignored in China. Pang argues that the creative economy—in which creativity is an individual asset to be commodified and protected as property—is an intensification of Western modernity and capitalism at odds with key aspects of Chinese culture. Nevertheless, globalization has compelled China to undertake endeavors involving intellectual property rights. Pang examines China’s IPR-compliant industries, as well as its numerous copyright violations. She describes how China promotes intellectual property rights in projects such as the development of cultural tourism in the World Heritage city of Lijiang, the transformation of Hong Kong cinema, and the cultural branding of Beijing. Meanwhile, copyright infringement proliferates, angering international trade organizations. Pang argues that piracy and counterfeiting embody the intimate connection between creativity and copying. She points to the lack of copyright protections for Japanese anime as the motor of China’s dynamic anime culture. Theorizing the relationship between knockoffs and appropriation art, Pang offers an incisive interpretation of China’s flourishing art scene. Creativity and Its Discontents is a refreshing rejoinder to uncritical celebrations of the creative economy.]
Zheng, Jane. “The ‘Entrepreneurial State’ in ‘Creative Industry Cluster’ Development in Shanghai.” Journal of Urban Affairs 32, 2 (2010): 143-170.
—–. “‘Creative Industry Cluster’ and the ‘Entrepreneurial City’ of Shanghai.” Urban Studies 48, 16 (2011): 3553-3574.
Zheng, Jane and Roger Chan. “The Impact of ‘Creative Industry Clusters’ on Cultural and Creative Industry Development in Shanghai.” City, Culture and Society 5, 1 (2014): 9-22.
—–. “A Property-led Approach to Cluster Development: ‘Creative Industry Clusters’ and Creative Industry Networks in Shanghai.” Town Planning Review 84, 5 (2013): 581-608.
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Photography
Asia Society Galleries. Picturing Hong Kong Photography 1855-1910. New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1997.
Atkinson, Alan. “No Heaven Awaits Us: Contemporary Chinese Photography at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.” Chinese Literature Today 2, 1 (2011): 32-49.
[Abstract: Since 2009, the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin has embarked on an unusual adventure: salvaging discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing that were destined to destruction. Undertaking one of the largest and most important archival projects in China, he buys by the kilo, taking away rice bags filled with thousands or rolls of slobbery, dusty and scratched negative film. Once closely examined, images are consistently selected, digitized, and classified. Today it encompasses over half a million of anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, reconstructing then a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in China. This coherent and unceasingly evolving archive allows us to apprehend negatives in different ways. It constitutes a visual platform for cross-cultural interactions, while impacting on our collective memory of the recent past.]
Bennett, Terry. History of Photography in China 1842-1860. London: Bernard Quaritch Limited, 2009.
—–. History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers 1844-1879. London: Quaritch, 2013.
Bibliography of Photo Albums and the History of Photography in China before 1949 (Heidelberg University)
Bickers, Robert. “The Lives and Deaths of Photographs in Early Treaty Port China.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 3-38.
Bourgon, Jerome. “Obscene Vignettes of Truth: Construing Photographs of Chinese Executions as Historical Documents.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 38-92.
Braester, Yomi. “Photography of Tiananmen: Pictorial Frames, Spatial Borders, and Ideological Matrixes.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 3 (Winter 2010): 633-70.
—–. “The Photographer’s New Clothes: An Interview with Cang Xin regarding Identity Exchange (2002-2007).” Trans-Asia Photography Review 2, 1 (Fall 2011).
Cabos, Maria. “The Cultural Revolution through the Prism of Vernacular Photography.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 8, 1 (Sept. 2017).
Capa, Cornell. Behind the Great Wall of China, Photographs from 1870 to the Present. Greenwich, CT: Weston J. Naef, 1972.
The Chain (photographs by Chien-chi Chang)
The Chain: Photographs by Chien-Chi Chang. Text by Cheryl Lai. London: Trolley, 2002.
Chen, Shuxia. “Departing from Socialist Realism: April Photo Society, 1979–1981.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 8, 1 (Sept. 2017).
—–. “Manipulation as Art: Photographs by Xu Zhuo, 1979-1981.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 1 (Fall 2015).
Cheng, Scarlet. “The Painted Photograph: An Exhibition of Contemporary Photography from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan” (review). Asian Art News 4, 3 (May/Jun 1994): 54-58.
Chinese Photography Museum (中国摄影博物馆). Website sponsored by the Chinese Photographers Association (中国摄影家协会). [contains biographies of important photographers and galleries of their photographs]
Cody, Jeffrey W. and Frances Terpak, eds. Brush and Shutter: Early Photography of China. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011.
[Abstract: In 1839, the year that the daguerreotype was invented, the West forcibly “opened up” China in the First Opium War, a confluence of events that brought photography to the country. In the early years, some Chinese feared that clicking shutters would steal their spirits or that photographers would steal their children’s eyes as part of the process of picture-taking, but the country soon embraced the new art form. Covering the years 1859–1911, the book includes work by both Chinese and Western photographers whose work can seem similar, save for a preference in the Western photographers for a mannered, heavily stylized effect, as well as an unmistakably imperialist bias manifested in stereotypical images that art historian Wu Hung, in one of the catalogue’s six fine essays, describes as “frozen in silent stillness.” Aside from a few images of nature, all the photos reveal a country in rapid flux from urbanization and Western influences, and are a valuable historical tool. This sumptuous volume, which could have benefitted from at least one map of China as well as from a glossary—who knows where Swatow Harbor is or what is meant by “The Tao-Tai of Anching”?—is an eye-opening delight. (Feb.) ]
Crombie, Isobel. “China, 1860: A Photographic Album by Felice Beato.” History of Photography, 2:1 (1987): 25-37.
Davies, David J. “Visible Zhiqing: The Visual Culture of Nostaligia among China’s Zhiqing Generation.” In Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007, 166-92. [focuses on the Great Chinese Zhiqing Photo Retrospective, held in Shanghai in 1998]
Dikotter, Frank. “The History of Photography in China.”
[This page introduces an AHRC-funded exploratory project on the history of photography in China. The project aims to explore the feasibility of a history of social photography in China which promises not only to rescue from oblivion a whole range of neglected and rapidly disappearing photographic material – from the art photo to the family snapshot – but also to raise interesting comparative observations which reach out beyond Europe]
—–. “Jack Birns on Modern China.” In Dikotter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
[documenting the material landscape of the republican era, and many have not hitherto been published. Reproduced here are several dozen of photos selected with Jack Birns, who was a photographer with Life-Time in China in 1947-9, from his personal archives in Los Angeles. The specific context and meaning of these photos are discussed in the book.]
Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenyi tuwenzhi: sheying juan 二十世纪中国文艺图文志: 摄影卷 (Pictorial record of 2oth century Chinese literature and arts: photography volume). Shenyang: Shenyang. 2002.
EyesCoffee.com [b/w photography magazine in HK; authored by Duncan Cheuk-sang Wong]
Gao, Chu and Wang Shuo. “Photographic Manipulation in China: A Conversation between Fu Yu and Gao Chu.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 1 (Fall 2015).
—–. “The Challenging Archive: Studying Photographers of the Chinese Communist Party.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 4, 1 (Fall 2013).
Gao, James Z. “Shooting Social Suffering: Photography and China’s Human Disasters.” Chinese Historical Review 18, 2 (Fall 2011): 99-124.
Gartland, Luke and Roberta Wue, eds. Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan. NY: Routledge, 2017.
[Abstract: This volume explores the early history of the photographic studio and portrait in China and Japan. The institution of the photographic studio has received relatively little attention in the history of photography; contributors here investigate various manifestations of the studio as a place and as a space that was cultural, economic, and creative. Its authors also look closely at the studio portrait not as images alone, but also as collaborative ventures between studio operators and sitters, opportunities to invent new roles, images that merged the new medium with “traditional” visual practices, as well as the portrait’s part in devising modern, gendered, nationalistic, and public identities for its subjects. As the first collection of its kind, Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan analyzes the photographic likeness—its producers, subjects, viewers, and pictorial forms—and argues for the historical significance of the photographic studio as a specific and new space central to the formation of new identities and communities. Photography’s identity as a transnational technology is thus explored through the local uses, adaptations, and assimilations of the imported medium, presenting modern images of their subjects in specific Japanese and Chinese contexts.]
The Giles-Pickford Photographic Collection [photographs of China around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; Australian National University]
Goodrich, Carrington and Nigel Cameron, eds. The Face of China As Seen by Photographers and Travelers, 1860-1912. Millerton, NY: Aperton, 1978.
Gu, Yi. “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840- 1911.” The Art Bulletin 95, 1 (2013), 120-138.
Hay, Jonathan. “Notes on Chinese Photography and Advertising in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.
Henriot, Christian. “Street Culture, Visual Fragments and Everyday Life: Narrating Peddlers in Shanghai Modern.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 93-129.
Hevia, James. “The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900-1901), Making Civilization.” In Rosalind C. Morris, ed., Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 79-120.
Hillenbrand, Margaret. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]
Historical Chinese Postcard Project, 1896-1920.
[This project studies the first wave of postcards with a Chinese subject. We show them, discuss what they are, who produced them and where, how they were used, their significance–in short, their historical context. Hopefully, this site will prove that postcards are indeed a tremendous visual resource on the late imperial and early republican periods in China. It was created under the patronage of the Institut d’Asie Orientale (IAO) in Lyon, France. The database primarily aims at being a reference and research instrument for scholars and students of the period. This is a virtual library for a type of material not previously studied at scientific level. (Especially when from early 20th century China, postcards are rarely found in public collections.) As a work in permanent progress, the database will be updated and enriched as research progresses.]
Historical Photographs of China (University of Bristol, UK)
[Abstract: The project now locates, digitises, and publishes online photographs of China held, largely, in private hands outside the country. Although there are some sets of material from institutional repositories, the principal sources of our materials are families living outside China who have historical connections with it, typically this involves a family history of living and working there. Our sources are families who were involved in public service, business, missionary work, police or foreign armed forces. Most of our photographers were ‘amateurs’, although we have some material from journalists, and much from individuals who applied themselves seriously to the art of photography. The collection also includes much material that was commissioned, bought or otherwise acquired, photographs not actually taken by those within whose albums or boxes they came to be preserved. Our aim is to help make this virtual photographic archive of modern China publicly available, without cost, and with limited restriction on use for non-commercial purposes.]
Ho, Eliza. Art, Documentary, and Propaganda in Wartime China: The Photography of Sha Fei. Columbus, OH: East Asian Studies Center, The Ohio State University, 2010.
Ho, Joseph W. Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People’s Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the US.]
Hogge, David. “Piety and Power: The Theatrical Images of Empress Dowager Cixi.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 2, 1 (Fall 2011).
Hu, Min. “The Photography about ‘Children’.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10, 2 (June 2009): 303-314.
Huang, Nicole. “Locating Family Portraits: Everday Images from 1970s China.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 3 (Winter 2010): 671-93.
Jiang, Jiehong. “The ‘China Dream’ Reimagined: Contemporary Photography in China.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 1 (Fall 2015).
Jiang Qisheng 蒋齐生, et al. Zhongguo sheying shi 1937-1949 中国摄影史1937-1949 (History of Chinese photography, 1937-1949). Beijing: Zhongguo sheying, 1998.
Jones, Andrew F. “Portable Monuments: Architectural Photography and the ‘Forms’ of Empire in Modern China.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 3 (Winter 2010): 599-631.
Journal of China: Illustrations of Late Qing Dynasty under John Thompson’s Eyes. Macau: Macau Museum, 2014.
Judge, Joan. “Portraits of Republican Ladies: Materiality and Representation in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Photographs.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 131-70.
—–. “The Republican Lady, the Courtesan, and the Photograph: Visibility and Sexuality in Early Twentieth-Century China.” In Luke Gartlan and Roberta Wue, eds., Facing East Asia: Histories of Studio Portrait Photography. Ashgate, Routledge, 2017, 191-208.
Kent, Richard K. “Fine Art Photography in Republican Period Shanghai: From Pictorialism to Modernism.” In Jerome Silbergeld, Dora C.Y. Ching, Judith G. Smith, and Alfreda Murck, eds., Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong, vol. 2. Princeton: P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University in association with Princeton University Press, 2011, 849-874.
—–. “Early Twentieth-Century Art Photography in China: Adopting, Domesticating, and Embracing the Foreign.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 3, 2 (Spring 2013).
Kunz, Andre. “Contemporary Chinese Photography: From a ‘Correct’ to a ‘Fragmentary’ World-view.” In Noth, Jochen, et.al., eds. China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture. HK, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 93-100.
Lai, Edwin K. “The Dawn of Hong Kong Photography 1839-1910.” Besides 3 (2001): 1-16.
Lee, Jung Joon. “Kowloon Walled City Revisited: Photography and Postcoloniality in the City of Darkness.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 2 (Spring 2016).
Lee, Wing Kit. “Xi Jinping at the ‘Occupy’ Sites: Derivative Works and Participatory Propaganda from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (2014).” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 1 (Fall 2015).
Li, Jie. “Utopian Photographs.” In Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 100-49.
Liu, Mia Yinxing. “The ‘Emulative’ Portraits: Lang Jingshan’s Photography of Zhang Daqian.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 1 (Fall 2015).
—–. “The Allegorical Landscape: Lang Jingshan’s Photography in Context.” Archives of Asian Art 65, no. 1-2 (2015): 1-24.
Liu, Yu-jen. “Second Only to the Original: Rhetoric and Practice in the Photographic Reproduction of Art in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Art History 37, no. 1 (Feb. 2014): 68-95.
Living in Interesting Times–A Decade of New Chinese Photography. The Open Museums of Photography, Tel-Hai Industrial Park (Tel Hai, Israel). Feb. 5-June 30, 2005.
Loh, Jean. “Lu Guang’s China Water Survey.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 5, 2 (Spring 2015).
—–. “Chassés-Croisés of Three Women Photographers in China: A Trilogy.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 2, 2 (Spring 2012).
Lucas, Christopher J., ed. James Ricalton’s Photographs of China During the Boxer Rebellion. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.
Ma Yunzeng 马运增, et al, eds. Zhongguo sheying shi, 1840-1937 中国摄影史 1840-1937 (The history of Chinese photography, 1840-1937). Beijing: Zhongguo sheying, 1987.
Mai, Mang. “Off Target: Cai Dongdong.” Chinese Literature Today 6, 2 (2017): 100-07.
[Abstract: This article introduces contemporary Chinese artist Cai Dongdong, who started as a documentary photographer. He soon moved to experiments of conceptual or meta-photography that aim to expose the paradoxical, often deceiving and violent origins of photography. Of particular note is Cai’s recent and ongoing series of “salvaged” photographs from 2014 on, including works such as Fountain and Off Target, in which Cai ingeniously performs an individual as well as public ritual of “salvaging”—at once referencing and reacting to China’s past history and current social reality, and also suggesting the newly found source of his own, future-oriented, creative inspirations. In the end, Cai offers a most powerful way of deconstructing the ideological darkroom, or Plato’s Cave, that is universal and ever-present across borders, not only specific to China or its Maoist past, and finds his own “re-entrance” into contemporary Chinese history and art.]
Massey, Annabelle. “The Yelllow Leaves of a Building: Urban Exploration in China adn the Cooling Plan Photography Project.” China Perspectives 4 (2021): 21-29.
[Abstract: Ruins and rubble have become a ubiquitous feature of the urbanising Chinese landscape. They have also become key motifs in Chinese visual culture, and artists have used the ruin image to critically comment on post-reform urban development. This article, however, seeks to bring an overlooked dimension of ruin representation to light: the creative culture of China’s “urban explorers,” who infiltrate obsolete architecture for their own recreational purposes. It shows how the derelict spaces portrayed by the explorers’ visual and textual accounts have a ludic potency of their own, with the urban ruin depicted as a site of embodied and aesthetic pleasure. The article ends by discussing the example of urban explorer Zhao Yang and his Cooling Plan photography project, which frames the ruin as a creative retreat from the pressures of the lived city.]
Moore, Oliver. “Zou Boqi on Vision and Photography in Nineteenth Century China.” In Kenneth J. Hammond and Kristin Stapleton, eds., The Human Tradition in Modern China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 33-54.
Morris, Rosalind, ed. Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.
Morrison, Hedda. A Photographer in Old Peking. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985.
——. Travels of a Photographer in China. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Newsphoto.com.cn (photo website of the China Daily)
Noth, Juliane. “Landscape Photography, Infrastructure, and Armed Conflict in a Chinese Travel Anthology from 1935: The Case of Dongnan lansheng.” Trans Asia Photography Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 2018).
Ortells-Nicolau, Xavier. “Gray Pastoral: Critical Engagements with Idyllic Nature in Contemporary Photography from China.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 5, 2 (Spring 2015).
—–. Urban Demolition and the Aesthetics of Recent Ruins in Experimental Photography from China. PhD diss. Barcelona: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2015.
[Abstract: In reform era China, demolition and rubble have become unavoidable presence in most major cities. Reifying “the menace to the city and its memory” (Yomi Braester), demolition has attracted many artists and filmmakers, who have incorporated it in their works. This dissertation contributes to recent studies of the ruin imaginary in Chinese art and visual culture, and to the emerging body of literature on Chinese photography with an analysis of experimental photographers who have engaged with urban demolition. The predominance of the theme of urban demolition responds, first and foremost, to the fact that urban rubble has been ubiquitous, enduring and highly visible. In this sense, this dissertation sketches the institutional and legal framework regulating land development in China, to account for the particular dynamics responsible to the emergence and visibility of ruinous landscapes. At the same time, the focus on artistic experimentalism serves to focus on the ways in which the different artists have transformed demolition sites into ruins, going beyond a documentary or activist depiction of demolition. In this sense, the dissertation also partakes in the current transdisciplinar revision of ruins studies, which foregrounds the constructedness of ruins as a discourse and critical category. The dissertation examines over 40 photographic series spanning from the early 1990s to the present, detects their aesthetic and discursive strategies, and divides them in different chapters according to their chronological sequence, and the commonalities in their approach to demolition. In addition to the immediate context of contemporary photography from China, the dissertation also explores the connections of contemporary photographic projects with the long aesthetical tradition around the ruin, and in particular with pioneering photo-conceptualist artists of the post-war period who rekindled its artistic value in tune with the contemporary context of mass-production and consumption. After analyzing the different photographic works, the dissertation highlights conceptualism, performativity, and digital technologies as the main strategies for the creation of ruins. It also posits a temporal evolution in the style and attitude of the artists, with an exploration of the newest photographic works on demolition concurrent with the writing of this work.]
Pang, Laikwan. “Photography and Autobiography: Zhang Ailing’s Looking at Each Other.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 73-106.
——. “Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images in Modern China.” Journal of Women’s History 17, 4 (2005): 56-85. Rpt. in Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China. Honolulu: University of Hawii Press, 2007, 69-100.
Parker, Eliot S. “John Thomson, 1837-1921: RGS Instructor in Photography.” The Geographical Journal 144, 3 (1978): 463-71. [JSTOR link]
Philips, Christopher and Wu Hung, eds. Life and Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media. Göttingen: Steidl/ Neu-Ulm: The Walther Collection, 2018.
[Abstract: Life and Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media Art is the first extensive catalogue of works by Chinese artists represented in The Walther Collection. Showing visually inventive and emotionally compelling artworks by 44 groundbreaking artists, Life and Dreams demonstrates the remarkable speed with which photography and media art have occupied important positions within the field of experimental Chinese art since the early 1990s, and the widespread adoption of these media and forms by successive generations of artists. Throughout the catalogue, photographic works register artists’ responses to the sweeping social and economic changes that have fundamentally altered the face of China’s cities and transformed the fabric of everyday life and social relations. Key approaches taken up by these artists include the use of the bare body as raw material for creative manipulation, the surveying of the architectural and the built environment, the synthesizing of classical and historical imagery to comment on contemporary issues, the consideration of China’s varied political legacies and histories, and the shaping of new emergent forms of individual and collective identity. Featured selections of media art employ elaborately imaginative and fantasy-driven means to evoke an ambiguous world of technological fantasy, suggesting where these changes may be leading China and its inhabitants.]
The Photographs of John Thomson. National Library of Scotland.
Photographs of John Thomson. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Exhibits of John Thomson’s Photographs. Paris, Fall 2015.
[Since 2011, Photography of China’s goal has been to offer an alternative vision of China and its history through the eyes of the people who love photography. As a non-profit association, we commit to facilitating the wide circulation of knowledge by unearthing and promoting photographic works from the advent of the medium to contemporary times. Our activities foster collaborations amongst artistic, institutional, and scientific communities. Dr Marine Cabos 马琳珂, Founder and President, is an art historian specialised in the history of photography in China. She received her PhD from SOAS University of London. She has published several papers on the art and history of modern and contemporary China and has lectured at SOAS, Christie’s Education, the EHESS, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She has worked in major cultural institutions in Shanghai, Paris, and London. She is currently Research Associate at SOAS University of London and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)]
Pollack, Barbara. “Chinese Photography: Beyond Stereotypes.” ArtNews Online (Feb. 2004).
Roberts, Claire. Photography and China. London: Reaktion Books, 2013.
