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David R. Stroup

My Afternoon at the Chinese Nationalities Museum

Scholarship on nationalism tends to focus on the dramatic. Nationalists start uprisings. Nationalists push politics to the brink. Nationalism justifies horrific acts of violence and abhorrent acts of discrimination. Or at least that's how discussions about nationalism tend to go. Nationalism appears as a volatile and disruptive ideology of supremacy. And I won't dispute that this is often the case. Nor am I an apologist for nationalists or nationalism as an ideology. But something does need to be said about these discussions of nationalism that focus on dramatic, virulent, intense nationalism. Moments where people experience this kind of intense nationalist sentiment, are in fact, quite rare. More often, a person's national identity, or the politics of nationalism and national image are relegated to the background where they do not intrude in the affairs of day to day life. How do we normally experience nationalism? In the most mundane of ways.

Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communties discusses the ways in which we are able to build a community, like a nation, with people who we will most likely never meet. Nations are vast. It's inconcievable that I'll ever meet everyone in the United States (to say nothing of a Chinese person meeting every person among the 1.3 billion who live in this country). Anderson explains that instead, nations are imagined communities. Despite not actually being in contact with everyone else in the nation, we are able to imagine our fellow citizens as sharing in a community. Why? Anderson talks about how things like speaking a common standardized national language, making pilgrimages to important national sites, reading daily newspapers, taking part in a census, seeing the boundaries of a state on maps, etc. allow for people to extend the bonds of community to those we may never meet. We imagine the boundaries of all corners of a nation, even though we may never be able to directly experience all of them.

Among the many important tools for building an imagined communnity Anderson discusses is the museum. Yes, museums create nations. As strange as it may sound, museums are vital sites for creating an imagined community. Museums display the history of the nation. Its art. Its culture. Its important artifacts. Its founding documents. Its most precious legacies. Museums are essential for creating a sense of common belonging among the members of the national community. They enshrine what the nation is all about, and distill it into a form that is easily viewed and digested by viewers.

In this sense, museums are places where people may experience and interact with their identity in those quiet times when they are not in the midst of nationalist fervor. The relatively long history of civilization in what consider today to be China allows Chinese museums to be paritcularly formative sites for shaping narratives about the Chinese nation. Perhaps none of China's many museum performs this role in a more "on the nose" kind of way than the China Nationalities Museum (中华民族园, Zhonghua Minzu Yuan).

Except that the China Nationalities Museum is less of a museum and more like a theme park. With areas set aside to showcase the traditional architecture of each of the 56 officially recognized nationalities. It's a huge place that sits just south of the Olympic Village and Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium. It's divided into a north and south park linked in the middle by the Minzu Bridge or Nationality Bridge. This is seemingly a metaphor.

Upon entry at the South end of the park, I felt like I had been transported to some sort of post-apocalyptic Epcot. Large swatches of the park have seen better days. Weeds grow around many of the paths. Landscaping items that at one point must have been trimmed and elaborate have become overgrown and untended. Some of the mock-up buildings are in desperate need of repair or repainting. Others have been largely filled up with storage items. Almost none of the buildings are open for touring, despite that clearly seeming to be the original intent. In some cases, you can even get to see the buildings themselves, as the entrance gateways have been locked. Trying to learn about the Dongxiang nationality? Looks, like you're out of luch. Want to see a building on the Baonan ethnicity? Or the Tajiks of China (shown below)? Well, it's not happening any time soon by the looks of it.

