Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Today we are joined by Emily Matson and James Gethyn Evans.

Emily Matson is an assistant teaching professor at Georgetown University with a joint appointment in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service's Asian Studies Program and the College of Arts & Sciences' History Department, as well as a research affiliate at the University of Virginia's East Asia Center. Her research interests include Northeastern China, historical memory, museums, and China's World War II.

James is a scholar of modern and contemporary China with a focus on China’s foreign relations with the Global South. He's a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where his dissertation examines how the People’s Republic of China engaged a global network of revolutionaries through the promotion of Mao Zedong Thought as a form of anti-imperialist Third World solidarity. His research interests include China’s foreign relations with non-state actors, the global impact of Maoism, and anti-imperialism and decolonization movements during the Cold War.

Emily and James, welcome to the show.

Emily Matson: Thanks so much.

James Gethyn Evans: Thanks for having us.

Eleanor M. Albert: I like to start these conversations on a touch of a personal note. I think it helps us warm up and also as people who study a country very far away from us, it's always interesting to know how you came to study China, and not just China, but also more substantially historical narratives. And so in essence, what are your China stories? I'll turn to Emily first.

Emily Matson: Thanks, Eleanor. I'll give the elevator pitch version. When I was little and actually was living abroad in Tokyo, I went to an international school and in first grade my teacher was Chinese, and for art class one day she taught us how to write some basic characters for a calligraphy lesson. From that point on, I really became obsessed with learning how to write Chinese characters. Fast forward to years later in high school, my high school finally started offering a Chinese language program. I jumped on that and then got a chance from a Chinese government scholarship to study abroad, take a gap year studying in Beijing at Beijing Language and Culture University. My interest grew from there.

In undergrad I realized I wanted to focus on history as a way to explain a lot of what I saw in China. Not having that background when I first went to study abroad in China, I was like, "Why is everything the way that it is?" And for me, the historical lens was really valuable for that reason. 

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. The “5,000 years of history” rings very true in present-day China. How about you, James? How did China come to be such an important part of your life and research?

James Gethyn Evans: I started having a vague idea that this place called China existed when I was in high school. It was very much part of the narrative of there's this growing power, we don't really know much about it. When I went to undergraduate in the [United Kingdom]—I actually trained as a political scientist—but I lived quite far out of the town center, but [I] was right next to the language center. It was $20 a month or $20 a semester to take a language. And I thought, "When else am I going to be able to take a really hard language this cheap?" One of my advisors in undergrad was a China specialist. It took off from there. Like Emily, I went to Beijing Language University. I worked in Beijing, I've worked in Shanghai, a few other places.

When I moved to the United States, I started working for a research center at Harvard University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. That allowed me to start taking classes on the side, experimenting.

Part of why history is so compelling is that you really get attracted to the power of history. The personal stories that get you into understanding questions of identity, questions of narrative, I think are really well drawn out in the history discipline. I'm a very accidental academic in that sense. But like Emily, we came upon China both by happenstance and this interest grew. There was something intriguing there that we just really wanted to find out more about.

Eleanor M. Albert: Unsurprisingly, my own trajectory echoes some of this. I randomly decided to take Chinese. I stumbled upon the history and was just blown away by what I would call contemporary Chinese history. The interactions starting with the West and how prominent the narratives around those interactions have been for how China sees itself in the world—I think has been so interesting.

But I think a good way to ground this would be to start with talking about how history fits into governance in the People's Republic of China. The foundation of the PRC was in 1949, and that in many ways represented the end of what they call the “Century of Humiliation,” bookending empire to rise of a new communist country. I'm curious how PRC leaders draw on this time period to shape, not just its national narratives about itself, but its relationship to the outside world. So I'll ask Emily Matson to talk about this first and then James, chime in.