[Abstract: Covering the period from the inception of photography to the present day, this is the first comprehensive account of photography in China to be published in English, illuminating in detail this previously neglected subject. Bringing together material held in museums, archives and private collections all over the world, Photography and China explores the long tradition of Chinese art and visual culture into which photography was initially absorbed and which it went on to expand in new directions. Locating these images within their particular social and temporal contexts, Claire Roberts describes the varied purposes with which photographers in China created their work, which included the commercial, political, artistic and journalistic. The book places emphasis on the practitioners themselves and the images they created, which cover an astonishing array of subjects, from landscapes and rural scenes to propaganda and the documentation of social upheavals, and from the earliest self-portraiture to radical contemporary art practices. This rich and evocative volume gathers over 130 images, many unfamiliar to a Western audience, to chronicle photography’s relationship to this complex country, underlining the medium’s status as both witness to and agent of historical change.]
—–. “Quick Time: On Beijing, Spring Festival and the Photographs of Hedda Hammer Morrison.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 2, 2 (Spring 2012).
—–. “Chinese Ideas of Likeness: Painting, Photography, and Intermediality.” In Luke Gartland and Roberta Wue, eds., Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan. London: Routledge, 2017, 97-116.
Robinson, Abby. “Coming to Light: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 1, 1 (Fall 2010).
Rojas, Carlos. The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
—–. “Eileen Chang and Photographic Nostalgia.” In Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008, 159-81.
——. “Abandoned Cities Seen Anew: Reflections on Spatial Specificity and Temporal Transience.” In Rosalind C. Morris, ed., Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 207-228.
Rong, Rong. Ruin Pictures. NY : Chambers Fine Art, 2001.
San, Long Chin. “Composite Pictures and Chinese Art (1942).” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 154-71.
Schaefer, William. “Shanghai Savage: ” positions east asia cultures critique 11, 1 (Spring 2003).
—–, guest editor. “Photography’s Places.” Special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 18, 3 (Winter 2010).
—–. “Poor and Blank: History’s Marks and the Photographies of Displacement.” Representations 109 (2010): 1-34.
—–. “The Lives of Form: From Zhang Jin to Aaron Siskind.” ASAP/Journal 1, 3 (Fall 2016): 461-86.
—–. “Photographic Ecologies.” October Magazine 161 (Summer 2017): 42-68.
—–. Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925-1937. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China’s new media culture. Described by the modernist writer Mu Shiying as “transplanted from Europe” and “paved with shadows,” for many of its residents Shanghai was a city without a past paradoxically haunted by the absent past’s traces. In Shadow Modernism William Schaefer traces how photographic practices in Shanghai provided a forum within which to debate culture, ethnicity, history, and the very nature of images. The central modernist form in China, photography was neither understood nor practiced as primarily a medium for realist representation; rather, photo layouts, shadow photography, and photomontage rearranged and recomposed time and space, cutting apart and stitching places, people, and periods together in novel and surreal ways. Analyzing unknown and overlooked photographs, photomontages, cartoons, paintings, and experimental fiction and poetry, Schaefer shows how artists and writers used such fragmentation and juxtaposition to make visible the shadows of modernity in Shanghai: the violence, the past, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity excluded and repressed by the prevailing cultural politics of the era and yet hidden in plain sight.]
www.shafei.cn [website devoted to the photography of Sha Fei]
Shanghai sheying shi 上海摄影史 (History of photography in Shanghai). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu, 1992.
Sidney D. Gamble Photographs (Duke University Libraries, Digital Collections)
Thiriez, Regine. Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palaces. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998.
—–. “Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth-Century China.” East Asian History 17/18 (June / December 1999): 77-102.
[The galleries on display here belong to the category of documentary photography. The main subject area is China and that country’s rather rapid transformation from a rural to an urban-centered society. Taken together, these galleries constitute a visual archive that for the most part is meant to capture and to preserve information (or “evidence of certain developments” perhaps). Only sometimes are these photographs speculative or interpretive. And although I do not claim to aspire towards the highest degree of objectivity (or “truth”) embodied in the image as such, I do claim a certain amount of authority over and understanding of the subjects treated in this visual fashion. ]
Thomson, John. Illustrations of China and Its People. A Series of Two Hundred Photographs, with Letterpress Descriptive of Places and People Represented. 4 Volumes. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1873-1874.
Trans-Asia Photography Review (TAP).
[Abstract: The Trans-Asia Photography Review is an international refereed journal (ISSN: 2158-2025) devoted to the discussion of historic and contemporary photography from Asia. Online and free of charge, it is published by Hampshire College in collaboration with the Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library. Two issues are published annually, in the fall and spring. Readers can join our email list to be notified additionally about special events pertaining to photography in Asia.]
Tupian Zhongguo bainian shi 图片中国百年史 (A pictorial history of a Chinese century). 2 vols. Ed. Zhang Xiaoqiang. Jinan: Shandong huabao, 1994. [high quality production with wide variety of photographs]
Tuwen ershi shiji Zhonguo shi 图文二十世纪中国史 (A pictorial and textual history of twentieth century China). 10 vols. Guangzhou: Guangdong luyou, 1999. [mainly photographs; one volume for each decade of the century]
Wang, Ban. “In Search of Real-Life Images in Chinaa: Realism in the Age of Spectacle.” Journal of Contemporary China 56 (August 2008): 497-512.
[Abstract: This essay re-examines new realism in documentary film and photography in China. Distinct from official realism, genuine realism requires that experience be seen within its real environment and characters and actions of a realist work be shaped by that environment. This principle challenges the visual regime of spectacle controlled by the expanding global cultural industry. Documentary realism represents a penetrating social comment but also recovers a materialist understanding of workers’ life and conditions in China. Photo-realism on the other hand uncovers the forgotten ways of life among ordinary people in the fast modernization of the cities.]
Wang, Eugene Y. “Perceptions of Change, Changes in Perception–West Lake as Contested Site/Sight in the Wake of the 1911 Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 73-122.
Wang, Meiqin. “Advertising the Chinese Dream: Urban Billboards and Ni Weihua’s Documentary Photography.” China Information 29, no.2 (2015): 176–201.
Wang, Yong. “Excerpt from Coming from the Village to Take Photos.” Tr. Claire Roberts. Trans-Asia Photography Review 6, 1 (Fall 2015).
Wickeri, Philip L. and Ruiwen Chen. Thy Kingdom Come A Photographic History of Anglicanism in Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
Woodworth, Max. “Picturing Urban China in Ruin: ‘Ghost City’ Photography and Speculative Urbanization.” GeoHumanities 6, 2 (2020): 233-51.
—–. “Ruins, Ruination, and Fieldwork Photography.” China Perspectives 4 (2021): 9-19.
Wong, Ka F. “Entanglements of Ethnographic Images: Torri Ryz’s Photographic Record of Taiwan Aborigines (1896-1900).” Japanese Studies 24, 3 (Dec. 2004): 283-299.
Worswick, Clark, and Spence, Jonathan. Imperial China: Photographs 1850-1912. New York: Pennwick Publishing, 1978.
Wu, Hong. “Ruins as Autobiography: Chinese Photographer Rong Rong.” Persimmon 2, 3 (Winter 2002): 36-47.
—–. Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China. London: Reaktion Books, 2016.
—–, ed. Rong Rong’s East Village, 1993-1998. New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2003.
[40 photographs of East Village, with extracts from Rong Rong’s diary kept while he was living there; also has extensive commentary by Wu Hong]
Wu, Hung and Christopher Phillips. Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China. With Melissa Chiu, Lisa Corrin, and Stephanie Smith. Distributed for the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Wu, Shengqing. Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Modern Media Culture. NY: Columbia University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jiangtao Gu]
[Abstract: Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.]
Wu, Yinxian. “‘Shaping a Photographic Art Image,’ from Expression Methods for Photographic Art.” Tr. Chen Shuxia. Trans-Asia Photographic Review 4, 2 (Spring 2014).
Wue, Roberta. “China in the World: On Photography, Montages, and the Magic Lantern.” History of Photography 41, no. 2 (May 2017): 171-187.
Wue, Roberta, and Edwin K. Lai, Joanna Waley-Cohen, eds. Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855-1910. George Braziller. 1997.
Xu, Tingting. “The Group Photo as an Imbricated Ritualistic Event: Duanfang and His Altar Bronzes in Late Qing Antiquarian Praxis.” History of Photography 44, 4 (2021): 249-266.
—–. “Prince Yihuan and the Photographer Liang Shitai’s Photo Album as a ‘Garden in the Mind.'” In Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell, eds., Photography and East Asian Art. Chicago: Center of East Asian Art, University of Chicago, 2021, 266-98.
Yu, Tianqi Kiki. “Walking at the Extreme Edge of Rationality: Yu Haibo in Conversation with Yu Tianqi Kiki.” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 2, 1 (2015): 85-101. [bilingual Chinese/English]
Zhang, Hai’er. Fotografien Aus China: 1986-1989. Art Publishers, 1993.
Zheng, Yanqiu. “(Un)Signifying Ethnicity in Republican China: State-Sponsored Ethnographic Photographs from the 1930s and 1940s.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 7, 1 (Fall 2016).
Zhongguo sheyingjia xiehui wang (official website of the China Photographers Association)
Zhou, Dengyan and Shi Zhimin. “Ranyin Fa: Photography and the Appropriation of Kodak Dye Transfer in Socialist China.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 7, 2 (Spring 2017).
Zhou, Dun. “Chinese Photography: Witness to Change.” In Christopher Crouch, ed., Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010.
Zhu, Yanfei. “Did Photography Win the Contest of Picturing Epigraphic Bronze?.” In Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell, eds., Photography and East Asian Art. Chicago: Center for the East Asian Art, Department of Art History, University of Chicago 2021, 40-60.
Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection. Organized by Tina Yapelli. San Diego: University Art Gallery, San Diego State University, 2003.
[Return to top of page]
Fashion/Dress
Bao, Mingxin. “Shanghai Fashion in the 1930s.” In Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian, eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919-1945. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005, 318-47.
Brownell, Susan. “The Body and the Beautiful in Chinese Nationalism: Sportswomen and Fashion Models in the Reform Era.” China Information 13, 2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1998).
—–. “Making Dream Bodies in Beijing: Athletes, Fashion Models, and Urban Mystique in China.” In Nancy Chen, et al, eds., China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Carroll, Peter. “Refashioning Suzhou: Dress, Commodification, and Modernity.” positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 443-78.
Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing). “Chinese Life and Fashions.” The XXth Century (Shanghai) 4, 1 (Jan. 1943).
—–. “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes.” Tr. Andrew F. Jones. positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 427-41.
Chang, Jui-Shan. “Refashioning Womanhood in 1990s Taiwan: An Analysis of the Taiwanese Edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine.” Modern China 30, 3 (2004): 361-397.
[Abstract: This article investigates how the Taiwanese edition of Cosmopolitan (1992-1997) may serve to resolve a tension felt by modern women in Taiwan by weaving global values and local values together into a tapestry of modern womanhood that can dwell within, and yet extend, the local culture. The article treats the magazine as a window into a Taiwanese image of the modern woman and as an arena in which there are Chinese and Western systems and values that could clash but, in fact, intermesh by virtue of the practice of exploiting Western means for Chinese ends. Taiwanese Cosmo shows how modernization need not mean Westernization, even if it relies on veneers of Western images, and it further aims to transform local Chinese values in a way that gives them global significance.]
Chen, Tina Mai. “Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao’s China.” positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 361-93.
—–. “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender Formation in Mao’s China.” Fashion Theory 5, 2 (June 2001): 143-172.
Chen, Tina Mai and Paola Zamperini, guest editors. Fabrications, special issue on fashion in Asia. positions 11, 2 (fall 2003).
Cheongsam Emporium (History of the cheongsam). Website.
Chew, Matthew. “The Dual Consequence of Cultural Localization: How Exposed Short Stockings Subvert and Sustain Global Cultural Hierarchy.” positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 479-509.
—–. “The Contemporary Re-emergence of the Qipao: Political Nationalism, Cultural Production and Popular Consumption of a Traditional Chinese Dress.” The China Quarterly 189 (March 2007): 144-61.
Out of the East: China’s Influence on Modern Western Fashion (NYT’s site based on the 1999 exhibition “China Chic” held at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan)
Chu, Ingrid. “Artificial Flavour: Asian Identity and the Cult of Fashion.” Plus Zero 2 (1998).
Clark, Hazel. “The Cheun Sam: Issues of Fashion and Cultural Identity.” In Steele, Valerie and John S. Major. China Chic: East Meets West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 155-65.
—–. The Cheongsam. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Clark, Hazel and Agnes Wong. The Cheung Sam in Hong Kong: From Functional Garment to Cultural Symbol. HK: Regional Council (unpublished research report, 1996).
—–. “Who Still Wears the Cheng Sam?” In Claire Roberts, ed. Evolution and Revolution: Chinese Dress, 1770s-1990s. Sydney: The Powerhouse Museum, 1997, 65-73.
Dal Lago, Francesca. “Crossed Legs in 1930s Shanghai: How ‘Modern’ the Modern Woman?” East Asian History 19 (June 2000): 103-44.
Edwards, Louis. “Sport, Fashion, and Beauty: New Incarnations of the Female Politician in Contemporary China.” In Martin and Larissa Heinrich, eds., Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006, 146-61.
Elle Taiwan (Taiwan electronic edition of Elle magazine)
Evolution and Revolution: Chinese Dress 1700 to Now (Powerhouse Museum exhibition, Sydney, Australia; June-July 1998).
Field, Andrew David. Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. HK: Chinese UP, 2010.
[Abstract: Drawing upon a unique and untapped reservoir of newspapers, magazines, novels, government documents, photographs and illustrations, this book traces the origin, pinnacle, and ultimate demise of a commercial dance industry in Shanghai between the end of the First World War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Delving deep into the world of cabarets, nightclubs, and elite ballrooms that arose in the city in the 1920s and peaked in the 1930s, the book assesses how and why Chinese society incorporated and transformed this westernized world of leisure and entertainment to suit its own tastes and interests. Focusing on the jazz-age nightlife of the city in its “golden age,” the book examines issues of colonialism and modernity, urban space, sociability and sexuality, and modern Chinese national identity formation in a tumultuous era of war and revolution.]
Finnane, Antonia. “What Should Women Wear? A National Problem.” Modern China 22, 2 (1996): 99-131. Rpt in Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1999, 3-36.
—–. “Military Culture and Chinese Dress in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Steele, Valerie and John S. Major. China Chic: East Meets West. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999, 119-32.
—–. “Yangzhou’s ‘Mondernity’: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century.” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 395-426.
—–. “China on the Catwalk: Between Economic Success and Nationalist Anxiety.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 587-608.
—–. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. NY: Columbia UP, 2008.
[Abstract: Based largely on nineteenth and twentieth-century representations of Chinese dress as traditional and unchanging, historians have long regarded fashion as something peculiarly Western. But in this surprising, sumptuously illustrated book, Antonia Finnane proves that vibrant fashions were a vital part of Chinese life in the late imperial era, when well-to-do men and women showed a keen awareness of what was up-to-date. Though foreigners who traveled to China in the early decades of the twentieth century came away with the impression that Chinese dress was simple and monotone, the key features of modern fashion were beginning to emerge, especially in Shanghai. Men in blue gowns donned felt caps and leather shoes, girls began to wear fitted jackets and narrow pants, and homespun garments gave way to machine-woven cloth, often made in foreign lands. These innovations marked the start of a far-reaching vestimentary revolution that would transform the clothing culture in urban and much of rural China over the next half century. Through Finnane’s meticulous research, we are able to see how the close-fitting jacket and high collar of the 1911 Revolutionary period, the skirt and jacket-blouse of the May Fourth era, and the military style popular in the Cultural Revolution led to the variegated, globalized wardrobe of today. She brilliantly connects China’s modernization and global visibility with changes in dress, offering a vivid portrait of the complex, subtle, and sometimes contradictory ways the people of China have worn their nation on their backs.]
—–. How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949-1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: When the PRC was founded in 1949, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in far-reaching changes in what people wore. In a pioneering history of dress in the Mao years (1949–1976), Finnane traces the transformation, using industry archives and personal stories to reveal a clothing regime pivoted on the so-called ‘Mao suit’. The time of the Mao suit was the time of sewing schools and sewing machines, pattern books and homemade clothes. It was also a time of close economic planning, when rationing meant a limited range of clothes made, usually by women, from limited amounts of cloth. In an area of scholarship dominated by attention to consumption, Finnane presents a revisionist account focused instead on production. How to Make a Mao Suit provides a richly illustrated account of clothing that links the material culture of the Mao years to broader cultural and technological changes of the twentieth century.]
Finnane, Antonia and Anne McLaren, eds. Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999.
Garrett, Valery M. Chinese Clothing: An Illustrated Guide. HK: Oxford University Press, 1994.
—–. “The Cheung Sam–Its Rise and Fall.” Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society 29 (1995): 88-94.
Gerth, Karl. “Shanghai Fashion: Merchants and Business as Agents of Urban Vision.” In Sherman Cochran, David Strand, and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Cities in Motion. Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming.
—–. “Fabricating Modernity and Nationalism in Republican China.” In Lise Skov, ed., ReOrienting Fashion. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming.
Godley, Michael. “The End of the Queue: Hari as Symbol in Chinese History.” East Asian History 8 (Dec. 1994): 88-94.
Harrison, Henrietta. “Clothing and Power on the Periphery of Empire: The Costumes of the Indigenous People of Taiwan.” positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 331-60.
Hastie, Amelie. “Fashion, Femininity, and Historical Design: The Visual Texture of Three Hong Kong Films.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. Special issue on HK Cinema. 19, 1 (Fall 1999).
Huang, Martha. “‘A Woman Has So Many Parts to her Body, Life is Very Hard Indeed.'” In Steele, Valerie and John S. Major. China Chic: East Meets West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 133-39.
Hui, Calvin. The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible.]
Ip, Hung-Yok. “Fashioning Appearances: Feminine Beauty in Chinese Communist Revolutionary Culture.” Modern China 29, 3 (July 2003): 329-61.
[Abstract: Studying the Communist revolution, scholars of China have generally assumed that the revolutionary era and pre-Cultural Revolution stage of the Communist regime were dominated by asceticism, androgynous clothing, or both. This article seeks to demonstrate that an interest in female beauty was always present in the revolutionary process. The author analyzes how revolutionaries sustained that interest by employing self-beautification practices and women’s beauty politically and how social interactions reinforced the perception that female beauty was rewarding, underscoring that Communists accepted the practice of self-adornment. After examining the revolutionary aesthetics of femininity developed by women activists, the article briefly explores the legacy of female beauty in the Communist regime. In its conclusion, it urges that more attention be paid to interest in female beauty as an important part of female experience both during the revolutionary process and during the Communist regime.]
Jackson, Beverley. Shanghai Girl Gets All Dressed Up. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.
Johansson, Perry. “White Skin, Large Breasts: Chinese Beauty Product Advertising as Cultural Discourse.” China Information 13, 2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1998).
Ko, Dorothy. “Jazzing into Modernity: High Heels, Platforms, and Lotus Shoes.” In Steele, Valerie and John S. Major. China Chic: East Meets West. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999, 141-53.
—–. “Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory.” Fashion Theory 1, 1 (1997): 3-29.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Visual Evidence for the Evolution of ‘Politically Correct’ Dress for Women in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai.”Nan nu 5, 1 (2003): 69-114.
Lei, Guang. 2003. “Rural Taste, Urban Fashion: The Cultural Politics of Rural / Urban Difference in Contemporary China.” positions 11, 3 (Winter): 613-46.
Lei, Jun. “Natural Curves: Breast-Binding and Changing Aesthetics of the Female Body in China of the Early Twentieth Century.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, 1 (Spring 2015): 167-227.
Leung, Lisa. “Fashioning (Western) Sexuality for Sale: The Case of Sex and Fashion Articles in Cosmopolitan Hong Kong.” In Barbara Einhorn and Eileen Janes Yeo, eds., Women and Market Societies: Crisis and Opportunity. Aldershot, UK: E. Elgar, 1995, 96-113.
Ling, Wessie. “Chinese Clothes for Chinese Women: Fashioning the Qipao in 1930s China.” In Alisa de Witt-Paul and Mira Crouch, eds., Fashion Foward. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009.
Ling, Wessie and Simona Segre-Reinach, eds. Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape. London: I. B. Tauris. 2018.
[Abstract: Much has been written about the transformation of China from being a clothing-manufacturing site to a fast-rate fashion consuming society. Less, however, has been written on the process of making Chinese fashion. The expert contributors to Fashion in Multiple Chinas explore how the many Chinese fashions operate across the widespread, fragmented and diffused, Chinese diaspora. They confront the idea of Chinese nationalism as `one nation’, as well as of China as a single reality, in revealing the realities of Chinese fashion as diverse and comprising multiple practices. They also demonstrate how the making of Chinese fashion is composed of numerous layers, often involving a web of global entanglements between manufacturing and circulation, retailing and branding. They cover the mechanics of the PRC fashion industry, the creative economy of Chinese fashion, its retail and branding, and the cultural identity of Chinese fashion from the diasporas comprising the transglobal landscape of fashion production.]
Mao’s New Suit. Documentary film by Sally Ingleton. Singing Nomad Productions, 1997. [about two young Beijing fashion designers]
Ng, Chun Bong, et al., eds. Hong Kong Fashion History. HK: Committee on the Exhibition of Hong Kong Fashion History, 1992.
Niessen, Sandra, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones eds., Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. Oxford: Berg, 2003
Roberts, Claire, ed. Evolution and Revolution: Chinese Dress, 1770s-1990s. Sydney: The Powerhouse Museum, 1997.
