1 Just as Moscow had its Museum of the Revolution, Red Army Museum, and Gorky Museum, Beijing followed with the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the Military Museum, and the Lu Xun Memorial Hall. Wang Yeqiu, who would go on to develop the exhibition at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, traveled with a delegation to Moscow in 1950, during which time he met with Alexander Gerasimov, the leading Soviet proponent of socialist realist oil painting, and visited revolutionary history museums such as the Lenin Museum (Wang Yeqiu 1997, 261–272).

2 Museum activities resumed more vigorously in the latter half of the Cultural Revolution. As is well known, the early 1970s was a prolific period for archaeology work, undertaken in many cases by museums and their staffs. For general information on museums in the Cultural Revolution, see Lü Jimin 1998, 89–100.

3 For Mao's phrase, see Schram 1974, 267. This tendency to focus on the present rather than on an objectified past existed already during the Great Leap Forward, when one of the slogans in the museum field was “Stressing the present, not the past, and making the past serve the present.”

4 To put post-Mao museum growth in perspective, in 1949 China had around twenty museums. By the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, there were 160. From 1980 to 1999, the number of museums rose from 365 to 1,357 (Wang Hongjun 2001, 114). Donghai Su (1995) writes, “Over approximately the last ten years, museums have developed considerably in terms of number, quality and type. The statistics show that more than 1000 museums have been established since 1980… . Up to the end of 1993, the number of museums funded and supervised by the Chinese governments at different levels reached 1130.”

5 For a discussion of post-Mao changes in historiography, see Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 2006.

6 For a collection of state laws and official proclamations regarding cultural heritage, see Wang Hongjun 2001, 493–559. For the reference to “spiritual civilization,” see ibid., 511.

7 Article 22 of the 1982 Constitution of the PRC reads, “The state promotes the development of literature and art, the press, broadcasting and television undertakings, publishing and distribution services, libraries, museums, cultural centres and other cultural undertakings, that serve the people and socialism, and sponsors mass cultural activities. The state protects places of scenic and historical interest, valuable cultural monuments and relics and other important items of China's historical and cultural heritage” (http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html).

8 By the year 2000, the PRC ranked seventh in the total number of museums, well below the United States (more than 8,000), Germany (more than 4,500), and Italy (just less than 3,500) (Wang Hongjun 2001, 129–130). In the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, museum construction and renovation continued at a fast past. According to Donghai Su (1995), in the 2000s China entered a new peak in museum construction. Some project that by 2015, China will have half again as many museums as it does today.

9 Paul Cohen (2002) has shown that the 1990s cultural field was replete with texts that sought to recall China's history of national humiliations at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialists, the China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu) books being the most obvious examples.

10 Studies of the emerging nationalism of the 1990s are too numerous to mention. See, for instance, Guo Yingjie 2004.

11 See Renmin ribao, June 1, 1991. Jiang's call for enhanced patriotic education was generally referred to as “two histories, one situation” (liang shi yi qing), a condensation of the quotation cited above.

12 See Wang Hongjun 2001, 522–525. The language of this state document reveals, to my mind, a strong, unspoken self-consciousness about the dangerous appeal of popular culture forms in distracting youths away from revolutionary history.

13 See Wang Maohua 1998 for a complete listing of the one hundred sites, as well as a detailed description of each. A second list of one hundred was later added to the original.

14 The Museum of the Chinese Revolution, for example, edited a four-volume pictorial history of modern China—using photographs and images of artifacts from the museum collection—titled China: Moving from Humiliation to Glory (ZGGMBWG 1997).

15 A Temple to the PLA, Video & Article by Joel Martinsen at Danwei.ORG

16 Museums have proliferated worldwide in the past three decades. According to one account, three quarters of all active museums in the world today were established after 1945 (Weil 2002, 31). In China, the percentage would be higher still.

17 Firms such as Ralph Applebaum Associates (RAA, New York), Gallagher & Associates (Bethesda), Jack Rouse (Cincinnati), and Lord Cultural Resources (Toronto) are all active in the PRC. RAA designed exhibits in the Capital Museum (Beijing) and the Deng Xiaoping Memorial Hall (Guang'an, Sichuan). Gallagher and Associates was involved in the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, and Jack Rouse designed the exhibits for the Three Gorges Museum (Chongqing).