Emily Matson: The “Century of Humiliation,” bainian guochi, is such a crucial component of Chinese nationalism today, but what I didn't realize when I started researching it was that this legacy dates back to the Republic of China (ROC). It was actually the Republic of China, the first national humiliation day was set for… It was in May, and it was set to commemorate the 21 demands that Japan imposed on the Republic of China during World War II.

So if you think about the “Century of  Humiliation” rhetoric and Chiang Kai-shek, when the nationalist government rose to power in the late 1920s, [it] started implementing official national days of humiliation. This does not just start with the Chinese Communist Party and the PRC, but there are a lot of interesting continuities between the Republic of China government and the People's Republic of China government.

Whether you're looking at the ROC or the PRC, this narrative of the “Century of Humiliation,” humiliation by foreign powers, both Western, starting with the Opium Wars and then particularly culminating with the Japanese invasion in the 1930s culminating in World War II. It's just key for Chinese national identity—this idea that China has this great historical civilization; it fell into decline.

But now under Xi Jinping in particular, this concept of the narrative of rejuvenation, this fact that China is reclaiming its historical place. There's a scholar who's really influenced me called Zheng Wang, who coins these different narratives, and how they've changed over time. This idea of the “Century of Humiliation” was not as much emphasized during the Mao era from 1949 to 1976 as it is today, but particularly after the 1970s, it started to reemerge.

Eleanor M. Albert: How about you, James, in thinking about history and the role that it plays in the conceptualization of the People's Republic of China and how it governs itself and how it governs its foreign relations?

James Gethyn Evans: Just to touch on Emily’s point about the “Century of Humiliation.” 1949 is the official end to the “Century of Humiliation.” We've had 100 years of, starting from the Opium Wars and moving into finally the Chinese Communist Party’s victory and the end of the civil war in ‘49—end of humiliation. That's only one end to this “Century of Humiliation.” It very much continues. Those similar themes continue past ’49. We're still building this country right into the Sino-Soviet split. It is in part reframing the Soviet Union at the time in the 1960s and '70s as just one of many foreign imperial powers who just like in the nineteenth century took advantage of China.

It's part of this broader narrative of China standing up that persists into the present. There's this very odd tension with framings like the “Century of Humiliation” in that it's something that's finished, but it's also something that's ongoing. We had the “Century of Humiliation,” but these themes are still persistent. One of the reasons that we are going to be able to throw this off is because of the party. Something that's really powerful about this narrative to me is that it really collapses this distinction between China as a state, the Chinese Communist Party, and China as this fluffy historical entity that may or may not have existed for 5,000 years.

While the “Century of Humiliation” is as much about national history, it's equally about party history. For example, “the party is the reason why we've been able to get rid of this century of humiliation.” There's this real tension that happens a lot in Chinese historical narratives between something that has both ended and is still alive. It's part of an ongoing political struggle. You'll still hear very senior Chinese leaders, for example, invoking the “Century of Humiliation” when they talk about their dealing with the [United States]. They talk about the fact that China is still, in their eyes, not unified.

It's likely that this is a narrative, that despite it theoretically ending in ‘49, is really going to persist. I'm sure in the next few years we'll hear more and more rhetoric about the “Century of Humiliation” as we talk about things like territorial control, as we talk about control of Chinese citizens overseas, as we talk about prevention of things like the U.S. renewing various security contracts in East Asia. It's a really powerful narrative that helps to fuse the state Chinese past and the party.

Emily Matson: So can I add something real fast? I studied museums for my dissertation and the phrase that I saw most commonly in these museums was that meiyou gongchandang jiu meiyou xin zhongguo, without the Chinese Communist Party, there is no new China. That's such a crucial part of the party's legitimizing narrative.

Eleanor M. Albert: I think some of the transformations of the PRC have been pivotal in how these narratives have evolved and continued to exist. You have this massive economic transformation that has taken place. Among all of this, this idea of Maoism seems to still have a really enduring impact on the country's political culture and the country's history, even though it's very clearly selective. How [has] Maoism and its role in the official narrative about the PRC evolved? What are the circumstances under which Maoism now is invoked for party legitimacy? What is selected and what is not?