Scott, A. C. Chinese Costume in Transition. Singapore: Donald Moore, 1958.
Skov, Lise. “Fashion Shows, Fashion Flows: The Asia Pacific Meets in Hong Kong.” In Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas eds., Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2004, 221-46.
—–. “Hong Kong Fashion Designers as Cultural Intermediaries: Out of Global Garment Production.” Cultural Studies 16, 4 (2002): 553-69.
—-. “Fashion-Nation: A Japanese Globalization Experience and a Hong Kong Dilemma.” In Sandra Niessen, A. M. Leshkowich, and C. Jones eds., Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. Oxford: Berg, 2003, 215-42.
—–. “Seeing is Believing: World Fashion and the Hong Kong Young Designers’ Contest.” Fasion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 8, 2 (2004).
Starr, Julie. Modified Bodies, Material Selves: Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Thin body, white skin, and big eyes. Such beauty ideals are ubiquitous across Shanghai, where salons and weight-loss clinics offering an array of products and treatment options beckon city dwellers with promises of a “better life.” Set against the backdrop of China’s post-reform era, Modified Bodies, Material Selves compares the radically different attitudes of middle-class Chinese and Western women living in Shanghai toward the pursuit of beauty. Through comparative ethnography, anthropologist Julie E. Starr parses how experiences of bodies and embodied identities, and the politics ascribed to them, are culturally produced for both groups of women. With a focus on the ways in which late capitalism interacts with different bodies, Starr joins an ongoing conversation about the impact of recent economic reforms on social life in China. Bringing together theories of embodiment, the politics of appearance, and the bodily nature of selfhood in the twenty-first century, Modified Bodies, Material Selves contributes fresh insights to current debates in anthropology, women’s and gender studies, and East Asian studies.]
Steele, Valerie and John S. Major. China Chic: East Meets West. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. [part I written by the authors, part II includes articles by others]
Sun, Lung-kee. “The Politics of Hair and the Issue of the Bob in Modern China.” Fashion Theory 1, 4 (1997): 353-65.
Szeto, Naomi Yin-yin. Dress in Hong Kong: A Century of Change and Customs. Hong Kong: Museum of History, 1992.
Turner, Matthew. Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity. HK: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995.
Wilson, Verity. “Dress and the Cultural Revolution.” In Steele, Valerie and John S. Major. China Chic: East Meets West. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999, 167-86.
Yee, Amy. “‘China Chic’: From Dragon Robes to Mao Suits.” New York Times (March 8, 1999).
Zamperini, Paola. “On Their Dress They Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai.” positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 301-30.
—–. “Making Fashion Work: Interview with Sophie Hong.” positions 11, 2 (Fall 2003): 511-20.
Zou, John. “Cross-Dressed Nation: Mei Lanfang and the Clothing of Modern Chinese Men.” In Martin and Larissa Heinrich, eds., Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006, 79-97.
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Dance
Ma, Nan. “Transmediating Kinesthesia: Wu Xiaobang and Modern Dance in China, 1929–1939.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 28, 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 129-173.
—–. When Words Are Inadequate: Modern Dance and Transnationalism in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: When Words are Inadequate is a transnational history of modern dance written from and beyond the perspective of China. Author Nan Ma extends the horizon of China studies by rewriting the cultural history of modern China from a bodily movement-based perspective through the lens of dance modernism. The book examines the careers and choreographies of four Chinese modern dance pioneers–Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda–and their connections to canonical Western counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. Tracing these Chinese pioneers’ varied experiences in Paris, Tokyo, Trinidad, London, New York, and China’s metropolises and borderlands, the book shows how their contributions adapted and reimagined the legacies of early Euro-American modern dance. In doing so, When Words are Inadequate reinserts China into the multi-centered, transnational network of artistic exchange that fostered the global rise of modern dance, further complicating the binary conceptions of center and periphery and East and West. By exploring the relationships between performance and representation, choreography and politics, and nation-building and global modernism, it situates modern dance within an intermedial circuit of literary and artistic forms, demonstrating how modern dance provided a kinesthetic alternative and complements to other sibling arts in participating in China’s successive revolutions, reforms, wars, and political movements.]
Mezur, Katherine and Emily Wilcox, eds. Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020.
Wilcox, Emily. “Dancers Doing Fieldwork: Socialist Aesthetics and Bodily Experience in the People’s Republic of China.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 17, 2 (2012).
—–. “Han-Tang Zhongguo Gudianwu and the Problem of Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Dance: Sixty Years of Controversy.” Asian Theater Journal. 29, 1 (2012): 206-232.
—–. “Meaning in Movement: Adaptation and the Xiqu Body in Intercultural Chinese Theatre.” TDR: The Drama Review 58, 1 (T221) (Spring 2014): 42-63.
—–. “Beyond Internal Orientalism: Dance and Nationality Discourse in the Early People’s Republic of China, 1949-1954.” The Journal of Asian Studies 75, 2 (May 2016): 363-386.
—–. “Performing Bandung: China’s Dance Diplomacy with India, Indonesia, and Burma, 1953-1962.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 18, 4 (2017): 518-539
—–. “Dynamic Inheritance: Representative Works and the Authoring of Tradition in Chinese Dance.” Journal of Folklore Research 55, 1 (2018): 77-111.
—–. “The Postcolonial Blind Spot: Chinese Dance in the Era of Third World-ism, 1949-1965.” positions: asia critique 26, 4 (Nov. 2018): 781-816.
—–. Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.
[Abstract: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.]
—–. “Dynamic Inheritance: Representative Works and the Authoring of Tradition in Chinese Dance.” In Levi Gibbs, ed., Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020.
—–. “When Folk Dance Was Radical: Cold War Yangge, World Youth Festivals, and Overseas Chinese Leftist Culture in the 1950s and 1960s.” China Perspectives 1 (2020): 33-42.
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Advertising/Commercial and Consumer Culture
Anderson, Michael. Madison Avenue in Asia: Politics and Transnational Advertising. London; Toronto: Associated University Press, 1984.
Arman, Cecile. “The Grapes of Happiness: Selling Sun-Maid Raisins to the Chinese in the 1920s-1930s.” Asia Pacific Perspectives 13, 2 (Fall/Winter 2015-16).
Arnold, Julean. “Advertising American Goods in China.” In Arnold, Commercial Handbook of China. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920.
Asian Television Commercials (Windows on Asia Pacific series). Films for the Humanities and Science, 1997.
Bacon, C.A. “Advertising in China.” Chinese Economic Journal 5, 3 (June 8, 1918): 756-58.
Benson, Carlton. “Consumers Are Also Soldiers.” In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. NY: Cornell UP, 1999.
Boretti, Valentina. “Small Things of Great Importance: Toy Advertising in China, 1910s-1930s.” Asia Pacific Perspectives 13, 2 (Fall/Winter 2015-16).
Carlile, Lonny E. “The Yaohan Group: Model or Maverick among Japanese Retailers in China?” In Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 233-52.
Chan, K. K. “Information Content of Television Advertising in China.” International Journal of Advertising 14 (1995): 365-373.
Chan, Kara and James U. McNeal. Advertising to Children in China. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2004.
Chan, Wellington K.K. “Selling Goods and Promoting a New Commercial Culture: The Four Premier Department Stores on Nanjing Road, 1917-1937.” In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commerical Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 19-36.
—–. “Personal Styles, Cultural Values, and Management: The Sincere and Wing On Companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1900-1941.” In Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 66-89.
Chao, Linda and Ramon H. Meyers. “China’s Consumer Revolution: The 1990s and Beyond.” Journal of Contemporary China 7 (18) (1998): 351-68.
Chen, Jing. “The State of the Archive: Research Resources for Advertising Studies in Mainland China.” Asia Pacific Perspectives 13, 2 (Fall/Winter 2015-16).
Chen Pei’ai 陈培爱. Zhongwai guanggao shi: zhan zai dangdai shijiaode quanmian huigu 中外广告史: 站在当代视角的全面回顾 (History of advertising in China and abroad: a total reflection from the corner of the present). Beijing: Zhongguo wujia, 1997.
Cheng, Hong. “Toward an Understanding of Cultural Values manifest in Advertising: A Content Analysis of Chinese Television Commercials in 1990 and 1995.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (1998): 773-796.
—–. “Advertising in China: A Socialist Experiment.” In Katherine Toland Frith, ed., Advertising in Asia: Communication, Culture and Consumption. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1996, 73-102.
Cheng, Hong and Schweitzer, J.C. “Cultural Values Reflected in Chinese and U.S. Television Commercials.” Journal of Advertising Research 36 (1996): 27-46.
Cheng, Hong and Katherine T. Frith. “Foreign Advertising Agencies in China.” Media Asia 23 (1996): 34-41.
China’s Public Advertising Culture (Transnational China Project, Rice University)
Cochran, Sherman, ed. Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999.
—–. “Transnational Origins of Advertising in Early Twentieth Century China.” In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 37-58.
—–. “Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945: Imported or Invented? Cut Short or Sustained?” In Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 3-18.
—–. “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900-1950.” In Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 62-97.
—–. Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
“Contemporary Advertising.” In Patricia Ebrey, preparer, Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization.[online project]
Contemporary Consumer Culture: Beijing and Shanghai Metropolitan Subway Advertisements (Transnational China Project: Curriculum Materials Image Archive, Rice University).
Dal Lago, Francesca. “Crossed Legs in 1930s Shanghai: How ‘Modern’ the Modern Woman?” East Asian History 19 (June 2000): 103-44.
Deco Orient: Vintage Chinese Posters [excellent site; contains short essays on the history of Chinese posters, with an emphasis on Republican period calendar posters, as well as galleries of posters; galleries of the following artists: Ni Gengye, Hu Boxiang, Jin Meisheng, Zhang Mantuo, Zhiying Studio, Zhou Baisheng, Wu Zhili, Liang Dingming, Chen Shiqing, Xie Zhiguang, Ding Yunxian, Ting Kang, Tang Mingsheng, Lin Da, Yuan Xiutang, and others]
Doctoroff, Tom. Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer. NY: Palgrave, 2005. [publisher’s blurb]
Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk and Yi Zheng.” Post-Mao, Post-Bourdieu: Class Culture in Contemporary China.” special issue of Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary Internationa Studies 6, 2 (July 2008). [with essays by Hai Rne, Pal Nyiri, and Luigi Tomba]
Field, Andrew David. Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. HK: Chinese UP, 2010.
[Abstract: Drawing upon a unique and untapped reservoir of newspapers, magazines, novels, government documents, photographs and illustrations, this book traces the origin, pinnacle, and ultimate demise of a commercial dance industry in Shanghai between the end of the First World War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Delving deep into the world of cabarets, nightclubs, and elite ballrooms that arose in the city in the 1920s and peaked in the 1930s, the book assesses how and why Chinese society incorporated and transformed this westernized world of leisure and entertainment to suit its own tastes and interests. Focusing on the jazz-age nightlife of the city in its “golden age,” the book examines issues of colonialism and modernity, urban space, sociability and sexuality, and modern Chinese national identity formation in a tumultuous era of war and revolution.]
Ferry, Megan. “Advertising, Consumerism and Nostalgia for the New Woman in Contemporary China.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17, 3 (2003): 277-90.
Fraser, David. “Inventing Oasis: Luxury Housing Advertisements and Reconfiguring Domestic Space in Shanghai.” In Deborah Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 25-53.
Frith, Katherine Toland, ed., Advertising in Asia: Communication, Culture and Consumption. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1996.
Gerth, Karl. “Consumption as Resistance: The National Products Movement and Anti-Japanese Boycotts in Modern China.” In Harold Fuess, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asian and Its Postwar Legacy. Munich: iudicium, 1998, 119-42.
—–. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
—–. As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything. NY: Hill and Wang, 2010.
[Abstract: In this revelatory examination of the most overlooked force that is changing the face of China, . . . Karl Gerth shows that as the Chinese consumer goes, so goes the world. While Americans and Europeans have become increasingly worried about China’s competition for manufacturing jobs and energy resources, they have overlooked an even bigger story: China’s rapid development of an American-style consumer culture, which is revolutionizing the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese and has the potential to reshape the world. This change is already well under way. China has become the world’s largest consumer of everything from automobiles to beer and has begun to adopt such consumer habits as living in large single-occupancy homes, shopping in gigantic malls, and eating meat-based diets served in fast-food outlets. Even rural Chinese, long the laggards of consumerism, have been buying refrigerators, televisions, mobile phones, and larger houses in unprecedented numbers. As China Goes, So Goes the World reveals why we should all care about the everyday choices made by ordinary Chinese. Taken together, these seemingly small changes are deeper and more profound than the headline-grabbing stories on military budgets, carbon emissions, or trade disputes.]
Griffiths, Michael B. Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing out, Fitting in. London: Routledge, 2012.
[Abstract: Breaking new ground in the study of Chinese urban society, this book applies critical discourse analysis to ethnographic data gathered in Anshan, a third-tier city and market in northeast China. The book confronts the – still widespread – notion that Chinese consumers are not “real” individuals, and in doing so represents an ambitious attempt to give a new twist to the structure versus agency debates in social theory. To this end, Michael B. Griffiths shows how authenticity, knowledge, civil behavior, sociable character, moral propriety and self-cultivation emerge from and give shape to social interaction. Data material for this path-breaking analysis is drawn from informants as diverse as consumerist youths, dissident intellectuals, enterprising farmers, retired Party cadres, the rural migrant staff of an inner-city restaurant, the urban families dependent on a machine-repair workshop, and a range of white-collar professionals. Consumers and Individuals in China: Standing out, Fitting in, will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, China Studies generalists, and professionals working at the intersection of culture and business in China. The vivid descriptions of living and doing fieldwork in China also mean that those travelling there will find the book stimulating and useful.]
Guo, Hongchi and Liu Fei. “New China’s Flagship Emporium: The Beijing Wangfujing Department Store.” In Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 114-38.
Hay, Jonathan. “Notes on Chinese Photography and Advertising in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” In Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s-1930s. Washington, DC: New Academia, 2007.
Hooper, Beverly. “Consumer Voices: Asserting Rights in Post-Mao China.” China Information 14, 2 (2000).
Huang Zhiwei 黄志伟 and Huang Bao 黄莹, eds. Wei shiji daiyan: Zhongguo jindai guanggao 为世纪代言: 中国近代广告 (Speaking for the century: modern Chinese advertising). Shanghai: Shanghai shiji, 2004.
Johansson, Perry. “Consuming the Other: the Fetish of the Western Woman in Chinese Advertising and Popular Culture.” Postcolonial Studies 2, 3 (1999): 377-388.
Keane, Michael. Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward. Routledge 2007.
Latham, Kevin and Stuart Thompson, eds. Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China. London: Curzon, 2004.
—–. “Rethinking Chinese Consumption: Social Palliatives and the Rhetorics of Transition in Postsocialist China.” In C. M. Hann, ed., Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Euroasia. London and NY: Routledge, 2002, 217-37.
Lei, Guang. “Rural Taste, Urban Fashion: The Cultural Politics of Rural / Urban Difference in Contemporary China.” positions east asia cultures critique 11, 3 (Winter 2003): 613-46.
—–. “The Market as Social Convention: Rural Migrants and the Making of China’s Home Renovation Market.” Critical Asian Studies 37, 3 (Sept. 2005).
Li Conghua. China: The Consumer Revolution. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998.
Li, Hongmei. Advertising and Consumer Culture in China. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016.
[Abstract: This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Chinese advertising as an industry, a discourse and profession in China’s search for modernity and cultural globalization. It compares and contrasts the advertising practices of Chinese advertising agencies and foreign advertising agencies, and Chinese brands and foreign brands, with a particular focus on the newest digital advertising practices in the post WTO era.Based on extensive interviews, participant observation, and a critical analysis of secondary data, Li offers an engaging analysis of the transformation of Chinese advertising in the past three decades in Post-Mao China. Drawing upon theories of political economy, media, and cultural studies, her analysis offers most significant insights in advertising and consumer culture as well as the economic, social, political, and cultural transformations in China. The book is essential for students and scholars of communication, media, cultural studies and international business, and all those interested in cultural globalization and China.]
Lu, Hanchao. “Away from Nanking Road: Small Stores and Neighborhood Life in Modern Shanghai.” Journal of Asian Studies 53, 4 (Nov. 1994): 93-122.
—–. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: UCP, 1999.
Ma, Eric Kit-Wai. “Re-Advertising Hong Kong: Nostalgia Industry and Popular History.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 131-60.
MacPherson, Kerrie L., ed. Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
Mittler, Barbara. “Imagined Communities Divided: Reading Visual Regimes in Shanghai’s Newspaper Advertising (1860s-1910).” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 267-78.
Notar, Beth. “Of Labor and Liberation: Images of Women in Current Chinese Television Advertising.” Visual Anthropology Review 10, 2 (1994).
Outdoor Political Advertising and Public Service Announcements in Shanghai (Transnational China Project: Curriculum Materials Image Archive, Rice University)
Outdoor Commerical Advertisements in China: Shanghai, 1997-1998 (Transnational China Project: Curriculum Materials Image Archive, Rice University)
The People’s Republic of China Consumer Attitudes and Lifestyle Trends: 1997 Survey. Gallop Poll.
Sanger, J.W. Advertising Methods in Japan, China, and the Phillipines. US Depart of Commerce, Special Agents Series no. 209. Washington, DC, 1921.
Schein, Lousa. “Urbanity, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption.” In Nancy Chen, et al, eds., China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
So, Stella L.M. “Advertising in China.” Access China 23 (Oct. 1996): 13-17.
Stross, Randall. “The Return of Advertising in China: A Survey of the Ideological Reversal.” China Quarterly 123 (Sept. 1990): 485-502.
Tan, Tina. “Why Are Chinese Not Buying Chinese Brands? The Notion of Chinese Nationalism in the Discourse on Chinese Consumerism.” Asia Pacific Perspectives 13, 2 (Fall/Winter 2015-16).
Tsai, Weipin. “Having It All: Patriotism and Gracious Living in Shenbao‘s Tobacco Advertisements, 1919 to 1937.” In Peter Zarrow, ed., Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900-1940. NY: Peter Lang, 2007, 117-46.
Tsao, James. “Advertising in Taiwan: Sociopolitical Changes and Multinational Impact.” In Katherine Toland Frith, ed., Advertising in Asia: Communication, Culture and Consumption. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1996, 103-24.
Tse, David, Russell Belk, and Nan Zhou. “Becoming a Consumer Society: A Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of Print Advertisements from Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (4, March 1989): 457-472.
Wang, Jian. Foreign Advertising in China: Becoming Global, Becoming Local. Ames: Iowa State UP, 2000.
Wang, Jian. “Export of Culture or Coproduction of Culture: Vignettes from the Creative Process at a Global Advertising Affiliate, Beijing.” In Georgette Wang, Jan Sevaes, and Anura Goonasekera, eds., The New Communications Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization. London: Routledge, 2000, 160-73.
Wang, Jing. “Framing Chinese Advertising: Some Industry Perspectives on the Production of Culture.” MIT International Committee of Critical Policy Studies of China.
—–. “Bourgeois Bohemians in China? Neo-Tribes and the Urban Imaginary.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 532-548.
—–. China Brand New: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.
Wong, Heung Wah. “From Japanese Supermarket to Hong Kong Department Store.” In Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 253-81.
Wong, Wendy. “Construction of Ideal Childhood: Reading and Decoding Television Advertisement Directed at Children in Hong Kong.” Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin 7 (Spring 1997): 75-84.
Wu, Jen-Shu and Ling-Ling Lien. “From Viewing to Reading: The Evolution of Visual Advertising in Late Imperial China.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 231-66.
Wu, Yanrui. China’s Consumer Revolution: The Emerging Patterns of Wealth and Expenditure. London: Edward Elgar, 1998.
Xu, Bai Yi. Marketing to China: One Billion New Customers. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, 1991.
Yi Bi, Liu Yuning, and Gan Zhenhu, eds. Lao Shanghai guanggao (Advertisements of old Shanghai). Shanghai: Xinhua shudian, 1995.
Yen, Ching-hwang. “Wing On and the Kwok Brothers: A Case Study of Pre-War Chinese Entrepreneurs.” In Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 47-65.
Young, John D. “Sun Yatsen and the Department Store: An Aspect of National Reconstruction.” In Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, 33-46.
Zhang, Jing and Sharon Shavitt. “Cultural Values in Advertisements to the Chinese X-Generation: Promoting Modernity and Individualism.” Journal of Advertising 32, 1 (2003): 23-33.
Zhang, Zhen. “Mediating Time: The ‘Rice Bowl of Youth’ in Fin-de-siecle Urban China.” In Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization. Durham: Duke UP, 2001, 131-54.
Zhongguo guanggao wang 中国广告网 (China Advertising network).
Zhou, Nan and Russell Belk. “China’s Advertising and the Export Marketing Learning Curve: The First Decade.” Journal of Advertising Research 33, 6 (Nov.1993): 50-66.
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Electronic Art
A-kuei.com [Taiwan animation site]
Flash Empire Interface [PRC flash art site]
Flash Works Appreciation [Flash zuopin xinshang]
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Museum Studies, Exhibitionary Culture, Historical Memory, Heritage
Allen, Joseph R. “Exhibiting the Colony, Suggesting the Nation: The Taiwan Exposition, 1935.” Paper presented at MLA 2005.