However, once you overcome the shock of how badly parts of the park have deteriorated, other stunning details come into focus. Like intricacy with whcih many of the buildings have been recreated. The exact replica of Emin minaret from Turpan. The skillfully reproduced Uyghur village. The Bai minority theatre stage that looked exactly like the one I remember from the town square in the village of Shaxi. The replica of the Bharkor in Lhasa in the Tibetan town. The ACTUAL Ming Dynasty buildings in the Salar nationality exhibit that were moved from Qinghai Province and reassembled. In these spaces attention to detail seems meticulous and truly impressive. The park clearly takes many of its cues from Disneyworld's Epcot, which features scale replicas of the Temple of Heaven, the high shopping streets of Paris, German bierhalls, etc. But despite a shared commitment to these intricate reproductions, the Nationalities Museum falls short of Epcot in a very crucial respect. Epcot is alive. While strolling through little France in Epcot, visitors interact with French culture in hands on way. It's not just awkward gawky performance. You can eat Quiche Lorraine, and drink Sauvignon Blanc from Burgundy, served by waitresses who actually come from Nice, and Poitiers, and Lyon. At the Bierhall in the Germany section, guests may drink Dunkelweisen and mulled wine, and converse with people who actually come from Munich. And yes, these representations of culture may be stylized, but Disney's commitment to finding real people to staff these parks, and present some facets of their heritage is admirable.

The Nationalities Park, by contrast is largely empty. Most of the exhibits are just buildlings. Many of the doors are locked. The traditional clothes of minorities are placed behind glass in exhibit buildings. There is no interaction with living culture. And where there is interaction, it comes largely in the form of performance. Tibetan singers and dancers perform for the audience. Mongolian musicians play songs. This presentation of culture goes in only one direction. Spectators are given no chances for interaction. And such a static presentation is made even more problematic when one examines some of the choices made in presentation. Take, for instance, the exhibit on the Hui.

The exhibit describes an incredibly clear picture of the Hui (who are, as I've discussed before, a fairly heterogenous group as far as aspects of daily life and culture go). The sign at the front of the exhibit describes the places the Hui live in China, primarily restrciting their "ethnic homeland" to Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and Gansu Province (i.e. west China), despite the fact that there's not a really a historical precedent for the Hui as having a "homeland." Similarly, the sign lists a list of cultural traits and holidays which are "traditional" for the Hui. There's truly no sense of the varying geographic traits that the Hui identity possesses. The Hui, the sign says, "The Hui are excellent at agriculture and trade and industry." Which tells precious little about the Hui, as it seems to cover all bases. Moreover, the traditional Hui home is depicted as a Ningxia style cave dwelling. And while many people who live in Ningxia doubtless live in these kinds of dwellings, why has this choice been made to represent the Hui? And not, say, the traditional Beijing siheyuan (四合院) courtyards found near NiuJiue? Or the mud brick houses one sees often in Linxia county? Or, for that matter, an urban apartment? Here, at the museum, the Hui are ruritans. No trace of urban, contemporary Hui identity is present. And because the "Hui Museum" is closed, and the courtyard filled with miscellaneous junk, a clearer or more nuanced picture is hard to get. Nor is there much sense that Hui culture is dynamic, or alive. All that we have to see is a locked, deserted mock-up cave house. An artifact of a rural past that may or may not still exist.

And it is in this way that the park shapes and influences the image of the nation. The introductory placard at the park reads:

China is a unified multi-ethnic country of 56 ethnic groups living together in harmony. They share weal and woe living under the Chinese family, contributing their efforts to shape Chinese history, and civilization, and its spirit. Each ethnic group is different in one way or other but the collectiveness of the 56 ethnic groups make up one great Chinese nation.

The depiction of the Hui as a part of the Chinese nation with a set of standard traditional holidays and standard living conditions helps to forge this new China. The Hui, as one member out of 56 are subsumed into this greater China. The park is merely an attempt to build a microcosm of that larger desired reality. Curiously, the Han exhibit, perched on top of a multi-story platform, is currently roped off. Most of the park workers I asked about didn't know how to get to it, nor were they completely clear on where it was. In this park full of minority culture on display, the majority Han were both everywhere (mostly as tourists) and nowhere.

As I wandered around the largely shuttered Uyghur village, perched on a high post in another part of the park, I noticed a sign which proclaimed that the best vista in the park was from this high rooftop. Gazing out to the Northeast, the sign proclaimed, one could take in not only the mock-up minaret of the Turpan mosque, but also, on the horizon, the Bird's Nest and Water Cube Olympic Stadiums. Yes, I thought to myself, this is perhaps the best understanding of the park. The view of these glittering cathedrals of sporting achievement and modernity are perhaps far better and more effective monuments to the "one great Chinese nation," than anything that might be glimpsed inside park.

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