James Gethyn Evans: A lot of my work is about global Maoism—how Maoism is refracted through various communities around the world. Maoism is a tricky topic insofar as it's really a series of contradictions that from the outset don't seem to make much sense.  

One of the big contributions Mao is claiming to make towards Marxism-Leninism as an ideology is that Maoism is seen as being both this real contribution with saying something new, but it's also the most orthodox interpretation of Marxism-Leninism at the same time. So you'll see a lot of books in the ‘60s and ‘70s for example, that will say, "Mao Zedong is the greatest orthodox Marxist-Leninist of our time," which seems strange now because we think about Maoism as being this separate ideology almost.

There are a couple of core tenets of Maoism. One of them is a shift away from what Lenin thought would be the urban workers as the heart of the revolution. Mao instead says “actually the heart of the revolution is the rural peasantry.” He is much more keen to talk about Lenin's appeal to anti-imperialism. Maoism really runs with that theme. It prioritizes race as a key vector by which to view the world, which Lenin does not really do. So he's really trying to think about this fusion between Marxism-Leninism as it was coming out of what is really Europe, and the Chinese experience, and specifically the Chinese Communist Party experience in places like Jiangxi and the Long March, the time in rural parts of China. There's this way in which the “Century of Humiliation” fuses with that party rhetoric to create this idea of Maoism as being distinct because it's grounded in both China's historical experience and also the party's experience.

Maoism is tricky in so far as most communist parties in the world have collapsed. So there is a distinction between the communist party ideology as it was then, and the ruling party that we have now. That's not the case in China. China has to balance this very difficult tightrope in some ways between “this is the past,” it's all part of this continuous narrative, what we would call history with a capital H, that is, big-picture historical continuity. Mao is part of that.

We used to, for example, talk about Yao to Mao (Yao being the very first emperor). Yao to Xi doesn't really rhyme as much. We could say like Xia to Xi, I guess, as a sort of compromise. But it's this idea of all of Chinese history is very much part of this singular trajectory. Mao fits into that. So “we can't necessarily criticize them too much because then we're criticizing our own trail” as it were.

There's this tightrope between embracing Maoist ideas, and that's certainly re-surging in many ways. This idea of technical self-reliance, for example. This idea of China being a strong world leader very much comes from the Mao era. This idea of cohesion in terms of ideology, again, very much a Cultural Revolution-era
idea.

So Maoism is really fused within the Chinese historical narrative in a way that was very much downplayed in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and now is seeing a mini-resurgence.

Eleanor M. Albert: Just to follow up, are there certain facets of that history that are explicitly blacked out? In the modern echoes of Maoism today, what are the elements that are being elevated, and what is very obviously missing?

James Gethyn Evans: There's very much this idea that the Mao era was part correct, and part very much not correct. As with any historical narrative, it's cherry-picked in some ways. There are things like the Great Famine [are] really underplayed. The Cultural Revolution itself in official historical narratives is very much glossed over. For anyone who saw, for example, there was a big gala extravaganza for the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and another for the anniversary of the PRC. For the one-hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, there was this incredible Cultural Revolution-almost style, the "East is Red" dance, song, acting, altogether in one go.

And it was supposed to be telling China's story—this is a favorite phrase of Xi Jinping, is jianghao zhongguo gushi, that idea of telling good China stories. We spent a lot of time on the Republican era. We spend a lot of time on the ‘50s, and then there's this gap and suddenly we're at '78. And you're like, "We missed a very important 15, 20-year period in the middle there where quite a lot happened." So there's this delicate balancing act between not really wanting to talk about it that much, but most of China's leaders today grew up in the Cultural Revolution era. And so there's this idea of red nostalgia. This idea of “It might not have been the best of times, but it was when we were all young.”