—–. “Taipei Park: Signs of Occupation.” Journal of Asian Studies 67, 1 (Feb. 2007): 159-199. [a section of this essay deals with the Taiwan National Museum, situated in Taipei Park]
—–. Taipei: City of Displacements. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.
[Abstract: This cultural study of public space examines the cityscape of Taipei, Taiwan, in rich descriptive prose. Contemplating a series of seemingly banal subjects — maps, public art, parks — Allen peels back layers of obscured history to reveal forces that caused cultural objects to be celebrated, despised, destroyed, or transformed as Taipei experienced successive regime changes and waves of displacement. In this thoughtful stroll through the city, we learn to look beyond surface ephemera, moving from the general to the particular, to see sociocultural phenomena in their historical and contemporary contexts.]
Amae, Yoshihisa. “Pro-colonial or Postcolonial? Appropriations of Japanese Colonial Heritage in Present-day Taiwan.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 40, 1 (2011): 19-62.
An, Laishun. “An Historical Approach to Museums’ Roles in China.” Lecture for Reinwardt Academie (Sept. 29,1999).
Anagnost, Ann. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durhan: Duke UP, 1997. [pages 161-67 deal with the Shenzhen Splendid China theme park]
Asia at the World’s Fairs [curated by Catherine Vance Yeh and others at Boston University]
Ba Jin 巴金. “Wenge bowuguan” 文革博物馆 (A Cultural Revolution museum). In Ba Jin zawen zixuanji 巴金杂文自选集 (Ba Jin’s self-selected zawen). Tianjin: Baihua wenyi, 1996, 287-90. English translation available at Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution.
Balachandran, Sanchita. 2007. “Object Lessons: The Politics of Preservation and Museum Building in Western China in the Early Twentieth Century.” International Journal of Cultural Property 14, 1 (Feb.): 1-32.
Barber, Lachlan B. “Unsettling the Familiar: Hong Kong’s Colonial Policing Heritage.” In Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers, eds., Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 83-102.
Beijing bowuguan nianjian 北京博物馆年鉴 (Yearbook of Beijing museums). Beijing: Yanshan. [four volumes: 1912-1987; 1988-1991; 1992-1994; 1994-1998].
Billiter, Térence. L’empereur jaune: Une tradition politique chinoise. Paris: Les indes savantes, 2007.
Blumenfield, Tami. “Recognition and Misrecognition: The Politics of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Southwest China.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 169-94.
Blumenfield, Tami and Helaine Silverman, eds. Cultural Heritage Politics in China. NY: Springer, 2013.
[Abstract: This volume explores China’s cultural heritage ideology and policies from three interrelated perspectives: the State and World Heritage tourism; cultural heritage tourism at sites not designated through an international system; and the cultural politics of museums and collections . It also considers the broader implications of China as a heritage power as the nation mobilizes routes beyond its borders as essential components of its own patrimony. The volume is timely because a cultural heritage designation craze is underway in China. Officials at many levels now see heritage preservation as a means for commoditizing and developing their regions. They are devoting new resources and attention to national and international heritage designations, but contradictions and complications in the actual practices of designating and protecting heritage abound . Thus, addressing cultural heritage politics in a nation dedicated to designation is an important project, particularly in the context of a rapidly growing economy increasingly interested in asserting its cultural power beyond its borders. ]
Bowuguan xue jikan 博物館學季刊 (Museum studies quarterly) [academic journal published by the National Museum of Natural History in Taichung, Taiwan; the entire run available in pdf format]
Bowuguan yu wenhua 博物館與文化 (Journal of museums and culture). [Official journal of the Republic of China Museum Association, Taiwan]
Branigan, Tania. Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution. Norton, 2023.
[Abstract: An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens. “It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?]
Brooks, Tony. “Angry States: Chinese Views of Japan as Seen through the Unit 731 War Museum since 1949.” In Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, eds., Remembering Asia’s World War Two. London: Routledge, 2019, 27-55.
Callahan, William A. China: The Pessoptimist Nation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
Cao Bingwu 曹兵武. Jiyi xianchang yu wenhua diantang: women shidai de bowuguan 记忆现场与文化殿堂: 我们的时代的博物馆 (Sites of memory and cultural palaces: the museum in our era). Beijing: Xueyuan, 2005.
Cao Bingwu 曹兵武 and Cui Bo 崔波, eds. Bowuguan zhanlan: cehua sheji yu shishi 博物馆展览策划设计与实施 (Museum exhibitions: planning, design, and implementation). Beijing: Xueyuan, 2005.
Cao Bingwu 曹兵武 and Li Wenchang 李文昌, eds. Bowuguan guancha: bowuguan zhanshi xuanchuan yu shehui fuwu gongzuo diaocha yanjiu 博物馆观察: 博物馆展示宣传与社会服务工作调查研究 (Investigation of museums: survey research into museum display propaganda and social service work). Beijing: Xueyuan, 2005.
Carroll, John M. “Displaying the Past to Serve the Present: Museums and Heritage Preservation in Post-Colonial Hong Kong.” Twentieth Century China 31, 1 (Nov. 2005).
Catching, Rebecca. “Great Leap Forward 2.0–Internet + and the Rapid Integration of Digital Technology in Chinese Museums.” RebeccaCatching.com.
—–. “One Country, Two Systems: A Hegemonic History of Public and Private Museums in China.” Yishu 18, 4 (July-Aug. 2019): 6-11.
Chan, Selina Ching. “Memory Making, Identity Building: The Dynamics of Economics and Politics in the New Territories of Hong Kong.” China Information 17, 1 (2003): 66-91.
—–. “Heritagizing the Chaozhou Hungry Ghosts Festival in Hong Kong.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 145-68.
Chang, Jui-te. “The Politics of Commemoration: A Comparative Analysis of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Commemoration in Mainland China and Taiwan of the Victory in the Anti-Japanese War.” In Diana Lary and Steve McKinnon, eds. Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2001, 136-60.
Chang, Sheng-lin. Memorial Space and Commemorative Behavior: A Case Study of the 2/28 Massacre Memorials in Taiwan. MA thesis. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1994.
Chang, Susan Shih and Jeremy Huai-Che Chiang. “Review of the Exhibition Oppression and Overcoming: Social Movements in Post-War Taiwan, National Museum of Taiwan History, 28 May 2019–17 May 2020.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 3, 2 (2020): 343-61.
[Abstract: This review article looks at “Oppression and Overcoming: Social Movements in Post- War Taiwan” (2019.5.28–2020.5.17), an exhibition at the National Museum of Taiwan History (nthm) through approaches of museum studies and social movement studies, and aims to understand its implication for doing Taiwan Studies. This review con- cludes that “Oppression and Overcoming” is significant as a novel museological prac- tice by being part of a continuation of social movements, which transformed the mu- seum to a space for civil participation and dialogue. This allows the exhibition to become a window for both citizens and foreigners to understand and realize Taiwan’s vibrant democracy and civil society. In addition, this review suggests that future exhibitions on social movements could demonstrate the possibility to position Taiwan in a global context to better connect with other countries in the Asian region.]
Chang, Vincent K. L. “Recalling Victory, Recounting Greatness: Second World War Remembrance in Xi Jinping’s China.” The China Quarterly 248 (Dec. 2021): 1152-73.
—–. “Exemplifying National Unity and Victory in Local State Museums: Chongqing and the New Paradigm of World War II Memory in China.” Journal of Contemporary China 31/138 (2022): 977-92.
Chang, Wan-chen. “A Cross-cultural Perspective on Musealization: The Museum’s Reception by China and Japan in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Museum and Society 10, n. 1 (2012): 15-27.
Chang, Yui-tan. “Cultural Policies and Museum Development in Taiwan.” Museum International 58, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 64-68.
Cheater, A. P. “Death Ritual as Political Trickster in the People’s Republic of China.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 26 (July 1991): 67-97.
Chen Jiali 陳佳利. Bei zhanshi de shangkou: jiyi yu chuangshang de bowuguan 被展示的傷口: 記憶與創傷的博物館 (Wounds on display: notes on memory and trauma in museums). Taipei: Diancang yishu jiating gufeng youxian gongsi, 2007.
—–. [Chia-li Chen]. “Museums and the Shaping of Cultural Identities: Visitors’ Recollections in Local Museums in Taiwan.” In Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, eds., Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed. London: Routledge, 2007, 173–188.
Chen, Lingchei Letty. The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]
China Heritage Quarterly [previously China Heritage Newsletter, edited by Bruce G. Doar and Geremie R. Barmé. It is an up-to-date publication covering recent developments and scholarship in all major areas related to China’s heritage. Its contents are based on a continuous assessment and collation of the latest archaeological finds, conferences, exhibitions, publications and media debates, both in Chinese and other relevant languages.]
“China’s First World Fair.” American Review of Reviews 41 (June 1910).
Chinese Museums Association (中国博物馆协会). Beijing.
Cho, Sungmin and Jennie Jin. “The Politics of Bones: The Political Motives behind the Repatriation of Remains of Chinese Soldiers Killed during the Korean War.” The China Journal 87, 1 (2021).
[Abstract: Between 2014 and 2020, China brought back from South Korea 716 sets of remains of Chinese soldiers who had died in the Korean War (1950–53). Why did the Chinese government decide to repatriate the remains of fallen soldiers only after so many years had passed? What are Beijing’s political motivations? We argue that the Chinese Communist Party utilizes the repa- triation of war remains as a propaganda opportunity to appeal to veterans and to boost military morale and nationalistic support of the Party. Our study investigates the first cases of repatri- ating war dead from Myanmar in 2011 and traces policy developments since the establishment of the Ministry of Veterans Affairs in 2018. Our findings enhance understanding of the chang- ing relationship between the Communist Party and vital constituencies in China.]
Chu, Chi-Jung. “Political China and the National Museum in Taiwan.” In Simon J. Knell et al., eds., National Museums: New Views from Around the World. London: Routledge, 2011, 180-92.
Chun, Allen. “The Culture Industry as National Enterprise: The Politics of Heritage in Contemporary Taiwan.” In Virginia R. Dominguez and David Y. H. Wu, eds., From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998, 77-113.
Chun, Dongho. “The Battle of Representations: Gazing of the Peace Monument or Comfort Women Statue.” positions: asia critique 28, 2 (May 2020): 363-88.
Claypool, Lisa. “Zhang Jian and China’s First Museum.” Journal of Asian Studies 64, 3 (Aug. 2005): 567-604.
—–. “Ways of Seeing the Nation: Chinese Painting in the National Essence Journal (1905-1911) and Exhibition Culture.” positions: east asia cultures critique 19, 1 (Spring 2010): 55-82.
Clayton, Cathryn Hope. “City of Museums: Reflections on Exhibiting Macao.” Review of Culture (International Edition) 5 (2003): 98–125.
Cliff, Tom and Wang Kan. “Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival? Imagined and Transient Political Groups in Urban China.” In Tom Cliff, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Wei Shuge, eds., The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, 29-55. [on the Migrant Workers Cultural Arts Museum, Picun, Beijing]
Coble, Parks M. “China’s ‘New Remembering’ of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, 1937–1945.” The China Quarterly 190 (June 2007): 394-410.
Coderre, Laurence. “The Curator, the Inventor, and the Dupe: Consumer Desire and Chinese Cultural Revolution Memorabilia.” Journal of Material Culture 21, 4 (2016): 429-47.
Cohen, Paul. A. “Remembering and Forgetting: National Humiliation in Twentieth-Century China.” Twentieth-Century China 27, 2 (April, 2002): 1-39.
Constantine, Eleni. “Mao’s Mausoleum Echoes JFK Center.” Progressive Architecture 60 (May 1979): 30-32.
Cooke, Susette. “Telling Stories in a Borderland: The Evolving Life of Ma Bufang’s Official Residence.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amserterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 41-66.
Council for Cultural Affairs. Culture Museums: An Introduction to the Specialized Museums of Taiwan’s Counties and Cites. Taipei: Council for Cultural Affairs, Executive Yuan, 2001.
Dangdai Zhongguo de bowuguan shiye 当代中国的博物馆事业 (The enterprise of contemporary Chinese museums). Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo, 1998.
Davies, David J. “Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Warriors and Commemorating the Cultural State.” In Marc Andre Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 17-50.
Davis, Peter. “Ecomuseums and Sustainability in Italy, Japan and China: Concept Adaptation through Implementation.” In Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, eds., Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed. London: Routledge, 2007, 198–214.
Demgenski, Philipp. Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.
[Abstract: Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in, shaping, and being shaped by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials— and particularly foregrounds the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.]
Denton, Kirk A. “Visual Memory and the Construction of a Revolutionary Past: Paintings from the Museum of the Chinese Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 203-35.
—–. “Museums, Memorial Sites and Exhibitionary Culture in the People’s Republic of China.” The China Quarterly 183 (Fall 2005): 565-86.
—–. “Horror and Atrocity: Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums.” In Guobin Yang and Ching Kwan Lee, eds. Reinvisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China. Washington: Wilson Center Press, 2007, 245-86. Rpt. as “Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums.” Japan Focus no. 2547 (October 2007).
—–. “Yan’an as a Site of Memory in Socialist and Postsocialist China.” In Marc Andre Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 233-81.
—–. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Joseph R. Allen]
[Abstract: During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs, to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades]
—–. “China Dreams and the ‘Road to Revival.'” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective 8, 3 (Dec. 2014).
—–. “Multicultural History in a Multiparty Taiwan: The National Museum of Taiwan History.” In Denton, ed., Crossing between Tradition and Modernity: Essays in Commemoration of Milena Doleželová-Velingerová (1932-2012). Prague: Karolinum, 2016, 203-222.
—–. “Chinese Red Tourism.” China Policy Institute: Analysis (Nov. 13, 2017).
—–. “Can Private Museums Offer Space for Alternative History? The Red Era Series at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster.” In Sebastian Veg, ed., Popular Memories of the Mao Era: From Critical Debate to Reassessing History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019, 80-111.
—–. “The Jianchuan Museum: The Politics of War Memory in a Private Chinese Museum.” In Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, ed., Remembering Asia’s World War Two. London: Routledge, 2019, 72-106.
[Abstract: Denton’s chapter examines where the distinctive trajectories of the remembrance of World War Two in Asia might be headed in the future. In focusing on the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren, Sichuan, he explores whether private museums in the People’s Republic of China have leeway to present historical memories which are “alternative” to official state memory. He first describes the concept of the “cluster” – that is, the bringing together a variety of museums on a variety of subjects into a single complex – and how it can open up space for new kinds of historical memory. He then turns to the war series of museums at the complex and analyzes how their representation of the war period both overlaps with and diverges from state memory. This chapter concerns itself with the negotiation that takes place between the state’s efforts to define and control public history, the curatorial desire to present history in a fresh light, and the commercial concerns of a private museum.]
—–. The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Cultural in Post-Martial Law Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2021. [MCLC Resource Center review by James Flath]
[Abstract: explores the place of museums and memorial culture in the contestation over historical memory in post–martial law Taiwan. The book is particularly oriented toward the role of politics—especially political parties—in the establishment, administration, architectural design, and historical narratives of museums. It is framed around the wrangling between the “blue camp” (the Nationalist Party, or KMT, and its supporters) and the “green camp” (Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, and its supporters) over what facets of the past should be remembered and how they should be displayed in museums. Organized into chapters focused on particular types of museums and memorial spaces (such as archaeology museums, history museums, martyrs’ shrines, war museums, memorial halls, literature museums, ethnology museums, and ecomuseums), the book presents a broad overview of the state of museums in Taiwan in the past three decades. The case of Taiwan museums tells us much about Cold War politics and its legacy in East Asia; the role of culture, history, and memory in shaping identities in the “postcolonial” landscape of Taiwan; the politics of historical memory in an emergent democracy, especially in counterpoint to the politics of museums in the People’s Republic of China, which continues to be an authoritarian single party state; and the place of museums in a neoliberal economic climate.]
—–. “Modern Literature Museums and Archives.” In Jack Chen et al. eds., Literary Information in China: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021, 447-55.
—–. “The Senses in Recent Exhibitionary Practice in Chinese History Museums.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. NY: Routledge, 2022, 250-75.
—– and Yichun Xu. “Lu Town: Theme Parks and the Commodification of Literary Culture in China.” Cultural History 11, 2 (Oct. 2022): 148-80.
[Abstract: This essay investigates Lu Town, a theme park dedicated to the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) that was established in Shaoxing, China, in 2003. The theme park is a recreation of a fictional town that is an amalgamation of settings from some of Lu Xun’s short stories. The essay seeks to answer the following questions: What happens when the works of a complex and serious writer get popularized in the three-dimensional form of a themed space? Why would one build a theme park around this kind of writer, and how would you capture in a theme park the trenchant critique of rural or small-town social life and traditions in his works? What meanings are invested in this ‘leftist’ writer in a neoliberal ideological climate in which notions of class exploitation and class struggle have all but disappeared? In the process the essay presents a detailed description of the park, based on visits in 2004 and 2018, and an overview of recent changes undertaken to make the park more profitable in the competitive domestic tourist market. The authors argue that Lu Town, driven by commercial concerns, presents a positive, nostalgic representation of small-town Jiangnan life, one that is starkly at odds with the ironic and sardonic attitude Lu Xun often took towards it in his stories.]
Deppman, Formosa. “Exhibiting Text as a Spatial Object in the Beijing Lu Xun Museum.” The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal 2, 1 (2021).
Elliott, Jeannette Shambaugh, with David Shambaugh. The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.
Evans, Harriet and Michael Rowlands. “Reconceptualizing Heritage in China: Museums, Development and Shifting Dynamics of Power.” In Paul Basu and Wayne Modest, eds., Museums, Heritage and International Development. New York: Routledge, 2014, 272-94.
Evans, Harriet and Michael Rowlands, eds. Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.
Fernsebner, Susan R. Material Modernities: China’s Participation in World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1876-1955. Ph. D. diss. San Diego: University of California, San Diego, 2002.
—–. “Objects, Spectacle, and a Nation on Display at the Nanyang Exposition of 1910.” Late Imperial China 27, 2 (Jan. 2007): 88-124.
—–. “Expo 2010: A Historical Perspective.” Journal of Asian Studies 69, 3 (2010): 669-676.
[Abstract: A remodeled city awaits Shanghai’s visitors this summer. As always, tourists will crowd the famous Bund and enjoy the classic architecture erected by the International Settlement’s foreign powers during an earlier day of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Recently, Shanghai’s city planners have undertaken a major project in remodeling the urban landscape that surrounds the Bund, with its old Hong Kong and Shanghai banks, Custom House, and grand hotels built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, planners have effectively transformed this waterfront symbol of China’s former semicolonial status into a breezy park, sightseeing plaza, and high-end shopping district, all rolled into one. The classic architecture of the treaty port era has become the backdrop for a new day’s consumerism, perfectly suited to the Chinese state’s own celebration of the successes of a reform economy.]
—–. “Contextualizing the Visual (and Virtual) Realities of Expo 2010.” In James B. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson and Sigrid Schmalzer, eds., Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-present. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Politics of Cultural Heritage.” In Ching Kwan Lee and You-Tien Hsing, eds., Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism. London: Routledge, 2010, 225-45.
—–. “Bury Me With My Comrades: Memorializing Mao’s Sent-Down Youth.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 16, 14, 4 (July 15, 2018).
[Abstract: Over the last decade or so, China has seen an unprecedented building boom of museums and memorials. One curious new genre is the museums for Mao-era “Cultural Revolution” youth “sent down” to the countryside by Mao during the 1960s and 1970s. After Mao’s death, they struggled to return to the cities. Surviving returnees have recently established several museums commemorating their suffering and sacrifice, even though the topic is politically fraught and the period’s history is strictly censored in official museums and histories. One museum, the Shanghai Educated Youth Museum, doubles as a memorial site and a collective cemetery for former sent-down youth who wish to be buried together. This paper locates these memorials and burial grounds in their historical and political context. It also reflects the Shanghai institutions’ copying of the design and architecture of the Korea and Vietnam war memorials in Washington D.C.]
Flath, James A.. “Managing Historical Capital in Shandong: Museum, Monument, and Memory in Provincial China.” The Public Historian 24, 2 (2002): 41-59.
—–. “Setting Moon and Rising Nationalism: Lugou Bridge as Monument and Memory.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, 2 (May 2004): 175-92.
—–. “‘This Is How the Chinese People Began Their Struggle’: Humen and the Opium War as a Site of Memory.” In Marc Andre Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 167-92.
—–. “‘Crack’: Beichuan in Ruins.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, 2 (2017): 239-62.
[Abstract: This discussion interrogates the ruins of Beichuan, a county town in North Sichuan that was destroyed and rendered uninhabitable by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. Those ruins exist today in two principal forms. The remains of the original townsite have been evacuated and opened to the public as an open-air memorial; and earthquake museums have preserved artifacts recovered from the townsite and organized them alongside supporting texts, images, exhibits, dioramas, and amusement attractions. The ghost town, it is argued, ruptures the reform-era sense of national progress and development, forcing its observers and participants to acknowledge loss and absence. Connecting to a wider discourse, the National Earthquake Memorial Museum (NEMM) attempts to piece that sensibility back together by creating a particular memory of the massive state-led relief effort, by “disciplining” the catastrophe through inquiry and education, and by sublimating the earthquake through science, planning, and building. Although they remain emotionally separate, the ruins and NEMM have a natural tension with one another. Away from the epicenter, the privately managed Wenchuan Earthquake Museum (WEM) combines ruins and narrative to capture the “strange objectivity” that comes from any effort to make sense of what is ultimately insensible.]
