History, Identity, and the Politics of Taiwan’s Museums: Reflections on the DPP-KMT Transition

Museums in Taiwan—as elsewhere—have always been embroiled in politicised debates over collective identity, both reflecting and helping to shape the contours of identity discourse. During the four decades of the Martial Law era, the Kuomintang (KMT) regime used museums as vehicles for its campaigns to nurture patriotic citizens of a “Republic of China” encompassing the entire Chinese mainland. However, with the onset of democratisation from the late 1980s, museums increasingly reflected and reinforced a strengthening consensus over Taiwan’s historical and cultural distinctiveness, while also mirroring the considerable pluralism of popular identity consciousness. This trend was accentuated under the regime of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after 2000, but 2008 witnessed the return to power of a KMT determined to establish warmer ties with China. This paper examines the extent to which the new regime’s more accommodative approach to China has extended into the realm of museums, while considering whether developments within the sector, and within broader Taiwanese society, mean that museums are no longer quite the pliable tools of official cultural policy that they once were.

Histoire, identité et politique des musées à Taiwan : Réflexions sur la transition du DPP au KMT

Comme c’est le cas également dans d’autres pays, les musées à Taiwan ont toujours été impliqués dans des débats politisés sur l’identité collective, reflétant et dessinant les contours des discours identitaires. Au cours des quatre décennies de Loi martiale, les musées ont servi au Kuomintang (KMT) de plateformes de propagande pour ancrer dans la population taiwanaise le mythe d’une « République de Chine » qui s’étendrait au continent chinois tout entier. À l’inverse, avec la démocratisation engagée à la fin des années 1980, les musées se sont fait l’écho d’un consensus croissant pour mettre en valeur le caractère distinct de l’histoire et de la culture taiwanaise, tout en reflétant le considérable pluralisme de la conscience identitaire populaire. Après 2000, cette tendance s’est accentuée sous le régime du Parti démocratique progressiste (DPP selon l’acronyme anglais), jusqu’en 2008 qui a vu le retour au pouvoir d’un KMT déterminé à réchauffer les liens avec la Chine. Cet article analyse dans quelle mesure l’approche plus accommodante du nouveau régime envers la Chine s’est poursuivie également sur le terrain des musées, et cherche à cerner si les événements qui ont eu lieu dans ce secteur, et plus largement dans la société taiwanaise, signifient que les musées ne sont plus, autant qu’ils le furent jadis, des outils manipulés par la politique culturelle officielle.

Shanghai's History Curriculum Reforms and Shifting Textbook Portrayals of Japan

ABSTRACT: This article examines the coverage of Japan in Shanghai's senior high history textbooks since the early 1990s – a period when the city's status as China's "showpiece for the global era" has been widely touted. Uniquely among cities on the Chinese mainland, Shanghai has throughout this period enjoyed the right to publish and prescribe its own textbooks for use in local schools (a right extended to most other regions only since the early 2000s). The portrayal of Japan in local texts thus offers a window onto the way in which a self-avowedly "global" Chinese metropolis has balanced an outward-looking and internationalist vision with the requirement for history to serve patriotic education. It also sheds light on the meaning and extent of local curricular "autonomy" in contemporary China.

KEYWORDS: Shanghai, China, Japan, history, education, identity, autonomy, war, modernity.

Transcending Victimhood: Japan in the public historical museums of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China

ABSRACT: This article looks at how the major national (or pseudo-national) historical museums in China and Taiwan interpret and display very different "new rememberings" of Japan. The main focus is on the permanent exhibitions of the modern history wing of the National Museum of China (NMC; formerly the Museum of the Chinese Revolution), which finally reopened in 2011 after almost a decade of refurbishment, and of the National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH), which opened in the same year. It discusses how museum portrayals of Japan reflect divergent public discourses on national identity. Through examining the relationship between museums and the apparatus of the Chinese state (ROC and PRC), the first section locates the NMC and NMTH in their bureaucratic and political contexts. A typology of approaches to the construction of national identity is then offered, considering the implications of different conceptions of identity for portrayals of Japan and its relationship with China or Taiwan. The remainder of the article looks in turn at the NMC and NMTH, outlining the history of each before examining how Japan is represented in their permanent exhibitions. It concludes by considering what can be learnt from this about the evolving relationship between official historical discourse and the broader political context on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

KEYWORDS: China, Taiwan, museums, history, Japan, identity.

Editorial

A resurgent China nowadays looms ever larger in the public consciousness of its East Asian neighbours, with implications not just for their external relationships, but also for their domestic political dynamics. However, Japan still supplies, as it has for over a century, the benchmark of successful "catch-up" modernisation for states, including China, that see themselves as still "catching up." For authoritarian governments keen to minimise "spiritual pollution," Japan has also long provided a model for the selective preservation of native "essence" alongside imported modern "technology," even while attracting condemnation for the nationalistic excesses associated with this enterprise: colonialism, invasion, and associated brutality. And at the popular level, the impact of Japanese culture – high-brow, low-brow, literary, or visual – on the societies of the region has been manifold and profound.