Rod MacFarquhar often described it a bit like being in the army where it was horrid at the time, but we were young and we were excitable, and we all did it together. There's this nostalgia for that past that a lot of Chinese current leaders probably still maintain in some ways. So that's why the Cultural Revolution has such a delicate balance within the Chinese historical narrative, even though often when we look at the Great Famine, the Red Guards, [as] the era that we sometimes call high Maoism of the late ‘60s, it's really an era that is marked by violence, insecurity, and a lot of things that otherwise we would necessarily say are really detrimental to a lot of Chinese people.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's really interesting. I was living in Nanjing in 2011, 2012, and a friend of mine was doing a research project on this idea of red tourism—the phenomenon of people going and traveling to sites that have been marked as important places within Chinese Communist Party history. That further contributes to the lore because if there are certain places that are on the list, but not all, how do you distinguish? But Emily, I wanted to see if you wanted to chime in on Maoism before we transition to some more of the narratives.

Emily Matson: Maoism is all about contradictions. Mao writes about it in his famous essay on Marxist dialectics, "On Contradiction," which then he revises in the 1950s. Mao was all about contradictions. In the research I do on Chinese historiography of World War II, there's this Marxist framework of history that is all about the zhuyao maodun, the principal contradiction, and then the secondary contradiction. 

I was also thinking about Maoism in terms of what James was talking about, cherry-picking which aspects of Maoism to keep and which ones not to. Deng Xiaoping in the resolution on party history talks about this a lot in, I believe it was 1982. The resolution when the party has to deal with the Cultural Revolution. How do we deal with keeping Mao's legacy but also distancing Maoism from Mao, the individual? So you have this idea of Maoism that emerges, and I would argue this emerges earlier too, during Mao's lifetime, where you have Mao Zedong Thought as being this collective body that is greater and in some ways distinct from the mistakes that individual Mao, the man, might have made.  

Eleanor M. Albert: That's fascinating. I want to pivot us to talking about official narratives again, and these, as we've echoed throughout this conversation so far, are by no means stagnant. They continue to evolve over time. To some degree, this is a reflection of the priorities and preferences of Chinese party leaders. Under Xi, we've really heard so much about this idea of the country's rejuvenation. What have some of the previous narratives been that Chinese leaders have drawn on, and why has there been this continuous shifting and rewriting of official histories? Emily, why don't you kick us off?

Emily Matson: I'm going to talk in particular about how the rhetoric on World War II. Kangri zhanzheng, as it's known in China, the War of Resistance against Japan, [and] how that has changed over time because that is considered the culmination of the “Century of Humiliation.” I think the change in that narrative gives us a good glimpse into how rhetoric on the “Century of Humiliation” has changed over time.

The CCP, depending on the sociopolitical circumstances, has crafted several distinct narratives to legitimize its rule in these different historical periods. So there's been really good research done on this by scholars, political scientists, and historians on what is known as the Mao-era victor narrative and a post-Mao-era victim narrative.

The victor narrative… Still there are echoes; it's not like this narrative has gone away. It still coexists with the victim narrative and the newer narrative under Xi Jinping, which I'll call the rejuvenation narrative.

The victor narrative is basically this idea that without the CCP-led defeat of the Japanese (which we know is historically a bit dicey—it was really the Guomindang that led most of the military effort to defeat Japan), so without the CCP-led defeat of the Japanese, there would be no new China. This narrative was largely based on Marxist class struggle in which the enemy was both the Japanese bourgeoisie led by the Japanese militarists and the Chinese bourgeoisie, which of course was led by the Guomindang.

Portrayals of the heroic sacrifices made by the Chinese communists, but not by the Guomindang soldiers, dominated the historical narrative during the Mao era. This was really important domestically, but it was also important on the international stage as an important show of strength for this brand new nation-state still contending for international recognition with the Republic of China on Taiwan.

However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao, this victor narrative gradually shifted to a victim narrative in which Japanese atrocities in the War of Resistance against Japan, and then I'd argue atrocities in the context of this “Century of Humiliation” as a whole—this foreign aggression towards the Chinese people—becomes more and more highlighted.