Frost, Mark R., Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, ed., Remembering Asia’s World War Two. London: Routledge, 2019.
[Abstract: analyzes the politics of war commemoration in contemporary East and Southeast Asia. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars, the chapters span China, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, covering topics such as the commemoration of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” system, forms of “dark tourism” or commemorative pilgrimages (e.g. veterans’ tours to wartime battlefields), and the establishment and evolution of various war-related heritage sites and museums. Case studies reveal the distinctive trajectories of new and newly discovered forms of remembrance within and across national boundaries. They highlight the growing influence of non-state actors over representations of conflict and occupation, as well as the increasingly interconnected and transnational character of memory-making. Taken together, the studies collected here demonstrate that across much of Asia the public commemoration of the wars of 1931–45 has begun to shift from portraying them as a series of national conflicts with distinctive local meanings to commemorating the conflict as a common pan-Asian, or even global, experience.]
Gao, Rui. “Revolutionary Trauma and Representations of the War: The Case of China in Mao’s Era.” In Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Elizabeth Butler Breese, eds., Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Boulder: Paradigm, 2011, 53-77.
Globalized Memorial Museums: Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals [research project led by Ljiljana Radonić, University of Vienna] and accompanying Facebook page.
Graf, Emily. “Beyond Party Politics? Visitors and Meaning-Making in the National Museum of Taiwan Literature.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 34, 2 (Winter 2022): 241-90.
—–. “The Rise of Author Museums in the PRC: How Institutions Make World Literature.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. New York: Routledge, 2023, 107-20.
Green, Frederik H. “The Twelve Chinese Zodiacs: Ai Weiwei, Jackie Chan and the Aesthetics, Politics, and Economics of Revisiting a National Wound.” Rocky Mountain Review (Spring 2016): 45-58.
Gros, Stéphane. “L’injonction à la fête. Enjeux locaux patrimoniaux d’une fête en voie de disparition.” Gradhiva 16 (2012): 22-43.
Gustafsson, Karl. “Chinese Collective Memory on the Internet: Remembering the Great Famine in Online Encyclopaedias.” Memory Studies 12, 2 (2019): 184-97.
Hamlish, Tamara. “Preserving the Palace Museum and the Making of Nationalism(s) in Twentieth Century China.” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 20-30.
—–. “Global Culture, Modern Heritage: Re-membering the Chinese Imperial Collection.” In Susan Crane, ed., Museums and Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 137-58.
Han, Min. “The Meaning of Mao in Mao Tourism of Shaoshan.” In Tan Chee-Beng, et al. eds, Tourism, Anthropology and China. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2001, 215-36.
Harris, Clare E. The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[Abstract: For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, … Harris argues … that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them. Harris begins with the British public’s first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.]
Harrison, Henrietta. “Martyrs and Militarism in Early Republican China.”Twentieth Century China 23, 2 (April, 1998): 41-70.
—–. The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hennings, Anne. The National Museum of China: Building Memory, Shaping History, Presenting Identity. Ph.D. diss. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 2012.
Henshaw, Jonathan. “That Which Is Carved in Stone: Nanjing’s Monuments and Chinese Commemoration of the Second World War.” Modern China 46, 6 (Nov. 2020).
[Abstract: Chinese commemoration of the Second World War and of the Nanjing Massacre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has been framed as a “new remembering” in response to political change in China and Japanese denial. This periodization obscures both earlier Chinese commemorations and the multiple ways the past has been (re-)remembered. In fact, Chinese commemoration of the victims of the Nanjing Massacre began much earlier, in 1937. Nanjing and its history of building, bulldozing, and restoring wartime monuments and memorial sites offer a case study of how China’s shifting political priorities have provided frameworks that alternately enable and restrain commemoration of the wartime past. This article explores these frameworks, with particular attention to occupied territory, in order to more fully understand the war’s legacy in the PRC.]
Hevia, James. “World Heritage, National Culture, and the Restoration of Chengde.” positions 9, 1 (Spring 2001): 219-43.
Hillenbrand, Margaret. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]
Ho, Dahpon David. “To Protect and Preserve: Resisting the Destroy the Four Olds Campaign, 1966–1967.” In Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, 64–95.
Ho, Denise Y. “Revolutionizing Antiquity: The Shanghai Cultural Bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1968.” The China Quarterly 207 (2011): 687-705.
[Abstract: This article, based on archival documents of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, traces the reinvention of the cultural bureaucracy over the years 1966–68 and the subsequent shift in the language of preservation. It argues that during the Cultural Revolution, there was an institutionalized and ideologically legitimated movement to protect historic sites and cultural objects. During the Attack on the Four Olds, cultural officials were faced with a number of dilemmas. How could they protect the objects under their care without defying the revolution? How could they evaluate the direction of a political campaign and situate their work within the movement? What risks could they take at the local level and what had to wait for more powerful patronage?]
—–. “Exhibiting the ‘Old Society’: Shanghai’s Fangua Lane and Propaganda in the Maoist Era.” China Beat (May 24, 2011).
—–. “Making a Revolutionary Monument: The Site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.” In Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, eds., Red Legacies in China: The Afterlives of the Communist Revolution in Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2016.
—–. Curating the Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: How did China’s Communist revolution transform the nation’s political culture? In this rich and vivid history of the Mao period (1949–1976), Denise Y. Ho examines the relationship between its exhibitions and its political movements. Case studies from Shanghai show how revolution was curated: museum workers collected cultural and revolutionary relics; neighborhoods, schools, and work units mounted and narrated local displays; and exhibits provided ritual space for ideological lessons and political campaigns. Using archival sources, ephemera, interviews, and other materials, Ho traces the process by which exhibitions were developed, presented, and received. Examples under analysis range from the First Party Congress Site and the Shanghai Museum to the ‘class education’ and Red Guard exhibits that accompanied the Socialist Education Movement and the Cultural Revolution. Operating in two modes — that of a state in power and that of a state in revolution — Mao era exhibitionary culture remains part of China’s revolutionary legacy.]
Ho, Denise Y. and Jie Li. “From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnation of a Chinese Museum Town.” Modern China 42, 1 (2015) 3-37.
[Abstract: What was a revolutionary museum in the Mao era, and what are the lives and afterlives of its artifacts? This article traces the exhibitionary culture of the town of Anren, home to both the Mao-era sculptural icon the Rent Collection Courtyard and the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, China’s largest private museum and collection of Maoist memorabilia. Examining the production and reception of exhibits from the 1950s to the present, we argue that—far from mausoleums that relegate objects safely to history—museums in China have been dynamic and vital public spaces that have defined and redefined the past for the present, serving as both a medium and a product of revolutionary culture. Over the last six decades, museums have paraded the revolution’s spoils, served as a schoolroom for class education, replaced traditional temples as new ritual sites, staged theatrical performances, held court over historical cases, and, finally, commodified their collections into tourist memorabilia.
Ho, Selina C. F. Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
Ho, Virgil Kit-Yiu. “Martyrs or Ghosts? A Short Cultural History of a Tomb in Revolutionary Canton, 1911-1970.” East Asian History 27 (June 2004): 99-138.
Hon, Tze-ki. “A Rock, a Text, and a Tablet: Making the Song Emperor’s Terrace a Lieu de Memoire.” In Marc Andre Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 133-66.
Hsieh, Shih-chung. “Representing Aborigines: Modelling Taiwan’s ‘Mountain Culture.'” In Kosaku Yoshino, ed., Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999, 89-110. [deals with Taiwan aboriginal culture parks]
Hu, Ying. “Qiu Jin’s Nine Burials: The Making of Historical Monuments and Public Memory.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, 1 (Spring 2007): 138-91.
Huang, Chen. “Ten Years of Public Education at the National Museum of China.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 43-53.
Huang, Jianli and Hong Lysa. “History and the Imaginaries of ‘Big Singapore’: Positioning the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, 1 (2004): 65-89.
Huang, Shu-Mei. “Staking Claims to Difficult Memories: Diplomacy and Jewish Heritage in Shanghai and Beyond.” In Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers, eds., Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 165-86.
Huang, Shu-Mei, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers, eds. Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
[Abstract: explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten.]
Huang Zhenchun 黄振春. Mao Zedong shidai de bowuguan he jinianguan: weilai cezhanren de diaochao yu biji 毛泽东时代的博物馆和纪念馆: 未来策展人的调查与笔记 (Museums and memorial halls in the Mao era: investigation and notes for future curators). Beijing: Zhongguo hongse yichan, 2016
Hung, Chang-tai. “Revolutionary History in Stone: The Making of a Chinese National Monument.” The China Quarterly 166 (June 2001): 457-73.
—–. “The Red Line: Creating a Museum of the Chinese Revolution.” The China Quarterly 184 (Dec. 2005): 914-933.
—–. “Mao’s Parades: State Spectacles in China in the 1950s.” The China Quarterly 190 (2007): 411-31.
—–. “The Cult of the Red Martyr: Politics of Commemoration in China.” Journal of Contemporary History 43, 2 (2008): 279-304.
—–. Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011.
[Abstract: In this sweeping portrait of the political culture of the early PRC, Hung mines newly available sources to vividly reconstruct how the CCP tightened its rule after taking power in 1949. With political-cultural projects such as reconstructing Tiananmen Square to celebrate the Communist Revolution; staging national parades; rewriting official histories; mounting a visual propaganda campaign, including oil paintings, cartoons, and New Year prints; and establishing a national cemetery for heroes of the Revolution, the CCP built up nationalistic fervor in the people and affirmed its legitimacy. These projects came under strong Soviet influence, but the nationalistic Chinese Communists sought an independent road of nation building; for example, they decided that the reconstructed Tiananmen Square should surpass Red Square in size and significance, against the advice of Soviet experts sent from Moscow. Combining historical, cultural, and anthropological inquiries, Mao’s New World examines how Mao Zedong and senior Party leaders transformed the PRC into a propaganda state in the first decade of their rule (1949-1959). Using archival sources only recently made available, previously untapped government documents, visual materials, memoirs, and interviews with surviving participants in the Party’s plans, Hung argues that the exploitation of new cultural forms for political ends was one of the most significant achievements of the Chinese Communist Revolution.]
—–. “The Cultural Palace of Nationalities: Ethnicities Under One Roof.” Journal of Contemporary History 47, 3 (2012): 572-93.
[Abstract: The Cultural Palace of Nationalities, one of the Ten Monumental Buildings built in 1959 in Beijing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is considered a ‘political building’ in that it brings together ethnicity, architecture, art, technology and, most importantly, representations of the Party- state’s policy on the unity of the many different nationalities in China. A careful exam- ination of the history of the Palace’s construction and its exhibits reveals two unsettling problems: the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of official images of national minorities, along with the Party’s difficulties in dealing with ethnic nationalism, regional separatism and local identity in the first decade of the PRC. These same thorny issues continue to cause the current government a major headache.]
Hung, Ruth Y. Y. “Red Nostalgia: Commemorating Mao in Our Time.” Literary Compass 12/8 (2015): 371-84.
Jacobsen, Claire. New Museums in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014.
[Abstract: China’s explosive urban growth continues to make headlines, illustrated by dramatic shots of the latest commercial or residential building, each more outstanding (and often more outlandish) than the next. As the country’s new money matures, it is increasingly being redirected from the necessity of industry to the nicety of culture. While the recession has put a damper on plans for new cultural venues in many world cities, museums in China are booming. Once scarce, they have multiplied rapidly, with more than 1,000 opening in the last decade. They are now found throughout the country in megacities, smaller urban centers, and even in more remote places like Ordos, Inner Mongolia, in the middle of the Gobi Desert. New Museums in China presents fifty-one of the most innovative museums of the last ten years in beautiful photographs, detailed drawings, and insightful texts based on new interviews with an international slate of architects. This spectacular collection makes an excellent survey and sourcebook for architects, art and design enthusiasts, and Sinophiles alike. Featured museums are the best new buildings of any kind in China. Features the works by starchitects such as David Chipperfield, MVRDV, Steven Holl, and Zaha Hadid as well as respected Chinese designers such as Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio, winner of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Includes not only art museums, but also an eclectic range of museums of archaeology, automobiles, natural history, comics and animation, handcrafted paper, and clocks from the Cultural Revolution]
Jeffreys, Elaine. “Modern China’s Idols: Heroes, Role Models, Stars and Celebrities.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, 1 (2012).
[Abstract: This paper examines the diversity of China’s popular culture idols with reference to a commemorative website called ‘The Search for Modern China’, which was launched in late September 2009 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party on 1 October 1949. The website’s framing narrative suggests that the history of idol production and celebrity in the PRC can be viewed crudely as marked by disjuncture: the decline of heavy-handed Party-state involvement in the propagandistic manufacturing of socialist idols of production, followed by the grafted-on rise of western-style media-manufactured celebrities as idols of capitalist consumption. However, an analysis of the website’s pantheon of idols reveals that while some idols from the Maoist and early reform period have been relegated to the realm of fiction, revolutionary kitsch or are now simply pass?, others remain very much alive in the popular imagination. A state-led project of promoting patriotic education has ensured the coexistence in commercial popular culture of revolutionary idols and contemporary celebrities, via memory sites associated with broadcast television, DVDs and the Internet, and the historical locations, museums and monuments of ‘red tourism.’ ]
—–. “Curating Philanthropy and Socialist Governance: The Chinese Charity Museum.” Museums and Social Issues 13, 2 (2018): 78-93.
[Abstract: This paper examines the growing political importance of philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China as presented in the Chinese Charity Museum, probably the only national-level museum in the world to feature permanent exhibits focused solely on the subject of philanthropy. The paper explains why charitable practices, which purportedly flourished in pre-communist China, “disappeared” during the Mao era (1949–1976), and why philanthropy is now a government-endorsed activity. It then examines the state-prescribed role of Chinese museology and the creation of a charity museum in Nantong City, before investigating the socio-political narrative that frames the Nantong collection. It concludes that the museum’s “story” simplifies and elides the significant change in forms of philanthropic institutions and practices in contemporary China, relative to their pre-1949 precursors, but yields new insight into how the Chinese Communist Party is recasting philanthropy as an integral part of socialist culture and state-led welfare provision.]
Jersild, Austin. “Socialist Exhibits and Sino-Soviet relations, 1950–60.” Cold War History 18, 3 (2018).
[Abstract: Socialist bloc exhibits in China in the 1950s communicated ideas about the future prosperity and development to be brought to China in the wake of its alliance with the socialist world, the role of socialism in preserving and maintaining folk and traditional culture, and the role of the bloc in extending the virtues of European high culture to the East. The Soviets proudly displayed Russia’s historic contribution to high culture as well as information about contemporary events at the Bol’shoi Theater and other cultural institutions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the East Germans and the Czechoslovaks similarly emphasized the prestige and quality of their past artists and composers as well as their contemporary symphonies and orchestras. The Chinese, however, were increasingly disappointed both with socialist bloc approaches to Chinese development as well as with depictions of Chinese culture that reminded them of the heritage of European imperialism. They complained in the exhibit “comment books” about methods, practices and technology that offered little to unique Chinese “conditions” and “peculiarities.” They were frustrated by the inefficiencies of Soviet-style socialism, and they even complained about the food at the Moscow Restaurant. By the end of the decade, the exhibits served as yet another example of the miscommunication, frustration and dispute over models of development that contributed to the Sino-Soviet split.]
Johnson, Ian. Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Oxford University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: A sweeping portrait from the 1940s to the 2020s of one of humanity’s great battles of memory against forgetting, including some of China’s best-known public intellectuals. China is often described as a “perfect dictatorship” of digital surveillance and endless crackdowns. This book shows that opponents are unbowed, challenging the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history. Shows the “dictator’s digital dilemma:” digital technologies can make their rule easier, but also empowers grassroots activists to form communities of opponents and spread information through samizdat publications, digital films, and journalism.]
Johnson, Marshall. “Making Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of Nationality.” positions 2, no. 2 (1994): 177-249.
Ju, Jane C. “The Palace Museum as Representation of Culture: Exhibitions and Canons of Chinese Art History.” In Ko-wu Huang ed., When Images Speak: Visual Representation and Cultural Mapping in Modern China. Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, jindai shi yanjiusuo, 2003, 477-507.
—–. “Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics.” In Anna Brzyski, ed., Partisan Canons. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 115-134.
—–. “Retiring Sun Yat-sen.” Orientations 38, 1 (Jan/Feb 2007): 121-122.
Kendall, Laurel. “Peoples under Glass: A Tale of Two Museums.” In Kosaku Yoshino, ed., Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999, 111-32. [deals in part with the Yunnan Museum of Nationalities]
Knothe, Florian. “Contemporary History Painting and Social Engagement in Hong Kong.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 149-52.
Kraus, Richard. “Public Monuments and Private Pleasures in the Parks of Nanjing: A Tango in the Ruins of the Ming Emperor’s Palace.” In Deborah Davis, ed., China’s Consumer Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Kuo, Tzu-ying. “Developing a New Children’s Art Education Centre at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 85-96.
Lang, Caroline. “Building New Audiences in Hong Kong.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 169-74.
Lang, Caroline and John Reeve, ed. New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018.
[Abstract: There has been an explosion of museum and heritage activity across Asia, especially in China, where audience development and public education have been made a government priority for museums. Public participation is already well established, for example in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, but is little documented and reviewed for a wider audience in Asia and beyond. This book examines and critiques these developments and asks how best practice can match the specific needs of diverse Asian cultures and societies. Written by practitioners, this book brings together a range of regional examples of innovative practice and new initiatives, which address shared themes and challenges for museums, galleries, community projects and heritage sites across Asia. It focuses on public programmes, exhibitions, education and media and seeks to provide a critical framework that is both sensitive to Asian contexts and alert to western museologies and critical practice.]
Lary, Diana. “The Tomb of the King of Nanyue: The Contemporary Agenda of History.” Modern China 22, 1 (1996): 3–27.
Laukkanen, Sonja. “Holy Heritage: Identity and Authenticity in a Tibetan Village.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 195-220.
Lauwaert, Francoise. “L’empire de l’éternel présent. Dans les musées de la République populaire de Chine.” Gradhiva 16 (2012): 44-63.
Law, Kam-yee. “The Red Line over European Colonialism: Comparison of the Macao Museum and Hong Kong Museum of History after Their Return to China.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, 5 (2014): 534-555
[Abstract: Hong Kong and Macao were once European colonies. A unique, hybrid culture of East and West now flourishes in these two Special Administrative Regions (SARs) of China. Both cities opened new history museums in 1998, but they adopted remarkably different approaches in their representation of their complicated and politically sensitive history. The Hong Kong Museum of History (HKMH) represents history by closely following the orientation of traditional Chinese nationalism. The postcolonial characteristics adopted by the Macao Museum to reproduce history, in contrast, are likely amongst the richest of all history museums in China. What are the reasons behind the different historical representations by Hong Kong and Macao, which were both promised a ‘One country, Two systems’ policy by the Chinese central authority? This paper argues that both museums reveal two faces of a rising China; the one in Hong Kong emphasises national dignity, and the people’s identification with and loyalty to the nation when it is engaged in state building. The one in Macao emphasises the multiple roles in finding a balanced position to coexist with superpowers, forging friendships with developing countries and building an idealised image of a (re-)rising nation through historical construction. The difference between these two museums indicates the exceptional flexibility of China’s postcommunist regime in engaging in soft power diplomacy.]
Le Mentec, Katiana. “Barrage des Trois-Gorges: exposer le monde local après l’immersion. Genèse et programme du premier musée de Yunyang.” Gradhiva 16 (2012): 84-105.
Lee, Francis and Joseph Man Chan. “Generational Transmission of Collective Memory about Tiananmen in Hong Kong: How Young Rally Participants Learn about and Understand 4 June.” Journal of Contemporary China 84 (Nov. 2013): 966-983.
[Abstract: This article addresses the problem of generational transmission of collective memory in Hong Kong about the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. It focuses on the young participants in the annual 4 June commemoration rallies and examines the process of mnemonic socialization that brought them into the community of 4 June commemoration. Drawing upon a rally onsite survey and in-depth interviews, this study found that many young people went through a dynamic process of gradual discovery in which various social institutions–school, family and media–played complementary roles. Their understanding of Tiananmen tended to be simplified and essentialized. Yet the loss of details through essentialization has arguably allowed them to uphold a clear-cut moral judgment regarding the event and dismiss certain memory-blurring discourses straightforwardly.]
Lee, Haiyan. “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan, or How to Enjoy a National Wound.” Modern China 35, 2 (March 2009): 155-90. Rpt in Marc Andre Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 193-232.
[Abstract: Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), or the Old Summer Palace, was once a massive complex of gardens, pavilions, lakes, hills, and pleasure grounds. After it was looted and burnt down by Anglo-French troops in 1860, it commenced a long “afterlife” as a site of farmsteads, factories, school campuses, a bohemian colony, and a public park. This article explores the politics of spatial configuration and signification, or “the relations of proximity,” in the present-day Ruins Park by revisiting the debates of the 1990s surrounding restoration/development issues, the disquiet over the xiyanglou ruins in literary and visual representations, and a more recent environmental controversy that has brought a new political life to the park. Analytically, the author proposes to read the park as a heterotopia of multiple emplacements: ruinscape, gardenscape, Disneyscape, and civicscape. As such, the park is a spatial metaphor of contemporary China and a schooling ground for the art of socialist neoliberal citizenship.]
