Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: (Un)Authorised Heritage Discourse and Practice in China
- Section 1 (Re)constructions, (Re)inventions, and Representations of Heritage
- Section 2 Creating Identities: Constructing Pasts, Disseminating Heritage
- Section 3 History, Nostalgia, and Heritage: Urban and Rural
- Section 4 Appropriations and Commodifications of Ethnic Heritage
- 10 ‘Even if you don't want to Drink, you still have to Drink’: The Yi and Alcohol in History and Heritage
- 11 ‘Ethnic Heritage’ on the New Frontier: The Idealisation and Commodification of Ethnic ‘Otherness’ in Xinjiang
- Afterword: Historicising and Globalising the Heritage Turn in China
- Index
- Publications / Asian Heritages
8 - The Role of History, Nostalgia and Heritage in the Construction and Indigenisation of State-led Political and Economic Identities in Contemporary China
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: (Un)Authorised Heritage Discourse and Practice in China
- Section 1 (Re)constructions, (Re)inventions, and Representations of Heritage
- Section 2 Creating Identities: Constructing Pasts, Disseminating Heritage
- Section 3 History, Nostalgia, and Heritage: Urban and Rural
- Section 4 Appropriations and Commodifications of Ethnic Heritage
- 10 ‘Even if you don't want to Drink, you still have to Drink’: The Yi and Alcohol in History and Heritage
- 11 ‘Ethnic Heritage’ on the New Frontier: The Idealisation and Commodification of Ethnic ‘Otherness’ in Xinjiang
- Afterword: Historicising and Globalising the Heritage Turn in China
- Index
- Publications / Asian Heritages
Summary
Abstract
Over the years interlocutors have pointed to the role of elites in the selective utilisation of history, memory, nostalgia and heritage within modern China; particularly, scholars have pointed to the role of Confucianism, humiliation history and totalitarian nostalgia within these hegemonic processes. However, with the exception of work on Shanghai, there is a paucity of investigations on the role of local elites in the utilisation of local historical-geographic discourses within contemporary China. Acknowledging this lacuna in the extant literature, this chapter argues that ‘local elites’ – defined as coalitions of local officials, developers, commercialists and/or urban conservationists – are increasingly coming together to utilise local histories, memory, nostalgia and heritage as a tool of urban marketing and place-branding. To unpack this argument, this chapter therefore explores local state coalitions dedicated to urban development in the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan and Xi’an.
Keywords: selective remembering, nostalgia, heritage, Shanghai, Wuhan and Xi’an
Introduction: History, Nostalgia, Heritage and the Chinese State
Debates on the use and abuse of history, memory, nostalgia and heritage have been longstanding in contemporary discussions of China (Feuerwerker 1968; Unger 1993; Duara 1995; Wang 2001; Horner 2009; Macmillan 2009; McGregor 2010). In recent years a growing number of researchers have examined the ways in which history, nostalgia and heritage have been utilised by elites (particularly governmental elites) in the construction of Chinese identities and subjectivities. Literature in this area has often focused on the role of Confucianism in the production of new forms of Confucian identities both as a mode of national and international identity making (in the construction of pan-Asian Chinese subjectivities) and as a form of party political identity making (Yu 1984, 1987; Brook 1997; Ong 1997a, 1997b, 1999; Zurndorfer 1997, 2004; Bell 2008; Barr 2011; Kallio 2011; Johnson 2016). From a different perspective, another group of writers have pointed to the role of humiliation history as a central tool in the construction of new ‘humiliation subjects’ in the present era (see Gries 2004, Broudehoux 2004, Callahan 2010, Macmillan 2010, Wang 2012, Law 2014).
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- The Heritage Turn in ChinaThe Reinvention, Dissemination and Consumption of Heritage, pp. 215 - 238Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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