In the 1980s in particular, there are these textbook controversies in which Japanese history textbooks don't mention things such as the Rape of Nanjing, for instance, or they use euphemisms like “comfort women.” They don't even talk about what the comfort women were and all this stuff that's very upsetting to both the People's Republic of China and to Korea as well.

There's also [a] place called Yasukuni Shrine (it is a Shinto shrine), and the decision was made to inter the kami, the spirits of the Japanese Class-A war criminals from World War II there. So the Japanese Prime Minister's Nakasone Yasuhiro's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine [in the 1980s ], no less, also stoked a lot of outrage in China.

There are definitely international factors as to why this narrative comes in the 1980s—this victim narrative—that are compounded by domestic factors happening within China. Marxist class struggle, that narrative is undermined by gaige kaifang, reform and opening up. Then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union, which sends a lot of waves through Chinese Communist Party leadership, as well as at the Tiananmen Square massacre. Deng Xiaoping after the Tiananmen Square massacre famously says, "We have really failed in educating our youth on how hard things used to be and how to use the past to build a new China."

Jiang Zemin then promotes this patriotic education campaign, which is officially implemented in 1994, although it had begun earlier than that. This campaign really focused on patriotic education, which is centered in the “Century of Humiliation” and remembering how hard things used to be to building new China.

Xi Jinping has piggybacked off of that in his rejuvenation narrative, but he has also looked at "traditional Chinese culture" a little more. There's been a revival of, say, Confucianism, for instance. There was a very famous TV show lately that was like Marx meets Confucius, and a lot of people laughed at it, but I think it shows a lot of the contemporary Chinese Communist Party's rhetoric: "Hey, we are still Marxist, but we also are drawing on this glorious tradition of Chinese culture” in combination with the “Century of Humiliation.”

Those are some of the historic reasons for the shift from the victor narrative to the victim narrative to now the rejuvenation narrative. I wouldn’t separate them entirely. They sometimes exist in tension with each other, but coexist nonetheless.

Eleanor M. Albert: Super interesting. James, do you want to add at all about the evolution of historical official narratives, perhaps bringing in some of the Cold War context?

James Gethyn Evans: What I would say is there's the old adage of “whoever controls the past controls the present.” But they also control the future. One of the reasons why that is such a powerful tool is it's fundamentally about controlling identity. One of the reasons, in my opinion, that history is usually the first victim of politics, especially in autocracy where there are fewer checks, is that history is a really powerful tool.

At the beginning I mentioned the power of history. It's fundamentally a way that we tell ourselves stories about who we are, where we came from, who our grandparents were, who our community is, what kind of people we are. So one of the reasons that politicians, and in some ways publics, often get so angry at historians, is that we are often reading against those sorts of prevailing narratives, which means by extension we're really attacking the fundamentals of someone's identity.

In the case of China, we often talk about rewriting history, but it's really a selective prioritization of party history over other interpretations. The party is paramount and therefore as party priorities change, so too do what we emphasize in history. If history is in service of legitimizing the party, the function of history is therefore fundamentally a political tool.  We see that in ways that space for alternative histories has rapidly shrunk in recent years. I think one of the clearest cases of that is Da Yi, who recently passed away, who was a historian who led a compilation of the Qing history project at Renmin University for about 20 years, funded—something like 2 billion RMBs, so almost $300 million to do this project. And last minute it was nixed because it was decided that this was too politically sensitive; it aligned too closely with a school of thought called New Qing History, which comes out of the West. And that's a great example of where something that was prioritized 20 years ago suddenly becomes sensitive and has to be axed.

