Antiquity in revolution: Cultural relics in twentieth-century Shanghai.

摘要

In twentieth-century China, cultural relics came to symbolize the authenticity and legitimacy of the state. This dissertation studies how cultural relics, or wenwu, were defined from China's Republican period (1912-1949) through the People's Republic (1949-) into the present day. While China's imperial rulers used cultural relics to demonstrate legitimate succession, the paradox facing any new regime in the twentieth century was that its claim to political legitimacy was based on both revolution and historical continuity. Taking Shanghai as its case study, "Antiquity in Revolution" examines this political tension through the authentication, nationalization, and display of cultural relics. This history of the city's arts and monuments explores how such relics have produced and supported national narratives.;This dissertation draws upon the records of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture. Building upon the regulations and rhetoric from the Republican period, the People's Republic established institutions to control cultural relics and their interpretation. In addition to using antiquity to define New China, these institutions also designated revolutionary places, including the site of the First Communist Party Congress. The state's cultural bureaucracy also reached into the lives of local people, creating neighborhood exhibitions, defining cultural relics within temple spaces, and regulating art trade to nationalize private collections. Despite the state's claims to mastery over the past, however, the cultural institutions remained politically fraught; the questions of whether museum officials were to be red or expert, how the history of the revolution was told, and who should define and own cultural relics demonstrate that the Party was not the sole claimant on culture or its definition.;Until the Cultural Revolution antiquity and revolution managed to coexist. But Mao's "Smash the Four Olds" campaign rejected the past; and in this context cultural officials had to reframe "preservation" by representing it as a revolutionary act. The enduring resonance of cultural relics to Chinese identity is reaffirmed in the cultural nationalism of today's globalizing China. But the tension between antiquity and revolution persists as the People's Republic, founded in revolution, seeks to integrate itself into China's longer historical narrative by redefining legitimate succession in the interest of the present Chinese nation-state.