TY - JOUR
AU - Li,, Na
AB - Abstract This article tracks the origin of modern public history in China. Through a critical survey of the landscape, the article focuses on why public history has such a widespread appeal among ordinary Chinese, and how it is used for social cohesion and identity building to mobilize a general population. The author argues that public history has flourished in the last two decades alongside a deteriorating notion of national identity unified by the state; the genesis of this can be traced back to the turn of the twentieth century. Three propositions are suggested for further developing public history in China, namely writing differently, a broader and more liberal understanding of history, and an emphasis on rigour. INTRODUCTION This article tracks all the manifestations of the past-in-the-present I have discovered in China. As both a watchword and a practice, public history finds expression in everyday life. Public imagination has been captured by sepia photographs, intimate family ephemera, windswept architecture, carefully crafted natural and historical walks, historical games and emotional oral testimonies. These emerging practices offer an ever-expanding space of dissidence and possibilities outside established categories or academic fields, and have a profound impact on how people see, feel about and engage with the past. Recognizing these fragmented public history impulses and claiming ‘everyone is their own historian’ can only get us started. If historians are to understand how the public’s sense of history is shaped, they should understand how a historically conscious public is formed and resourced. My primary focus is why public history has such a widespread appeal among ordinary Chinese, and how it mobilizes a general population from almost all walks of life in today’s China. The revolution in media technology has shortened distances and altered how people communicate with each other, but technology simply accelerates an impulse that has been present for some time. As I have argued elsewhere, public history in China does not rise like the sun at an appointed time: it is present at its own making and has emerged in the last two decades alongside a deteriorating notion of a national identity unified by the state. This connection owes its origin to a quintessentially Chinese cultural tradition that values harmony between the heaven and the earth, humanity and continuity.1 Modern public history in China can be traced back to the early twentieth century when a growing sense of national crisis triggered a collapse of the traditional idea system, a yearning for roots and an attempt to popularize history. MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE The past is popular, but public history is different from popular history. Public history appeals to a socially stratified public with the capacity for critical thinking; it is not a spontaneous engagement with the ‘mindless’ masses. The Chinese public has become passionate about explaining and interpreting the past, and within this ‘public’ have emerged groups of educated, thoughtful and socially responsible citizens. They actively participate in interpreting and presenting the past, and their writings impinge on public historical consciousness on a different scale. Electronic technology and the expansion of the Internet make it possible to reconstruct a national culture and identity or some kind of community that is otherwise virtual, fluid, rapidly changing and diverse. Several signposts mark the terrain of public history in China, from which I have unashamedly collected a few sparkling spots and teased out some threads that connect them into a unified whole. ‘Unofficial’ is the Key Word Confucius says, ‘if the traditional belief is lost, seek help among the folks (shili er qiu zhuye)’.2 One possible starting point in our exploration is oral history, which has long played an important role in collecting and transmitting historical knowledge. Even today, many ethnic tribes that lack formal written records rely solely on oral transmission. State-centred Chinese culture historically values two kinds of primary source: archaeology, and material culture, such as ancient temples, ancestral halls, written records and the collections of aristocratic families. Discourses of the States (Guo Yu), for example, is an ancient Chinese text that consists of a compilation of speeches attributed to rulers and other men from the Spring and Autumn period (770BC–221BC). Even part of the Zuo Tradition or Commentary of Zuo (Zuo Zhuan), an ancient Chinese history, is traditionally regarded as a commentary on the ancient Chinese chronicle Spring and Autumn Annals (Chun Qiu), with the addition of narrative structure to the formal chronicles. Starting in the Han Wei period (202BC–265AD), Chinese history became centred on written texts and gradually acquired an authoritative status. Thus, some folk culture, which relies heavily (if not solely) on oral transmission, was lost. However, peoples without writing did have WuZhu,3 who were highly respected intellectuals in ancient times, to record and disseminate historical materials through oral history. Such