—–. “Figuring History and Horror in a Provincial Museum: The Water Dungeon, The Rent Collection Courtyard, and the Socialist Undead.” In Viren Murthy and Axel Schneider, eds., The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 215-55.
Lee, Kevin. “A Futuristic History Tour at the Shanghai Film Museum.” Fandor (Aug. 27, 2014).
Lee, Leksa. “Exhibiting Growth: Producing State-Market Hybridity in China’s Museum Industry.” Journal of Anthropology 87, 3 (2022): 560-83.
[Abstract: As China’s growth slows, the government targets high-value-added services for development. These policies can surface in unexpected places. One is the booming museum industry where, as local governments build museums as part of development projects, museum production companies grow rapidly on government capital. For one design firm, the theme of ‘growth’ animated not only a history museum they designed, but also directors’ stories about the firm, and rituals celebrating their IPO. I find that all these narratives of growth celebrated the enmeshment of state and market. The ethnography of state-market hybridity shows how market freedom is an ideology requiring constant maintenance. But in China markets are understood as tools for government caretaking, raising instead the question: when state-market hybridity is the explicit ideology, how is it maintained? I argue that ‘exhibitions of growth’ do this by claiming that this hybridity itself will drive growth and transform the economy.]
—–. “Developmental Speculation: Materializing the Future in China’s Urban Planning Museums.” Anthropological Quarterly 96, 2 (2023):279-306.
Lee, Wei-i. “Le nationalisme dans les musées locaux à Taïwan: colonisation, autoritarisme et démocratie.” Gradhiva 16 (2012): 64-83.
Leese, Daniel. “A Place Where Great Men Rest? The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.” In Marc Andre Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 91-130.
Lei, Jiang and Edward Vickers. “Constructing Civic Identity in Shanghai’s Museums: Heritage, Ideology and Local Distinctiveness.” In Edward Vickers and Krishna Kumar, eds., Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship. NY: Routledge, 2015.
Li, Henry Siling. “Narrative Dissidence, Spoof Videos and Alternative Memory in China.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19, 5 (2016): 501-17.
[Abstract: This article explores a special type of trickster discourse, networked spoof videos and the ‘narrative dissidence’ embedded in their construction of an alternative memory in China. I start with a review of the relationship between memory and power, and the changes that the internet as a mnemonic system has brought to their configuration, before turning to memory policy in contemporary China and the challenges posed to this policy by active users on the internet. I argue that the control of memory in China is realized through the monopoly of the media and the language system. I argue that this constructive process negates the official version of memory, strips bare all falsities and pretensions, and signals an emergent model for the construction of memory and truth in China.]
Li, Hongtao and Shunming Huang. The Nanjing Massacre and the Making of Mediated Trauma. Trs. Xinyue Chang and Edwin A. Schmitt. New York: Routledge, 2022.
[Abstract: Drawing on cultural trauma theory, this book investigates how collective memory of the Nanjing Massacre is fashioned in China and how the mass media, political power and public praxis jointly shape the politics and culture of memory in contemporary China. Allowing for the dimensions of history and different mediating spaces, the authors first conduct textual analysis of news reports from traditional media since the event took place, revealing that the significance of the Massacre was initially portrayed as a local incident before its construction as a national trauma and finally a collective memory. In a study of physical and online memorial spaces, including the Memorial Hall, commemorative activities on the Internet and new media platforms, the book unveils the production and reproduction of trauma narratives as well as how these narratives have been challenged. The final part further studies the interactions between media and other institutional settings while exploring issues of global memory and reconciliation in East Asia.]
Li, Jie. “Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie’s Documentary Films of the Cultural Revolution.” Public Culture 21, 3 (Fall 2009): 538-549.
—–. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
—–. “Museums and Memorials of the Mao Era: A Survey with Curatorial Proposals,” In Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, eds., Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016, 319-354.
—–. Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. [MCLC Resource Center review by Kirk A. Denton]
[Abstract: In Utopian Ruins Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China’s Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and cataclysmic reverberations. Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity. Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution’s unrealized dreams and staggering losses.]
Li, Ping. “A New Model for Managing Tourism at Mogao Grottoes: Establishment and Practice.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 206-13.
Li Rang 李让 and Li Wenchang 李文昌, eds. Bowuguan de jiyi yu xiangxiang 博物馆的意义与想像 (Museum memory and imagination). Beijing: Xueyuan, 2005.
Li, Wei-I. “The Construction of Community Imaginaries in Taiwan’s Museums and Archives Committees (1945-1978). Unpublished paper. Presented at the 2005 Meeting of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (SOAS)
Li Wenru 李文儒, ed. Quanqiuhua xia de Zhongguo bowuguan 全球化下的中国博物馆 (Chinese museums under the condition of globalization). Beijing: Wenwu, 2002.
Lian, Zhiying and Gillian Oliver. “Sustainability of Independent Community Archives in China: A Case Study.” Archival Science 18, 4 (2018): 313-332. [on the Migrant Workers Cultural Arts Museum, Picun, Beijing]
Liang, Samuel Y. 2008. “Amnesiac Monument, Nostalgic Fashion: Shanghai’s New Heaven and Earth.” Wasafiri 55: 47-55.
Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. Making National Heroes:
[Abstract: Making National Heroes is an ethnography of the making of national heroes in the commemoration of the Second World War in contemporary China. Foregrounding the lived experience of men and women who participate in commemorative activities, it theorises how masculinity and nationalism entangle in recollecting war memories. Taking the feminist line of inquiry, this anthropological study develops an approach to capture the centrality of making exemplars in the realisation of hegemonic masculinities. It adds a gender perspective to studies on exemplarist moral theory and theorises exemplary men’s cross-cultural significance in defining masculinities. Researchers in the fields of critical masculinity studies, anthropology, feminist methodology, China studies, and memory studies will be interested in this book.]
Lin, Wei-ping. Island Fantasia: Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between China and Taiwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: The Matsu archipelago between China and Taiwan, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, was suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist-Nationalist conflict. The army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people were confronted with the question of how to move forward. This in-depth ethnography and social history of the islands focuses on how individual citizens redefined themselves and reimagined their society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Wei-Ping Lin shows how islanders used both traditional and new media to cope with the conflicts and trauma of harsh military rule. She discusses the formation of new social imaginaries through the appearance of ‘imagining subjects’, interrogating their subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies as they seek to answer existential questions. This title is Open Access.]
Liu, Wan-Chen. “Inside-Out: Creative Ageing Movement through Museums in Taiwan.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 195-205.
Loeske, Annette. “Studying International Visitors at Shanghai Museum.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 122-30.
Lord, Gail Dexter, Guan Qiang, An Laishun, and Javier Jimenez, eds. Museum Development in China: Understanding the Building Boom. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
[Abstract: The growth of the number and scale of Chinese museums in the 21st century, from about 1,400 at the turn of the century to over 5,000 to date, reflects the government’s Museum Development Plan for 2011-2020 to open one museum per 250,000 inhabitants, with the goal of attracting one billion visitors at the end of the decade. It is not just the numbers but the speed of development of Chinese museums that takes our breath away—with nearly one new museum per day being opened or expanded in this huge country. What are the motivations for the rapid development of museums in China? How is the public responding? Who pays for these museums and how? What has been the impact of china’s urbanization? How do Chinese museums balance education, scientific research, social cohesion, cultural diplomacy and tourism both internal and external? These are issues that continue to be discussed and debated among western museum professionals in the context of our 200-year history of modern museology. How are these debates evolving in China, which has its own history of museology over that same period from colonialism to communism and from isolation to opening up to the world? This book explores these issues while introducing English-language readers to a sample of the new Chinese museums in case studies and photographs. … The four sections of this book build our knowledge of the roles of China’s museums through social and political changes, the systems of governance, the complex relationships between private and public sectors and many levels of government. Section One places the current building boom in context. Section Two addresses how China’s rapid urbanization has fueled the museum building boom, framed it, formed it and in some cases financed it. Section Three analyzes how Chinese exhibitions are tools for cultural diplomacy and key elements of soft power The six case studies in Section Four provide perspectives on the diversity of innovative approaches in the sector.]
Lovell, Julia. “It’s Just History: Patriotic Education in the PRC.” The China Beat (April 22, 2009).
Lu, Di Yin. Seizing Civilization: Antiquities in Shanghai’s Custody, 1949-1996. PhD diss. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2012.
—–. “From Trash to Treasure: Salvage Archaeology in the People’s Republic of China, 1951–1976.” Modern China 42 (2016): 415-443.
[Abstract: Since 1951, salvage archaeologists in the PRC have retrieved tons of ancient artifacts from municipal scrapyards, refineries, and industrial development sites. They evaluated the artifacts for quality and distributed them to Chinese museums, libraries, hotels, restaurants, and art dealerships, which promoted the objects as representative of China’s ancient past. This article examines the salvage archaeology program in Shanghai, one of the largest in the country. Shanghai evaluated metal and paper scrap from collecting stations throughout China. Salvage archaeologists in this program benefited from movements such as the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), as these movements allowed them to collect unprecedented quantities of ancient coins, standard weights and measures, weapons, agricultural implements, and ethnic minority artifacts. The program created museum and library collections across the PRC, and changed the distribution of bronze artifacts both in China and overseas. Covering the history of salvage archaeology in Shanghai over four decades, this article argues that “trash picking” increased the availability and visibility of bronze and textual artifacts throughout the PRC. It further argues that salvage archaeology shaped what Chinese people regard as relics of Chinese civilization.]
Lu Jimin 吕济民. Zhongguo bowuguan shilun 中国博物馆史论 (Essays on the history of Chinese museums). Beijing: Zijincheng, 2004.
—–. ed. Dangdai Zhongguo de bowuguan shiye 当代中国的博物馆事业(The museum enterprise in contemporary China). Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo, 1998.
Lu Jianchang 吕建昌. Bowuguan yu dangdai shehui ruogan wenti de yanjiu 博物馆与当代社会若干问题的研究 (Research on museums and related issues of contemporary society). Shanghai: Shanghai cishu, 2005.
Lu, Tracy L. D. “Heritage Conservation in Post-Colonial Hong Kong.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, 2-3 (2009): 258-272.
—–. Museums in China: Power, Politics and Identities. New York: Routledge, 2013.
[Abstract: From the earliest museums established by Western missionaries in order to implement religious and political power, to the role they have played in the formation of the modern Chinese state, the origin and development of museums in mainland China differ significantly from those in the West. The occurrence of museums in mainland China in the late nineteenth century was primarily a result of internal and external conflicts, Westernization and colonialism, and as such they were never established solely for enjoyment and leisure. Using a historical and anthropological framework, this book provides a holistic and critical review on the establishment and development of museums in mainland China from 1840 to the present day, and shows how museums in China have been used by a wide range of social, political, and state actors for a number of economic, religious, political and ideological purposes. Indeed, Lu examines the key role played by museums in reinforcing social segmentation, influencing the economy, protecting cultural heritage and the construction and enhancement of ethnic identities and nationalism, and how they have throughout their history helped the powerful to govern the less powerful or the powerless. More broadly, this book provides important comparative insights on museology and heritage management, and questions who the key stakeholders are, how museums reflect broader social and cultural changes, and the relationship between museum and heritage management. Drawing on extensive archival research and anthropological fieldwork, as well as the author’s experience working as a museum curator in mainland China in the late 1980s, Museums in China such will be of great interest to students and scholars working across museology, heritage studies, tourism studies Chinese culture and Chinese history.]
Ludwig, Carol, Linda Walton and Yi-Wen Wang, eds. The Heritage Turn in China: The Reinvention, Dissemination and Consumption of Heritage. Amersterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
[Abstract: focuses on heritage discourse and practice in China today as it has evolved from the ‘heritage turn’ that can be dated to the 1990s. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches to regionally and topically diverse case studies, the contributors to this edited volume show how particular versions of the past are selected, (re)invented, disseminated and consumed for contemporary purposes. These studies explore how the Chinese state utilises heritage not only for tourism, entertainment, educational and commercial purposes, but also as part of broader political strategies on both the national and international stage. Together, they argue that the Chinese state deploys modes of heritage governance to construct new modernities while strengthening collective national identity in support of both its political legitimacy and its claim to status as an international superpower. The authors also consider ways in which state management of heritage is contested by some stakeholders whose embrace of heritage has a different purpose and meaning.]
Luo, Pan, David Francis, and Lisheng Zhang. “Crafting Chinese Ethnic Minority Heritage: Innovation in the Chinese Ethnology Museum.” In Museum Innovation: Building More Equitable, Relevant and Impactful Museums. London: Routledge, 2021.
[Abstract: Using the case study of the exhibition Tradition@Present, this chapter explores the concept of innovation in relation to the Chinese Ethnology Museum. Fei Xiaotong’s original vision for the Chinese Ethnographic Museum was to escape from the division of self and other that categorized its European counterpart. Instead, the cultures of the Han majority and China’s ethnic minorities would be displayed in mutually supporting togetherness aligned with the philosophy of “me within you and you within me.” Such a vision was never realized and the narratives of Chinese Ethnological Museums would present ethnic minority culture as frozen in a past stage of history. Embracing the discourse of the creative economy and the productive protection of heritage, the Chinese National Museum of Ethnology has sought to recast ethnic minority culture as contemporary fashion. By adopting the language of innovation in official heritage policy, the curators are able to return to Fei Xiaotong’s vision of a Chinese Ethnological Museum adopting an anthropological point of view in their exhibitions. This includes exploring the cosmological belief systems woven into the textiles patterns and the social conditions that lie behind the objects’ making.]
Ma, Sheng-Mei. “Contrasting Two Survival Literatures: On the Jewish Holocaust and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, 1 (1987): 81-93.
Ma, Xiaohua. “Constructing a National Memory of War: War Museums in China, Japan, and the United States.” In Marc Gallicchio, ed., The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia-Pacific War in U.S.-East Asian Relations. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007, 155-200.
Maags, Christina and Marina Svensson, eds. Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
[Abstract: The Chinese state uses cultural heritage as a source of power by linking it to political and economic goals, but heritage discourse has at the same time encouraged new actors to appropriate the discourse to protect their own traditions. This book focuses on that contested nature of heritage, especially through the lens of individuals, local communities, religious groups, and heritage experts. It examines the effect of the internet on heritage-isation, as well as how that process affects different groups of people.]
Matten, Marc Andre, ed. Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
[Abstract: In the last decades, the scholarship on issues of national and cultural identity of China has been constantly on the rise. This edited volume aims at addressing these issues by applying Pierre Nora’s approach of places of memory (lieux de memoire) to the Chinese context. The volume assembles a number of articles that focus on the most significant places of memory in modern and contemporary China, ranging from Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Warriors to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. The genesis and nature of these places are discussed in detail by combining approaches of both cultural and historical sciences. In addition, issues of cultural memory and politics are addressed in order to question the ideological construction of these places.]
—–. “The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei: A Contest Place of Memory.” In Matten, ed., Places of Memory in Modern China. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 51-90.
Mazur, Mary G. “Public Space for Memory in Contemporary Civil Society: Freedom to Learn from the Mirror of the Past.” The China Quarterly 160 (1999): 1019-1035.
Meyer-Fong, Tobie. “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 13 (2014).
[Abstract: The Chinese garden now symbolizes timeless national, cultural, and aesthetic values. But as real property in the past, gardens inevitably were subject to the vicissitudes of their times. This article focuses on gardens and the Taiping Civil War (1851–1864). During the war, many gardens were reduced to tile shards and ash. Surviving gardens functioned as objects of longing and nostalgia, sites of refuge (physical and emotional), or a means to display status under the new regime. In the postwar period, gardens served as status symbols, places to commemorate loss or celebrate restoration, and venues for renewed sociability. This article uses a series of case studies to explore the multiple meanings associated with gardens, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the Qing dynasty—in the past and today.]
Mitter, Rana. “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History, and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997.” The China Quarterly 161 (March 2000): 279-93.
Mühlhahn, Klaus. ”‘Remembering a Bitter Past’: The Trauma of China‘s Labor Camps 1949- 1978.” History & Memory 16, 2, (Fall/Winter 2004): 108-139.
Munsterhjelm, Mark. “Killing Paiwan: The Dark Truth about Mitsubishi, CMC, and the Shung Ye Museum.” English translation of an essay originally published in Lih Bau (Dec. 1999).
—-. Aborigines Saved Yet Again: Settler Nationalism and Hero Narratives in a 2001 Exhibition of Taiwan Aboriginal Artefacts. MA thesis. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 2004.
Murthy, Viren and Axel Schneider, eds.The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Musgrove, Charles D. “Monumentality in Nanjing’s Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29 (2007): 1-19.
—–. “Monumentality in Nationalist Nanjing: Purple Mountain’s Changing Views.” In James B. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson and Sigrid Schmalzer, eds., Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750-present. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Neather, Robert. “Translation in a ‘Non-Translation’ Community: Practices, Ideologies and Conceptualization of Translation in the PRC Museum.” Translation Quarterly 51/52 (2009): 145-76.
[Abstract: This paper examines the practice and discourse of translation in a “non-translation” community, i.e. a professional discourse community in which translation is practised but is not a defining aspect of that community’s discursive expertise. The museum discourse community in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is taken as a key example. The paper adopts an explicitly “textexternal”focus to examine several key issues. These include the discursive procedures by which members of the museum community collaborate to produce translations, ideologies of translation, and the recourse to traditional paradigms by members of the museum community when conceptualizing translation. The paper also highlights issues of expert versus non-expert discursive practice and possible points of comparison with discourses in the translation studies community.]
New Approaches to the Mao Era (1949-1976): Everyday Memory and Unofficial Memory
[Abstract: New Approaches to the Mao Era is a collaborative research project presented by a team of scholars from the University of Hong Kong and the CEFC, and funded under a joint scheme by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and Hong Kong’s Research Grant Council (RGC). The program starts in March 2013 and runs for 3 years until February 2016. This project aims to lift the disciplinary barriers between various approaches to the unofficial history of the Mao era, as well as breaking new ground in each of the disciplinary areas (access to new archives; field work with hitherto undocumented citizen memory groups). Besides supporting the participants’ own research, this program aims at disseminating and exchanging scholarly findings by means of public workshops, conferences and publications. A calendar of scientific events related to this program will be announced on the CEFC website.]
Ng, Janet. “Walking Down Memory Lane: On the Streets of the Hong Kong History Museum’s Paradigm City.” In Ng, Paradigm City: Space, Culture, and Capitalism in Hong Kong. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009, 43-64.
Nicholson, Ken. Landscapes Lost and Found: Appreciating Hong Kong’s Heritage Cultural Landscapes. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.
[Abstract: Hong Kong’s approach to heritage conservation has focused mainly on saving an old building here and there with little or no regard to its surroundings. Recent public debates challenging proposals to demolish the former Central Government Offices have highlighted this problem and, for the first time, acknowledged that the heritage value of the buildings is enhanced by their contribution to the broader ‘cultural landscape’ of Government Hill. Not all of Hong Kong’s heritage cultural landscapes have been so fortunate. Landscapes Lost and Found illustrates the concept of cultural landscape using wonderful local examples and champions this new approach to interpreting and conserving Hong Kong’s heritage sites more effectively. ]
Nitsky, W. “Ecomuseums with Chinese Characteristics: The Politics of Safeguarding Living Heritage.” In Sergio Lira, Rogerio Amoeda, Cristina Pinheiro, Peter Davis, Michelle Stefano, Gerard Corsane, eds., Proceedings of Ecomuseums 2012 – 1st International Conference on Ecomuseums, Community Museums and Living Communities. Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, 2012.
[Abstract: This paper examines the complex role ecomuseums play in contemporary Chinese society as a strategy to promote cultural diversity and stimulate economic development in ethnic minority regions. Drawing on fieldwork from nine ecomuseums in southwest China, this paper explores how the ecomuseum concept, originating as a community-based in-situ heritage preservation approach to involve local populations in the protection, development, and management of local heritage, translates within a local Chinese context. At the same time ecomuseums in China are implemented using a top-down government-led approach, they have become a space where contact relations generate new capabilities for local communities to engage in heritage and negotiate the state authorized heritage discourse. This paper examines the forces that shape ecomuseum development to show how ecomuseums in China embody both governmental and civic roles and are an agentive cultural process involving the construction of specific localities and the conditioning of local cultural practices.]
Oakes, Tim. “The Village as Theme Park: Mimesis and Authenticity in Chinese Tourism.” In Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein eds., Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining of Space. London: Routledge, 2006, 166-92.
Pan, Lu. “The Invisible Turn to the Future: Commemorative Culture in Contemporary Shanghai.” Culture Unbound 4, 3 (2012): 121-46.
—–. In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai. Bern: Peter Lang, 2016.
[Abstract: In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 Shanghai began to once again play its role as the most powerful engine of economic development in the post-1989 China. This critical moment of history has fundamentally transformed the later development of both cities, above all in terms of urban spatial order. The construction mania in Shanghai and Berlin shares the similar aspiration of «re-modernizing» themselves. In this sense, the current experience of Shanghai and Berlin informs many of the features of urban modernity in the post-Cold-War era. The book unfolds the complexity of the urban space per se as highly revealing cultural texts. Also this project doesn’t examine the spatial changes in chronological terms, but rather takes the present moment as the temporal standing point of this research. By comparing the memory discourse related to these spatial changes, the book poses the question of how modernity is understood in the matrix of local, national and global power struggles.]