18 Shou yi is short for shouxian qiyi. See “Jian Xinhai geming bowuguan de zhongyao yiyi he zuoyong” (The important significance and function of establishing the Xinhai Revolution Museum). Xinhai geming bowuguan zhuanti. http://www.cnhan.com/gb/content/2002–12/26/content_232641.htm, accessed August 2, 2012.

19 See the Yifang website: http://news.fdc.com.cn/lsztc/259166.htm, accessed August 2, 2012.

20 Zhang Yuteng (2003, 99–100) writes, without any apparent criticism, that the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung, Taiwan, is motivated by a kind of “colonial” mentality in its desire to imitate the model of Western nations in building science museums. A history of the museum begins with the statement, “All civilized nations of the world have had large-scale science museums with long histories” (Zhang Yuteng 1993, 4), which suggests that science museums are symbols of a nation's advancement.

21 Cao Huoxing wrote the song in 1943 during the War of Resistance, well before New China had materialized.

22 There are an increasing number of privately owned and funded museums in China, but the vast majority of Chinese museums continue to be government funded. It is also true, however, that some state-run museums are forced to rely increasingly on non-state funding (donations and revenue from visitors). James Flath (2002, 54) argues that that frees them from the imposition of official statist narratives of history, though this is not necessarily the case. Funding is clearly a concern for Chinese museologists. Wang Hongjun, for example, devotes a chapter of his book on museum studies to the changing economic climate faced by museums in the West and China. He mentions the Shanghai Museum, which relied heavily on outside donations for the construction of its new museum in the mid-1990s, as an example of how museums in general will have to cope in the era of the “socialist market economy” (Wang Hongjun 2001, 398–414). For a good overview of private museums in the PRC, see Song Xiangguang and Li Zhiling 2006.

23 Her (2001) writes that in 2001 Taiwan had some one hundred private museums, almost one-third of the total (Zhang Yuteng 2003, 101).

24 See story in the New York Times, Jan. 1, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/business/worldbusiness/02yuan.html.

25 Buruma (2002, 8) suggests that the idea for the memorial was Deng Xiaoping's. Daqing Yang (2002) states that the memorial was a direct response to the textbook debates of 1982.

26 The memorial is constructed on the site of a mass grave of victims that was unearthed in the early 1980s. For a detailed look at the excavation of this site, see Zhu 2002.

27 Qi 1999a, 8. The memorial won the Liang Sicheng Prize for design in 2000. This was the first year of the prize, and it was presented to several architects for work done as far back as 1960.

28 Qi (1999a) shows awareness of the difference of doing a memorial for Yuhuatai and the Nanjing Massacre memorial.

29 The sculpture is apparently based on a shot in the American missionary John Magee's documentary film footage of the atrocities.

30 Käthe Kollwitz, a German leftist artist, frequently used images of mothers separated from dead children or holding dead children in her etchings, woodblock prints, and sculptures. An enlarged version of her sculpture Mother with Her Dead Son was placed in the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny in the famous Neue Wache in Berlin.

31 In 2009, the Nanjing Spoken Drama Troupe performed a play called Fallen (Lunxian). See http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/dfpd/2009–12/14/content_9174415.htm, accessed July 31, 2012. On the shoe display, see http://news.jxnews.com.cn/system/2010/08/15/011455548.shtml, accessed July 31, 2102.

32 I do not mean to suggest that this and other memorial sites are not sometimes used by people for the expression of local and personal concerns that are at odds with official state policy, only that these uses are ultimately circumscribed by the state.

33 The number appears in multiple places in the site, most prominently in the prefatory hall of the main exhibition space. It is the “official” number of people killed in the massacre, a number that may have been arrived at by upping the ante of the 290,000 thought to have died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

34 The artist Wu Weishan designed the sculptures. See Wang Wenzhang 2008 and Wu Weishan 2008.

35 One of the design ideals the designers were working with in developing the plan for the renovation was to create a commemorative space (jinianxing changsuo). They also sought to integrate the new design with the original structures. See He, Ni, and Liu 2008, 11.