Some thoughts on the Reopening of the National Museum

The French surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris once remarked: “Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum. In it you find the same equivocal aspect, the same frozen quality.”

The National Museum of China, built in 1959 as one of the massive architectural sentinels which surround Tiananmen Square, has reopened, finally, after nearly four years of revisions. In that time, the government spent $400 million trying to prove M. Leiris correct.

I’ve haven’t been to the museum in years, and I have yet to find an opportunity to go to the reopening. A friend of mine who went last Friday and said she had to get in line two hours ahead to battle the retirees and provincial tourists for one of the 8000 tickets issued each day. I figure at some point I have an obligation to go and check this monstrosity out, but I hate crowds and many of the exhibits are actually the same as when I went five years ago, so the whole process of fighting the masses to check out exhibit after exhibit on “Why we Rock and White People suck” sounds frankly about as appealing as waiting in line for an hour and a half to stick my dick into an industrial fan.

Until then, I highly recommend Ian Johnson’s brilliant summary of what is new and what is not at the National History Museum.

Many countries do not present their history in terms independent historians consider fully credible. American museums have been under pressure to account more fully for slavery. American Indians won a long battle to open their own museum on the Mall in Washington; other museums celebrate the westward expansion of the United States but give short shrift to the displacement and killing of American Indians.

Even so, few countries can compete with China in so completely suppressing the shades of gray about their past. One result is that the Chinese public rarely has access, even on the Internet, to versions of history that differ from party propaganda, and popular support for some nationalist causes is sometimes even stronger than the party’s own stances. Many Chinese are bewildered, for example, that some Tibetans or Uighurs are dissatisfied with Chinese rule or that Japanese and Taiwanese might have differing views of China’s claims on their territory.

This means that the National Museum, which has been granted unlimited access to treasures and relics of China’s long history, has failed to escape the political constraints that for centuries have hobbled the study of Chinese history. Then, as now, rulers used history to shape the present, a leitmotif that has marked almost every era.

As Johnson correctly notes, it’s not only in China where politicians are unable to resist the temptation to screw with history, but the size of this screw job, the unconcealed nitwit fuckery with which the museum hacks try to justify this marble palace to glorified bullshit suggests a level of civilizational hubris that makes Michele Bachmann look like the second coming of Thucydides.

Tian Shanting, who runs the museum’s foreign affairs office/barbarian inquiries center pulls out the shovel and piles on the overcompensation:

“We feel we had a lot to show and need the space. It’s not about being the biggest, but China does have 5,000 years of culture so it’s not inappropriate to be the biggest.”

[Cue: Sound of my head hitting desk repeatedly]

The fact that so many people in China uncritically buy into such a self-indulgent and solipsistic view of their own history is sad/funny/scary…kind of like a wombat being skinned on YouTube whilst wearing a clown suit.

The larger problem with whitewashing history is that the past is not there to be a comfort to those of us in the present, nor is it a tale of inevitability justifying our contemporary political preferences. The American historian Roy Basler said, “To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.”

Put another way, and adapting Finley Dunne, the role of the historian – or a curator – is to simplify that which is complicated and to make complex that which we assume to be simple. Teleologies need not apply.