—–. “Taipei’s National Martyrs’ Shrine The Past and Present Lives of a Difficult Monument.” In Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers, eds., Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 64-82.
Pao, Ignatius T. P. A History of Chinese Museums. Taipei: National Historical Museum, n.d.
Paintings Collected by the Museum of Chinese Revolution. Beijing: Cultural Relics Publishing House, 1991.
Pozzi, Laura. “Visiting the Shanghai History Museum.” ECHOES: European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities. n.d.
—–. “A City, its History, and its Museum(s): Making the Shanghai History Museum / Shanghai Revolution Museum.” ECHOES: European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities. n.d.
Puga, Rogério Miguel. “The First Museum in China: The British Museum of Macao (1829–1834) and Its Contribution to Nineteenth-Century British Natural Science.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society22, no. 3–4 (Oct. 2012): 575–586.
Qian, Junxi and Eric Florence. “Migrant Worker Museums in China: Public Cultures of Migrant Labor in State and Grassroots Initiatives.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47, no. 12 (2021): 2706–24.
Qian, Junxi and Guo Junwan’guo. “Migrant on Exhibition: The Emergence of Migrant Worker Museums in China as a Neoliberal Experiment on Governance.” Journal of Urban Affairs 41, 3 (2019). [analyzes migrant workers museums in Shenzhen and Guangzhou]
Qian, Licheng. “Consuming a Difficult Past Unapproved: Chairman Mao as Commodity.” Memory Studies 14, 2 (2021): 363-79.
[Abstract: What role does consumption play in remembering a difficult past unacknowledged by the state? By analyzing the consumption of Chairman Mao symbols in contemporary China, this article explores the memory of a difficult past under censorship with ambiguous rules, that is, imposed discursive ambiguity, and puts forward a theory of mnemonic displacement centering on two generational mechanisms: denial and diversion. The “attendant generation” has experienced the past, reads the discursive ambiguity conservatively and consumes the Mao symbol as denial of the difficult past. The “posterior generation” has no autobiographical memory of the past, reads the discursive ambiguity more openly and consumes the Mao symbol as diversion of mnemonic themes. As a result, the difficult past is displaced and forgotten. This article contributes to memory studies not only by theorizing a type of difficult past under discursive ambiguity but also by developing a displacement theory of remembering and forgetting.]
Qiang, Guan. “Preface: The Chinese Museum Boom in Broad Strokes.” In Gail Dexter Lord, Guan Qiang, An Laishun, Javier Jimenez, eds., Museum Development in China: Understanding the Building Boom, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, xiii-xiv
Qiu, Jack Linchuan and Wang Hongzhe. “Working-Class Cultural Spaces: Comparing the Old and the New.” In Beatriz Carrillo and David Goodman, eds., China’s Peasants and Workers: Changing Class Identities. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018, 124-46. [on the Migrant Workers Cultural Arts Museum, Picun, Beijing]
Ren, Hai. Economies of Culture: Theme Parks, Museums, and Capital Accumulation in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Ph.d. diss. University of Washington, 1998.
—–. “The Displacement and Museum Representation of Aboriginal Cultures in Taiwan.” positions: east asia cultures critique 6, 2 (Fall 1998): 322-344.
—–. “The Landscape of Power: Imagineering Consumer Behavior at China’s Theme Parks.” In Scott A Lukas ed., The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, 97-112.
Rodewald, Patricia. “Developments in International Professional Exchange for Museum Educators in China.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 70-78.
Safford, Lisa. “Cultural Heritage Preservation in Modern China: Problems, Perspectives, and Potentials.” ASIANetwork Exchange 21, 1 (2014): 3-15.
Sala, Ilaria Maria. “Bringing History Up to Date: The New Museums of Macau and Hong Kong.” China Perspectives 22 (March-April, 1999): 58-67.
Schwarcz, Vera. Bridge across Broken Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Schwedes, Martin. Museumsgeschichte Chinas: von den Anfängen bis zur Gründung der Volksrepublik. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 2005.
Shao, Qin. “Exhibiting the Modern: The Creation of the First Chinese Museum, 1905-1930.” The C hina Quarterly 177 (2004).
—–. “The Model on Display.” In Shao, Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 140-97.
—–. “Waving the Red Flag: Cultural Memory and Grassroots Protest in Housing Disputes in Shanghai.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22, 1 (Spring 2010): 197-231.
Shelach-Lavi, Gideon. “Archaeology and Politics in China: Historical Paradigm and Identity Construction in Museum Exhibitions.” China Information, 33, 1 (2019): 23-45
Shih, Fang-Long. “Memory, Partial Truth and Reconciliation without Justice: The White Terror Luku Incident in Taiwan.” Taiwan in Comparative Perspective 3 (March 2011): 140-151.
Sickman, Lawrence. “Provincial Museums of North China.”The Open Court 1, no. 937 (1936).
Stanley, Nick and Siu King Chung. “Representing the Past as the Future: The Shenzhen Chinese Folk Culture Villages and the Making of Chinese Identity.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 7 (1995): 25-40.
Stokes-Rees, Emily. “Recounting History: Constructing a National Narrative in the Hong Kong Museum of History.” In Simon J. Knell, et al. eds., National Museums: New Studies from Around the World. Oxon: Routledge, 2011, 339-54.
—–. Imagining Asia: Cultural Citizenship and Nation Building in the National Museums of Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
[Abstract: Despite widespread recognition that we are living in an era of mass globalization, there has been a startling resurgence of nationalism in many regions of the world. Alongside this development, many new national museums are being built or refurbished, pointing to the critical role the telling of history plays in processes of building national identity. From new museum construction to the re-purposing of colonial monuments, and from essentialized narratives to spaces which encourage visitors to dream, this book explores the development and influence of national museums in three contemporary Asian societies – Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau.]
Stolojan-Filipesco, Vladimir. “The Second Life of a Political Cult: Official and Popular Reappropriation of Chiang Kai-shek Statues in Post-martial Law Taiwan.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 8, 1 (2022): 131-48.
[Abstract: From 1945 to the beginning of the democratization, the Chinese nationalist party ruled Taiwan through a single-party regime. After being forced out of China in 1949, it implemented several policies promoting a national imagination in which Taiwan was turned into an ideal representation of China. One of the main symbolic pillars of the regime was the personality cult dedicated to its leader, Chiang Kai-shek. If the democratization put an end to the political ritual of the authoritarian era, the physical remnants of the cult have been subject to different reappropriations by public and private actors who publicly express a positive remembering of the deceased leader. This article explores the modalities of these reappropriations and their significance for the mnemonic divide characteristic from the symbolic Taiwanese landscape.]
Su, Donghai. “Museums and Museum Philosophy in China.” Nordisk Museologi 2 (1995): 61-80.
—— . Bowuguan de chensi: Su Donghai lunwen xuan 博物馆的沉思: 苏东海论文选 (Thoughts on museums: selected essays of Su Donghai). Beijing: Wenwu, 1998.
—— . Bowuguan de chensi: Su Donghai lunwen xuan (juan er) 博物馆的沉思: 苏东海论文选 (卷二) (Thoughts on museums: selected essays of Su Donghai, vol. 2). Beijing: Wenwu, 2005.
Su, Donghai and An Laishun. “China’s First Ecomuseum–Soga Miao Community, Guizhou: The First Test Case of the International Ecomuseum Concept in China.” In Linda Young, ed., Museology and Globalisation/Muséologie et Mondialisation. Canberra: University of Canberra, 1998, 41-48.
Su, Rui and Hyung Yu Park. “Negotiating Cultural Trauma in Tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 26, 10 (2023): 1652-1668.
[Abstract: This study responses to call for an evidentiary frame that incorporates thecontested views of cultural trauma in dark tourism sites. Central to thiscontestation is a failure to break down the victim-perpetrator binary thatparticularly struggles for truth-seeking transnationally and trans-generationally. This requires a new and critical heritage interpretation,addressing traumatic historical lessons and reaching a reconciliation forfuture integration and inclusivity. With employment of semi-structureinterviews and participant observations, this study of the Memorial Hall ofthe Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders illustrates how darktourism and counter-monuments play a critical role in transformingmassacre trauma into commemorative practices. Designing and buildingnew tourism space and artworks as counter-monuments proves to be onesignificant encoding practice that negotiates more mundane andinteractive peacebuilding and reconciliation. Such negotiation contributesto a more meaningful and holistic understanding of cultural trauma,heritage interpretation, memory and identity. Its implications can inspirefuture research to explore tourism’s transformative potential forremembering, forgetting and healing.]
Svensson, Marina. “Heritage 2.0: Maintaining Affective Engagements with the Local Heritage in Taishun.” In Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 269-290.
Tarulevicz, Nicole. “Between Forgetting and Remembering: Singaporean History and the Singapore History Museum.” In Fiona Kerlogue, ed., Performing Objects: Museums, Material Culture and Performance in Southeast Asia. London: The Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2004, 31-45.
Tatlow, Didi Kirsten. “A New Look at Japan’s Unit 731 Wartime Atrocities and a U.S. Cover-Up.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 13, Issue 44, No. 3 (Nov. 16, 2015).
Taylor, Jeremy. “‘Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day’: Zuoying and the Discourse of Civilisation.” In Christina Neder and Ines Susanne Schilling, eds., Transformation! Innovation? Perspectives on Taiwan Culture. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003, 29-44.
—–. “Reading History Through the Built Environment in Taiwan.” In John Makeham and A-chin Hsiau, eds., Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 159-83.
—–. “The Production of the Chiang Kai-shek Personality Cult, 1929-1975.” The China Quarterly 185 (March 2006): 96-110.
—–. “Discovering a Nationalist Heritage in Present-day Taiwan.” China Heritage Quarterly 17 (March 2009).
—–. “QuJianghua: Disposing of and Re-appraising the Remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s Reign on Taiwan.” Journal of Contemporary History 45, 1 (2010): 181-196.
—–. “Nation, Topography, and Historiography: Writing Topographical Histories in Hong Kong.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 2 (Fall 2003): 45-74.
Tian, Mo. “The Legacy of the Seond Sin0-Japanese War in the People’s Republic of China: Mapping the Official Discourse of Memory.” The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus 20, 11.4 (2022).
Ting, Chun Chun. “The Start and the Queen: Heritage Conservation and the Emergence of a New Hong Kong Subject.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, 2 (Fall 2013): 80-129.
Ting, Vivian. “A Global Museum in the Twenty-first Century: The Making of M+, Hong Kong.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 54-64.
Tong, Xin. “Redeveloping the Heritage of Migration: The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Urban Transformation.” In Burcu Dogramaci et al. eds., Urban Exile: Theories, Methods, Research Practices. Bristol: Intellect, 2023, 396-421.
Trémon, Anne-Christine. “Introduction: L’État au musée. Politiques muséales et patrimoniales dans le monde chinois contemporain.” Gradhiva 16 (2012): 5-21.
—–. “Yingti/ruanti (hardware/software). La création d’un hall culturel hakka à Taïwan.” Gradhiva 16 (2012): 130-55.
Tsao, Ronald Chin-Jung. “Museums for Peace: Identity of Taiwan’s Peace Museums and Human Rights Parks.” ICOM, International Committee on Management, 2006.
van Crevel, Maghiel. “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today 8, 1 (2019): 127-45.
[Abstract: This essay offers some impressions of a grassroots literature group and the multifaceted nongovernmental organization of which it is a part: the Migrant Workers Home based in Picun, in the suburbs of Beijing. In migrant worker literature the subaltern definitely speaks—and this is also true for the museum of migrant worker culture that is part of the Migrant Workers Home. After comparing this museum with government-run migrant worker museums in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the essay returns to the Picun literature group and highlights the question of translatability in foreign scholarship’s engagement with China’s migrant worker poetry.]
Varutti, Marzia. “Reconfiguring the Political Role of Museums in Post-Communist China: The Case of Shanghai.” Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques 58, 4 (2004): 1085-95.
—–. “A Chinese Puzzle: The Representation of Chinese Ethnic Minorities in the Museums of Kunming, Yunnan Province of China.” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 1, 3 (2008): 35-42.
—–. “The Aesthetics and Narratives of National Museums in China.” In S. J. Knell et al. eds., National Museums: New Studies from Around the World. London: Routledge, 2011, 302-12.
—–. “The Politics of Imagining and Forgetting in Chinese Ethnic Minorities Museums.” Outlines: Critical Practice Studies 12, 2 (2010): 69-82.
—–. “Standardising Difference: The Materiality of Ethnic Minorities in the Museums of the People’s Republic of China.” In S. Dudley et al. eds., The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation. London: Routledge, 2011, 297-309.
—–. “Miniatures of the Nation: Ethnic Minority Figurines, Mannequins, and Dioramas in Chinese Museums.” Museums and Society 9, 1 (2011): 1-16.
—–. “Towards Social Inclusion in Taiwan: Museums, Equality and Indigenous Groups.” In Richard Sandell and Eithne Nightingale, eds., Museums, Equality and Social Justice. London: Routledge, 2012.
—–. “Learning to Share Knowledge. Collaborative Projects between National and Indigenous Museums in Taiwan.” In Viv Golding and Wayne Modest, eds., Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration. Oxford: Berg, 2013, 59-78.
—–. Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao. Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2014.
[Abstract: Museums in China have undergone tremendous transformations since they first appeared in the country in the late nineteenth century. Futuristic, state-of-the-art museums have today become symbols of China’s global cultural, economic and technological prominence, and over the last two decades, the number of Chinese museums has increased at an unprecedented rate, with China set to become the country with the highest number of museums in the world. But why have museums become so important? This book, based on extensive research in a number of the museums themselves, examines recent changes in their display methods, narratives, actors and architectural style. It also considers their representations of Chinese national identity, millenarian history and extraordinary cultural diversity. Through an analysis of the changes affecting not only what we observe through museums, but also the very medium of observation (i.e. museums themselves), this book provides a unique, original and timely exploration of the ongoing changes affecting Chinese society, and an evaluation of their consequences.]
Veg, Sebastian. “Testimony, History and Ethics: From the Memory of Jiabiangou Prison Camp to a Reappraisal of the Anti-Rightist Movement in Present-Day China.” The China Quarterly 218 (June 2014): 514-539.
[Abstract: The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhui’s 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou, marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yang’s book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yang’s work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone, contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today.]
—–. “Debating the Memory of the Cultural Revolution in China Today.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (August, 2016).
Veg, Sebastian, ed., Popular Memories of the Mao Era From Critical Debate to Reassessing History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: The present volume provides an overview of new forms of popular memory, in particular critical memory, of the Mao era. Focusing on the processes of private production, public dissemination, and social sanctioning of narratives of the past in contemporary China, it examines the relation between popular memories and their social construction as historical knowledge. The three parts of the book are devoted to the shifting boundary between private and public in the press and media, the reconfiguration of elite and popular discourses in cultural productions (film, visual art, and literature), and the emergence of new discourses of knowledge through innovative readings of unofficial sources. Popular memories pose a challenge to the existing historiography of the first thirty years of the People’s Republic of China. Despite the recent backlash, these more critical reflections are beginning to transform the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China.]
Vickers, Edward. “Frontiers of Memory: Conflict, Imperialism, and Official Histories in the Formation of Post-Cold War Taiwan Identity.” In Sheila M. Jager and Rana Mitter, eds., Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, 209-232.
—–. “Museums and Nationalism in Contemporary China.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 37, 3 (2007): 365-382.
—–. “Writing Museums in Taiwan.” In F. Shih, P. Tremlett, and S. Thompson, eds., Rewriting Culture in Taiwan. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. 69-101.
—–. “History, Identity and the Politics of Taiwan’s Museums: Reflections on the DPP-KMT Transition.” China Perspectives 3 (2010): 92-106.
—–. “Transcending Victimhood: Japan in the Public Historical Museums of Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.” China Perspectives no. 4 (2013): 17-28.
—–. “Celebrating the Humane Superpower: Chinese Nationalism, the Holocaust and Transnational Heritage Politics at Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum.” Holocaust Studies 29, 4 (2023): 566-587.
[Abstract: This article examines the portrayal of the Nazi Holocaust in Chinese public culture, focusing on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM). It argues that contemporary Western preoccupations with coloniality/decoloniality are unhelpful in understanding the Communist Party’s efforts to project influence abroad, and reinforce legitimacy at home. The SJRM shows how these efforts extend to fierce competition with Japan for UNESCO recognition of war-related heritage, as each country trumpets its role in saving Jews from the Holocaust. Official interest in the Holocaust as heritage remains overwhelmingly instrumental, focused on enhancing the international reputation of Shanghai and China.]
Vickers, Edward and Mark Frost, eds. Special issue: The ‘Comfort Women’ as Public History. The Asia-Pacific Journal 19, 5.1 (March 1, 2021).
Viitasaari, Erkki. “Standing their Grounds among Giants–National Identity in National or Equivalent Museums in Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore.” European Journal of Sinology 9 (2018).
Vu, Linh D. Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.
[Abstract: Linh D. Vu explains how the Chinese Nationalist regime consolidated control by honoring its millions of war dead, allowing China to emerge rapidly from the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful state, supported by strong nationalistic sentiment and institutional infrastructure. The fall of the empire, internecine conflicts, foreign invasion, and war-related disasters claimed twenty to thirty million Chinese lives. Vu draws on government records, newspapers, and petition letters from mourning families to analyze how the Nationalist regime’s commemoration of the dead and compensation of the bereaved actually fortified its central authority. By enshrining the victims of violence as national ancestors, the Republic of China connected citizenship to the idea of the nation, promoting loyalty to the “imagined community.” The regime constructed China’s first public military cemetery and hundreds of martyrs’ shrines, collectively mourned millions of fallen soldiers and civilians, and disbursed millions of yuan to tens of thousands of widows and orphans. The regime thus exerted control over the living by creating the state apparatus necessary to manage the dead. Although the Communist forces prevailed in 1949, the Nationalists had already laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through their governance of dead citizens. The Nationalist policies of glorifying and compensating the loyal dead in an age of catastrophic destruction left an important legacy: violence came to be celebrated rather than lamented.]
—–. “Commemorative Contention: The Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine and the Politics of Death.” Modern Asian Studies 56, 4 (2022).
[Abstract: This article addresses the Taipei National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine (Guomin geming zhonglie ci) as a site of contention over national sovereignty and belonging. The shrine originated in Sun Yat-sen’s aspiration to commemorate the anti-imperial martyrs of the 1911 Republic and in the Nationalist government’s attempt to marshal political allegiance in the 1920s–1940s. Upon fleeing from the mainland to Taiwan after losing to the Communist forces in 1949, the Nationalist leadership renovated the Japanesebuilt National Protection Shrine in Taipei, transforming it into the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine to house the displaced spirits of the national dead. Throughout the Cold War era, the spring and autumn sacrifices performed by heads of state and visits to the shrine by foreign dignities served to affirm the sovereignty of the Republic of China vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China. Even though the end of martial law in 1987 opened a new era marked by the Nationalist Party’s loss of political hegemony, the shrine continued to adhere to the Nationalist Party’s ideology and version of history. Far from embodying a place of remembrance and mourning for war victims, the palace-style compound is a site of contested sovereignty exaggerated by China’s extraordinary growth and Taiwan’s transforming identity. The enshrined dead have found a new role as both an assertion of the island’s autonomy and a reflection of its dynamism. The departed, albeit silent, hold power in the malleability of their memories, and each permutation of how the past is remembered hosts its own tension.]
Vynckier, Henk. “Museifying Formosa: George Mackay’s Far From Formosa.” In Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven Yao, eds., Sinographies: Writing China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 247-270.
Wagner, Rudolf. “Reading the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Peking: The Tribulations of the Implied Pilgrim.” In Susan Naquin and Chun-fang Yu, eds., Pilgrim and Sacred Sites in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 378-423.
—–. “Ritual, Architecture, Politics and Publicity during the Republic: Enshrining Sun Yat-sen,” in Jeffrey Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011, 223-78.
Wakeman, Frederic. “Revolutionary Rites: The Remains of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung.” Representations 10 (Spring 1985): 146-93.
—–. “Mao’s Remains.” In James Watson and Evelyn Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Wang, Cangbai. “Heritage as Theatre: Re-conceptualizing Heritage-making in Urban China.” China Information 31, 2 (2017) 195-215.
—–. “How Does a House Remember? Heritage-ising Return Migration in an Indonesian-Chinese House Museum in Guangdong, PRC.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, 4 (2014): 454-474.
—–. Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas: Migration Histories and the Cultural Heritage of the Homeland. London: Routledge, 2021.
[Abstract: Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas is the first book to analyse the recent upsurge in museums on Chinese diasporas in China. Examining heritage-making beyond the nation state, the book provides a much-needed, critical examination of China’s engagement with its diasporic communities. Drawing on fieldwork in more than ten museums, as well as interviews with museum practitioners and archival study, Wang offers a timely analysis of the complex ways in which Chinese diasporas are represented in the museum space of China, the ancestral homeland. Arguing that diasporic heritage is highly ambivalent and introducing a diasporic perspective to the study of cultural heritage, this book opens up a new avenue of inquiry into the study and management of cultural heritage in China and beyond. Most importantly, perhaps, Wang sheds new light on the dynamic between China and Chinese diasporas through the lens of the museum. [The book] takes a transnational perspective that will draw attention to the under-researched connections between heritage, mobility and meaning in a global context. As such, this cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to scholars and students working in the museum and heritage studies fields, as well as those studying Asia, China, migration and diaspora, anthropology, history and culture.]