That's something that's really clear in the Cold War, particularly very stark when the Sino-Soviet split happens, where suddenly China has to turn on a dime away from saying, "The Soviet Union has always been our friend and ally," to "Look at this white European imperial power, they've always been that way. Clearly they are the enemy akin with the United States." And so  for the Soviet Union, it's actually quite easy to reframe them as a white imperial European power because, spoiler alert, it's kind of what Russia is. That is a slightly easier one for the CCP to cover up. But it happens a lot, and it happens especially in the Cultural Revolution with
this emphasis on the Third World.

Part of my own research is looking at how China does or does not engage with various Maoist groups around the world. You’d think: “height of the revolution, Maoism is very in vogue in the mainland. There's another Maoist group coming up in another country. Surely China will support that group.” And actually we really see far more real politik from the CCP when it comes to foreign policy. The rhetoric might be “support Maoist groups, support continuous revolution the world over, support the Global South.”

But when we really look at who they’re engaging with, especially after the Cultural Revolution, a lot of it is Japan. A lot of it is South Korea. It’s places where they’re trying to learn “How do we develop an economy? How do we build certain industries?” The rhetoric of the Global South, while very resurgent now, is still out of step with the reality of who and why China decides to engage overseas.

Eleanor M. Albert: We've talked a lot about the narratives, and I'm curious to get more into the nitty-gritty of how these narratives are actually rewritten. I wanted to see if you could shed some light on what the tools are for how these narratives get rewritten or if there are particular vehicles or channels that are preferred for disseminating some of the narratives as they shift. So if some are selective official histories, how do they live alongside other narratives about the past? Is there room for pushback? How are these histories accepted by Chinese people who have lived through so much? So I'll turn to James first.

James Gethyn Evans: Ian Johnson, he talks a lot about the simplification of Chinese history under Xi Jinping. Part of that is that Xi is really very serious about history. Part of the simplification and part of this top-down narrative is also a way to try and get the mechanisms and the structures of the Chinese party state to basically do this bidding. It's much easier to persuade lots of other people to do the heavy lifting for you than it is to do it yourself if you're the Chinese Communist Party.

So we see this partly in ways of financing. That can be both in terms of promotion and in withholding financing. For example, there's a big push at the moment in Chinese ancient archeology to try and find very concrete evidence of the very earliest Chinese dynasties of the Xia, the Shang, the Zhou Dynasty. And the Xia dynasty in particular is this potentially mythical dynasty; we're not really sure what's going on there.

There's this huge amount of government funding into very early ancient Chinese archeology that seems to have taken a lot of archeologists by surprise, that suddenly not only is there all this money for it, but there's money to get a very specific answer. It means that archeology, which is often outside of contemporary politics, is now very much in the spotlight in terms of political debates, political fights within China.

It also comes in terms of censorship. We work in universities. There are clear hierarchies of power. There's very clear incentive structures. If you do this, then you get this. That is a very easy system to manipulate as we're seeing, not just in China, but in places like Florida. We're seeing political appointees increasingly becoming university leaders, changing things like how people get tenure. We look at some of the states in the [American] South who are trying to undo tenure.

We also see that, for example, in the number of Chinese publications that have the name Xi Jinping in the title. If you look in political science, for example, everything is the history of Xi Jinping Thought, the history of this. It’s a way to try and weaponize academia in particular or in other functions to try and conform with what are really shifting party priorities.

Actually there's a discussion on ChinaFile, for example, about how now the most important person in the university is not necessarily the president, it's the party secretary. That idea of thinking about how academia is being used as a tool of the party is very much in line with how this used to be in the ‘60s, the ‘70s, and the ‘80s. Anyone who went to China in those times will know that you probably were affiliated with the university. The party secretary was the head honcho. They controlled what people said, wrote, and things like that. In some ways, what's old is new again. But that's one example of how the party is able to use levers to try and influence the whole of Chinese society, in this case academia, to influence how it talks about narratives and how it changes narratives in certain ways.

Eleanor M. Albert: So that's one facet of education. Emily, I'd like to bring you in here, especially in thinking about patriotic education, what that looks like now 30 years after its initial phase, and then also thinking about the role of museums and how those are structured, and whether they echo these shifting narratives.

Emily Matson: I'll start with talking a little bit about patriotic education. In the research I do, in particular on the War of Resistance against Japan, and the interactions between academia and the government on this. My research, in brief, focuses on this really intense debate that went on particularly in the 1990s and 2000s between scholars, largely from Dongbei, the Northeast, arguing that there should be an official shift in the timeline of the War of Resistance against Japan.

Now, there was no officially decreed timeline for it at this point in time, but they wanted there to be this official shift so that the Mukden incident of 1931, when the Japanese Kwangtung Army invaded Manchuria and subsequently established the puppet state of Manchukuo; they wanted that to be the start of the War of Resistance against Japan as opposed to 1937, which had been popularly perceived, not just in the media, but also in academia.

If you look at textbooks, it's from the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937, to August 1945: [that] was assumed to be the timeline. So in the 1980s, they start publishing about this. By the 1990s, you have these prominent scholars from universities in Beijing, like Beida, like Renda, like Tsinghua who start arguing that, "No, 1937 is the proper date. It shouldn't be 1931." These scholars have gained traction a decade on.

But then surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, the CCP lets this debate go on for a couple of decades, but then ends up siding with the largely Northeastern scholars. Officially, the Ministry of Education announced that starting in the spring of 2017, all secondary school textbooks need to be changed. So that one talking about kanri zhanzheng [War Against Japanese Aggression], the timeline has to be 1931 to 1945. So you can see in this case, the CCP letting this debate play out.

But it's very interesting how the party kind of watches this date debate. A party scholar named Cao Ziyang in 2017 actually publishes this article in a party journal saying, "Both sides of this debate are very valid, but we're going to end up siding with the 14-year war timeline." So I think this is a good instance of seeing how the CCP is very, very interested in history education, and what's going on in academia, in the education system. But sometimes interests within academia, they're not necessarily opposed to the party, but can work in a symbiotic relationship with the party for their interests. These Northeastern scholars clearly really wanted this timeline to be changed to reflect the invasion of their homeland.

That's one case. Sometimes, of course, there is opposition to official party rhetoric, but sometimes, you have these interests that are working with the party.

Museums, there can be private localized museums, but museums are often very much affiliated with promoting the collective memory of the nation state. This is true in China as well. You have this narrative of the “Century of Humiliation” heavily promoted in museums. There's been quite a museum boom. If you go to China as a tourist, it's unavoidable. There are so many museums popping up everywhere, largely about historical topics.

They're so important that, since 1982, they've even been a part of the People's Republic of China's constitution as a type of cultural undertaking of the state to serve the people and socialism. Then in patriotic education, there are things called patriotic education bases, including museums, memorial halls, protected historical relics, scenic sites. The “Century of Humiliation,” particularly World War II and the War of Resistance against Japan, it's a very common topic for these museums in promoting a top-down narrative of CCP legitimacy.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. I want to leave the floor open to explore any other dimensions that we maybe haven't gotten into.

James Gethyn Evans: Something I would just add at the end. One thing that I've found consistently intrigues a lot of our students is that they have done a history class in high school. They think history is very much about memorizing names and dates. That's important in some ways. We do need to get our facts right. But thinking about history, both in how we explain China to an American audience, but also how we engage our Chinese students in thinking about their own history and their own identity, I think is a very powerful message that resonates a lot in our classes. This idea that history is really thinking about questions of agency, of structure, of narrative, really trying to get away from this idea of something being a good thing or a bad thing.

I find that history students often come into a history class with this preconceived idea of “this was a bad thing,” “this was a good thing.” So when we try and think about history less as that and more about power, power relations, who gets to tell a narrative, questioning these prevailing stories that we're told about where we come from. Then I think that's one way that we, at a very micro-scale, start to push back against these very politicized narratives that are very controlled from the top about not only what is Chinese history, but who gets to tell Chinese history.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.