Wang, Eugene Y. “Perceptions of Change, Changes of Perception: West Lake as Contested Site/Sight in the Wake of the 1911 Revolution.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 73-122.
Wang, Fang (Marily) and Xiao-hong Duan. “Museum Audiences and Public Education: Examples from Guangdong Museum.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 142-48.
Wang Hongjun 王宏鈞, ed. Zhongguo bowuguanxue jichu 中国博物馆学基础 (Foundation of Chinese museum studies). Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2001. [revised version of original 1990 edition]
Wang, Liping. “Creating a National Symbol: The Sun Yatsen Memorial in Nanjing.” Republican China 21, 2 (April 1996): 23-63.
Wang, Qizhi and Gang Chen. “A Visitor-orientated Exhibition at Nanjing Museum.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 43-53.
Wang, Shu-Li. “Exhibiting the Nation: Cultural Flows, Transnational Exchanges, and the Development of Museums in Japan and China, 1900-1950.” In Carolien Stotle and Yoshiyuke Kikuchi, eds., Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017, 47-72.
Wang, Xian. “Contested Memories: An Imaginary Museum for a Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyr, Liu Hulan.” Modern China 49, 5 (2023): 231-63.
[Abstract: Over the past few years, the Chinese government has sought to assert ideological dominance and rebuild the legitimacy of the Communist Party regime through control of national memory. Although collective memory is shaped by the ruling government through ideological maneuvering, it is also reinterpreted in literature, media, and art. This article examines both the state-sanctioned narratives and the reproductions of one young female revolutionary martyr, Liu Hulan (1932–1947), to explore how the process of making Liu a martyr contributed to collective memory, how gender and sexuality support or problematize state-sponsored ideology, and how contemporary rewritings of Liu’s martyrdom question state ideology and nationalism. This article establishes an imaginary museum for Liu Hulan, exhibiting official memories and countermemories in juxtaposition. It shows that chastity and traditional gender roles remain constant concerns in the creation and commemoration of female revolutionary martyrs.]
Wang, Yu. “The Myth of ‘Shanghai Ark’ and the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum.” University of Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought 6 (2017): 107–130.
Wang, Zheng. “National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory: Patriotic Campaign in China.” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 783-806.
[Abstract: This manuscript explores the state’s political use of the past and the function of history education in political transition and foreign relations. Modern historical consciousness in China is largely characterized by the “one hundred years of humiliation” from mid-1800s to mid- 1900s when China was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists. This research focuses initially on how such historical memory has been reinforced by the current regime’s educational socialization through the national Patriotic Education Campaign after 1991. It then explores the impact of this institutionalized historical consciousness on the formation of national identity and foreign relations. This study suggests that, even though existing theories and literature illuminate certain aspects of China’s political transition and foreign affairs behavior, a full explanatory picture emerges only after these phenomena and actions are analyzed through the “lenses” of history and memory]
—–. Never Forget National Humiliation in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. NY: Columbia University Press, 2012.
[Abstract: How could the CCP not only survive but even thrive, regaining the support of many Chinese citizens after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989? Why has popular sentiment turned toward anti-Western nationalism despite the anti-dictatorship democratic movements of the 1980s? And why has China been more assertive toward the United States and Japan in foreign policy but relatively conciliatory toward smaller countries in conflict? Offering an explanation for these unexpected trends, Wang follows the Communist government’s ideological reeducation of the public, which relentlessly portrays China as the victim of foreign imperialist bullying during “one hundred years of humiliation.” By concentrating on the telling and teaching of history in today’s China, Wang illuminates the thinking of the young patriots who will lead this rising power in the twenty-first century. Wang visits China’s primary schools and memory sites and reads its history textbooks, arguing that China’s rise should not be viewed through a single lens, such as economics or military growth, but from a more comprehensive perspective that takes national identity and domestic discourse into account. Since it is the prime raw material for constructing China’s national identity, historical memory is the key to unlocking the inner mystery of the Chinese. From this vantage point, Wang tracks the CCP’s use of history education to glorify the party, reestablish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era. The institutionalization of this manipulated historical consciousness now directs political discourse and foreign policy, and Wang demonstrates its important role in China’s rise.]
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Watson, Rubie. “Palaces, Museums, and Squares: Chinese National Spaces.” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 7-19.
—–. “Tales of Two ‘Chinese’ History Museums: Taipei and Hong Kong.” Curator: The Museum Journal 41, 3 (Sept. 1998): 167-77.
Wei, Qiaowei. “Community Archaeology and Alternative Interpretation of the Past through Private Museums in Shanghai, China.” Archaeologies 11, 2 (2015): 204–219
West, Andy. “Collecting the Modern City: Material Culture and People in Kunming, Southern China.” In Fiona Kerlogue, ed., Performing Objects: Museums, Material Culture and Performance in Southeast Asia. London: The Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2004, 169-86.
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Wu, Hung. “Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments.” Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 84-117.
—–. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. [MCLC Resource Center review by Robin Visser]
Xie, Nian and Liu Jun. “Museum Preserves Miao Culture.” Beijing Review (Nov. 1999).
Yin-wang, Reginald and Annette Kwok. “Le mausolee de president Mao.” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 210 (Feb. 1979): 51-53.
Yang, Dominic Meng-Hsuan. “Noble Ghosts, Empty Graves, and Suppressed Traumas The Heroic Tale of ‘Taiyuan’s Five Hundred Martyrs’ in the Chinese Civil War.” Historical Reflections 41, 3 (2015): 109-124.
—–. The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Yang, Yi. “A New Landmark for Taiwanese Literature: National Museum of Taiwanese Literature.” www.culture.tw website.
Yao, Yuan and Rongbin Han. “Challenging, But Not Trouble-Making: Cultural Elites in China’s Urban Heritage Preservation.” Journal of Contemporary China 25, no. 98 (March 2016): 292-306.
[Abstract: Urban heritage preservation is gaining momentum in China as massive urban renovation has put many historical sites under threat. A group of renowned scholars, experts and artists have played an important role in leading and coordinating the movement. How do these cultural elites promote urban heritage preservation? How do they mediate state–society interactions and navigate the authoritarian regime to achieve their goals? This article explores how cultural elites take advantage of their intermediary position between officialdom and citizenry by not only mobilizing urban residents and the media to counter-balance the state, but also balancing different levels and sectors of the party-state against each other. Such a ‘double balance’ approach maximizes their influence within both the state and society, pushing forward the otherwise non-prioritized goal of heritage preservation.]
Yi, Sabrina Hong. “The Suojia Ecomuseum in China: A New Rural Landscape Planning Approach for Ethnic Minority People?” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 5, 4 (2013): 51-69.
Yin, Tongyun. “From Context to Subject: The Poetics and Politics of Creating and Exhibiting Artwork in the National Museum of China.” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, 1 (Fall 2017): 101-16.
Zemanek, Adina.” National History and Generationsal Memory: Taiwanese Comic Books as Lieux de Memoire.” positions: asia critique 28, 2 (May 2020): 363-88.
Zhang, Everett Y. “Grieving at Chongqing’s Red Guard Graveyard: In the Name of Life Itself.” The China Journal 70 (July 2013): 24-47.
[Abstract: This article presents a historical and ethnographic account of the event of mourning at the Graveyard for the Red Guards in Chongqing. Built in the Cultural Revolution to glorify about 450 Red Guards as “revolutionary martyrs”, this graveyard testifies to the tragic nature of their deaths, which resulted from fighting between two factions for their shared goal of “defending Chairman Mao”. The post-Mao reform negated the Cultural Revolution. In a way, their deaths and mourning their deaths were stigmatized, resulting in their “second death”, but recent important changes in Chinese society have allowed the resurgence of grieving for them, culminating in the granting of the official title of “cultural relic” to the graveyard. Opening up a space to contest their stigmatization and to invalidate the official judgement about the Cultural Revolution, this title signifies the rising imperative to account for every death in the name of life itself.]
Zhang, Lisheng. “Ambivalent Nostalgia: Commemorating Zhiqing in the Jianchuan Museum Complex.” Made in China Journal (Jan-June 2022).
Zhao, Jing. “Collaborations Between Museums and Schools: Developing Integrated Resources for Schools at the National Museum of China.” In Caroline Lang and John Reeve, eds., New Museum Practice in Asia. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 214-23.
Zhongguo bowuguan xiehui 中国博物馆协会, ed. Huigu yu zhanwang: Zhongguo bowuguan fazhan bainian 回顾与展望: 中国博物馆发展百年 (Looking back and looking forward: 100 years of development of Chinese museums). Beijing: Zijicheng, 2005.
Zhongguo minzu bowuguan 中国民族博物馆, ed. Minzu bowuguan xue yanjiu 民族博物馆研究 (Research into ethnography museum studies). Beijing: Minzu, 2001. [collection of essays]
Zhu, Pei. Root and Contemporaneity. Ed/intro Brian Carter and Kristin Stapleton. Buffalo: University of Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning, Confucius Institute Distinguished Architecture Lecture, 2019. [about Zhu’s design for the Jingdezhen Museum]
Zhu, Yujie. Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
[Abstract: The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantations and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed the whole way by tourists, who have bought tickets for the privilege. The traditional wedding ceremonies are performed for the ethnic tourism industry in Lijiang, a World Heritage town in southwest China. This book examines how heritage interacts with social-cultural changes and how individuals perform and negotiate their identities through daily practices that include tourism, on the one hand, and the performance of ethnicity on the other. The wedding performances in Lijiang not only serve as a heritage ‘product’ but show how the heritage and tourism industry helps to shape people’s values, dreams and expectations. This book also explores the rise of ‘romantic consumerism’ in contemporary China. Chinese dissatisfaction with the urban mundane leads to romanticized interests in practices and people deemed to be natural, ethnic, spiritual and aesthetic, and a search for tradition and authenticity. But what, exactly, are tradition and authenticity, and what happens to them when they are turned into performance?
—–. “Hot Interpretations of Difficult Heritage: The Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre in China.” Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 12, no. 1 (2022): 32-44.
Zhu, Yujie and Christina Maags. Heritage Politics in China: The Power of the Past. London: Routledge, 2020.
[Abstract: This book studies the impact of heritage policies and discourses on the Chinese state and Chinese society. It sheds light on the way Chinese heritage policies have transformed the narratives and cultural practices of the past to serve the interests of the present. As well as reinforcing a collective social identity, heritage in China has served as an instrument of governance and regulation at home and a tool to generate soft power abroad. Drawing on a critical analysis of heritage policies and laws, empirical case studies and interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and local communities, the authors off er a comprehensive perspective on the role that cultural heritage plays in Chinese politics and policy. They argue that heritage-making appropriates international, national, and local values, thereby transforming it into a public good suitable for commercial exploitation. By framing heritage as a site of cooperation, contestation, and negotiation, this book contributes to our understanding of the complex nature of heritage in the rapidly shifting landscape of contemporary China.]
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Historical Museums, Memorial Sites, Theme Parks, etc.
General Resources
Antiquities and Monuments Office (Hong Kong)
Beijing wenbo (a site devoted to culture and museums in the Beijing area; click “Wenbo zhanguan” for a list of museums)
Chinese Association of Museums (Zhonghua minguo bowuguan xuehui; Taiwan) [excellent general source of information on Taiwan museums]
Chnmuseum.com (Zhongbo wang; excellent site for general information on museums throughout China)
Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan [state agency that oversees cultural affairs, including museums, in Taiwan]
Cultural Affairs Bureau (Macau) [oversees museums and cultural heritage in the Macau SAR]
Internet Museum: Museum Communication Network Since 1996 [in Japanese]
State Administration of Cultural Heritage (Guojia wenwu ju) [the main state organization in the PRC overseeing cultural preservation, heritage, and museums]
World Heritage Sites in China (MIT Chinese Students and Scholars Association) [lots of photographs and narrative description]
Zhongguo bowuguan 中国博物馆 (Chinese museums)
Zhongguo bowuguan tongxun 中国博物馆通讯 (Chinese museums newsletter)
Zhongguo wenwu bao 中国文物报 (Chinese cultural relics paper) [official organ of the Cultural Relics Bureau, as is the journal Wenwu 文物]
Zhongguo wenwu xinxi wang 中国文物信息网 (China cultural relics information net) [official site of the Zhongguo wenwu ju, the Cultural Relics Bureau; affiliated with the Bureau’s publication Zhongguo wenwu bao (Chinese cultural relics paper)]
PRC Museums and Exhibitionary Spaces
9-18 Historical Museum (九一八历史博物馆; Shenyang)
Agricultural Museum of China (中国农业博物馆; Beijing)
Anhui Museum (安徽省博物馆)
Beijing Lu Xun Museum (北京鲁迅博物馆)
Capital Museum (首都博物馆; Beijing)
Beijing Urban Planning Hall (北京规划展览馆)
Changyu Wine Culture Museum (Zhangyu jiu wenhua bowuguan; Yantai, Shandong) [official corporate museum of the Changyu Wine Company, founded by Zhang Bishi in 1892]
China Advertisement Museum (中国广告博物馆; Beijing)
China Colour Lantern Museum (中国彩灯博物馆; Sichuan)
Chinaspirit.net (Minzu hun; official CCP site sponsored by the CCP Youth League, the History Study Office of the Central Committee, and the National Archives Office; contains links to many virtual memorial halls for great leaders and martyrs)
China Maritime Museum (Zhongguo hanghai bowuguan; near Shanghai]
Chinese Military Museum (Zhongguo junshi bowuguan; Beijing)
China Millennium Monument (Zhonghua shiji tan) (built in 1999 in Beijing, next to the Military Museum)
China Museum of Telecommunications (Zhongguo tongxin bowuguan) [established in 2001; located in Haidian district of Beijing]
China National Film Museum (Zhongguo dianying bowuguan; Beijing)
China Port Museum (中国港口博物馆; Ningbo)
China Railway Museum (Zhongguo tiedao bowuguan; Beijing)
Chinese International Friendship Museum (Zhongguo guoji youyi bowuguan; Beijing)
Chinese Nationalities Museum of Inner Mongolia (Nei Menggu minzu bowuguan)
Du Fu Museum (Du Fu caotang; Chengdu)
Foshan Museum (Foshan shi bowuguan)
Guangdong Provincial Museum (Guangdong sheng bowuguan; Guangzhou)
Henan Museum (Henan bowuguan) [one of the oldest and finest museums in China]
Inner Mongolia Museum (Nei menggu bowuguan)
Jilin University Museum (Jilin daxue bowuguan)
Jimei Museum of Chairman Mao Badges (Jimei, Fujian)
Jianchuan Museum (建川博物馆; Anren, Dayi County, Chengdu Municipality, Sichuan) [a complex of 4 private museum series–War of Resistance series, Red Era series, Folk series, and Earthquake series–initiated and funded by Fan Jianchuan]
Labor Museum 劳务工博物馆 (Bao’an, Shenzhen)
League of Left-Wing Writers Meeting Hall Memorial (中国左翼作家联盟会址纪念馆; Shanghai)
Lei Feng Memorial Hall (Lei Feng jinianguan; Fushun, Liaoning)
Liangzhu Culture Museum (Liangzhu wenhua bowuguan) [near Hangzhou, Zhejiang]
Longhua Martyrs Memorial Park (Longhua lieshi lingyuan). [nicely developed website; contains pages for 566 martyrs, with biographies, images, and text; you can even send virtual flowers to your favorite martyr]
Luoyang Museum (Luoyang bowuguan)
Mao Zedong Mausoleum 毛泽东纪念堂 (Beijing)
Museum of Chinese Ethnology (Zhongguo minzu bowuguan) [although it has an extensive and informative website, the museum does not yet exist]
Museum of the Imperial Palace of the Puppet Manchu State (Wei man huang gong bowuyuan; Changchun)
Museum of Migrant Workers 农民工博物馆 (Guangzhou)
Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Arts 打工文化艺术博物馆 (Picun, Beijing)
The Museum of Terra Cotta Soldiers and Horses of Qinshihuang(秦始皇兵马俑博物馆; Xian)
Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japan (中国人民抗日战争纪念馆; Wanping; outside Beijing)
Nanjing Lu Xun Memorial Hall (南京鲁迅纪念馆)
Nanjing Municipal Museum (南京市博物馆)
Nanjing Museum (南京博物馆) [after the Palace Museum and Henan Museum, one of the finest collections in the PRC]
Nanjing Presidential Palace (南京总统府) [also known as the Nanjing Zhongguo jindai shi yizhi bowuguan, Nanjing Ruins Museum of Modern Chinese History]
Nantong City Museum (南通城市博物馆)
Nantong Museum (南通博物院; Nantong, Jiangsu)
National Museum of China (中国国家博物馆) [the new amalgamation of the old Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution)
National Museum of Classic Books (国家典籍博物馆; affiliated with the National Library of China, Beijing)
National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (中国现代文学馆; Beijing)
National Museum of Chinese Writing (中国文字博物馆; Anyang, Henan)
Nationalities Culture Palace (民族文化宫; Beijing)
New Culture Memorial Hall (新文化运动纪念馆) [organized and run by the National Museum of China in the famous “Red Building” on the old campus of Beijing University)
Overseas Chinese History Museum of China (中国华侨历史博物馆; Beijing)
Palace Museum (故宫博物院; Beijing)
Resist America, Aid Korea War Memorial Hall (Kang Mei yuan Chao jinianguan; Dandong)
Qingzhou Museum (Qingzhou bowuguan; Shandong)
Shaanxi History Museum (陕西历史博物馆; Xian)
Shandong Provincial Museum (山东省博物馆; Jinan)
Shanghai Municipal History Museum (上海市历史博物馆) [at the base of the Pudong Tower]
Shanghai Museum (上海博物馆)
Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology (上海科技馆) [in Pudong, on Century Plaza]
Shanghai Lu Xun Memorial Hall (上海鲁迅纪念馆)
Shanghai Police Museum (上海公安博物馆)
Shikumen Museum (Wulixiang: Shikumen jumin chenlieshi) [in the Xintiandi area of Shanghai, very near the First Meeting Place of the CCP]
Sichuan University Museum (四川大学博物馆; Chengdu)
Sino-Japanese War of 1894 Naval Battle Exhibition Hall (甲午海战馆; Weihai, Shandong)
Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China (中国共产党第一次代表大会会址) [Shanghai]
Suzhou Museum (苏州博物馆) [designed by I. M. Pei, opened in Oct. 2006]
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Zhongshan, Guangdong)
Taiping Rebellion History Museum (太平天国历史博物馆; Nanjing)
Tourist Ticket Museum (旅游门票博物馆) [Zhenjiang, Jiangsu e-museum (I think)]
Unit 731 Crimes Exhibition Hall (侵华日军第七三一部队罪证陈列馆) [in Pingfang, about 30 km outside of Harbin, Heilongjiang]
Water Technology Museum (Jishui jishu bowuguan) [Nantong, Jiangsu]
Western Han Mausoleum of the Nanyue King Museum (Xi Han Nanyue wang bowuguan; Guangzhou)
Xinhai Revolution Museum (Xinhai geming bowuguan; Wuhan)
Yuhuatai Martyrs Park (Yuhuatai lieshi lingyuan) [huge memorial park and museum in Nanjing devoted to martyrs executed at Yuhuatai]
Yunnan Ethnic Nationalities Museum (Yunnan minzu bowuguan; Kunming)
Zhou Enlai Memorial Hall (Zhou Enlai jinianguan) [Huai’an, Jiangsu]
Zhejiang Provincial Museum (浙江省博物馆, Hangzhou)
Taiwan
Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village (Jiuzu wenhua cun; Taiwan)
Armed Forces Museum of Taiwan (國軍歷史文物館; Taipei)
Hu Shi Memorial Museum (Hu Shi jinianguan; Nangang, Academia Sinica)
Land Reform Museum (Tudi gaige jinianguan; Taiwan)
Miniatures Museum of Taiwan (Xiuzhen bowuguan; Taiwan)
Museum of World Religions (Shijie zongjiao bowuguan; Taipei)
National Museum of History (Guoli lishi bowuguan; Taiwan)
National Museum of Prehistory (Guoli Taiwan shiqian wenhua bowuguan)
National Museum of Taiwan History (Guoli Taiwan lishi bowuguan; Tainan)
National Museum of Taiwanese Literature (Guoli Taiwan wenxue guan; Tainan) [established in 2003]
National Palace Museum (Guoli gugong bowuyuan)
Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology (Shisanhang bowuguan; Bali, Taipei County)
Shung Ye Formosan Museum of Aborigines (Shun Yi Taiwan yuanzhumin bowuguan)
Taiwan Memory Digital Photo Museum (Taiwan lao zhaopian)
Wulai Atayal Museum (Wulai, Taipei County)
Hong Kong/Macau
Hong Kong Heritage Museum (香港文化博物館)
Hong Kong Maritime Museum (香港海事博物館)
Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence (香港海防博物館)
Hong Kong Museum of History (香港歷史博物館
Museum of Macau (澳門博物館)
Sheung Yiu Folk Museum (上窰民俗文物館; New Territories, HK)
Online Museums
Chinese Holocaust Memorial (中国文革受难者纪念园)
Virtual Museum of the Cultural Revolution
“Chinese” Museums in the West
Chinese Holocaust Museum of the United States (currently has small site in Oakland, CA, with plans for a permanent museum)