cultures withstand the erosion of time and have a lasting impact on history.4 Thus Chinese history is not just about chronicles, words and numbers but is peppered with ballads, legends, riddles and puzzles, which provide a cultural basis for more contemporary oral practices. The popularity of oral history in the last two decades owes much to a renewed search for identity through personal, family and national history and memory. Driven by a sense of urgency, oral history projects with veterans have been funded by the prestigious National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC), reflecting a research focus that has attracted official attention. For example, the Salvaging and Organizing the Oral History of Anti-Japanese War Veterans project won a key research grant from NSSFC in 2015. At the same time at a more grassroots level, the Nanjing Folk Museum, collaborating with a few other folk institutions, initiated ‘Salvaging the Oral History of Anti-Japanese War Veterans’, a volunteer-based oral history project; while the Center for Oral History at Nanjing University hosted the ‘War Memory’ oral history workshop, a collaborative work involving multiple eminent institutions. Another oral history documentary project, Flaming, which features more scholarly input and more structured fieldwork, records the mining industry in deindustrialized Northeastern China, including a photographical ethnography for revitalizing and preserving industrial memory.5 This project, which began in 2016, is an oral history of those who lived through the vicissitudes of state-owned enterprise reform and how these changes affected personal lives and memories. It is lavishly illustrated with 8,000 pictures, 250,000 words of audio interviews and thirty hours of video interviews, and key recurring themes include the nature of reform, working-class identity and the experiences of laid-off workers, to name but a few. These projects, which travel between historical recording and imaginative retelling, conflate history and literature in both the Chinese and English languages. The first project of its kind to present oral history together with still and moving images, Flaming has attracted official attention and is listed as a key project by the social research association in Liao Ning Province. In other cases, oral histories are privately funded and mostly volunteer-based. These projects are largely populist and attract techno-savvy and visually literate younger generations. Home (jia) Spring–Autumn (Chun Qiu), the College Student Oral History Video Documentary Project, for example, is funded by a series of nonprofit nongovernment organizations and primarily targets college and university students.6 Founded in 2014, the Home Spring–Autumn projects aim to salvage positive histories and memories that are close to people’s hearts, such as family histories. Their emotional core demonstrates a more clearly democratic intention couched in accessible language with literal and metaphorical implications. Spanning thirty-five cities across China and involving 167 colleges and universities, 1,200 young students and 300 documentaries, these projects have collected thousands of individual and family stories. Deeply grassroots, participatory and performative, the Home Spring–Autumn projects have a wide appeal. However, despite the popularity of oral history with college students, academic settings in China rarely offer formal oral history courses or training. Why have historians and history educators lost their ground in the public history movement? I will return to this point below. Another starting point can be found in projects that explore difficult pasts. The recent waves of studies on the Cultural Revolution (1966–76; henceforth CR), for example, reveal professional energy and rigour, nuanced judgement and intellectual complexity. The general attitude toward the CR shifted from an uncritically accusatory attitude in the 1980s to a more balanced approach in the 1990s. Those who were middle-school students during the CR have, with some distance, become more mature observers; some have published memoirs. In the new century, with the opening up of more sources, work on the CR has flourished. In 2006, a seminar to mark its fortieth anniversary took place in Beijing and was attended by many scholars and eyewitnesses. He Shu, a prominent local historian, collected oral history from CR witnesses from 2011 to 2013. The project was organized by the Culture and History committee of the Chongqing People’s Political Consultative Conference as a structured and systematic effort to collect oral histories of CR eyewitnesses. He’s dedication continued after he retired,when he founded Yesterday (Zuo Tian), an electronic magazine dedicated to CR studies.7 These unofficial works mostly comprise reflections and memoirs by those who lived through the CR. Most of them were from prestigious universities, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University. A few intellectuals managed to get into universities when the national entrance exam, known as the Gaokao, was restored in 1977. The alumni of these top-ranking universities are now in different occupations, live in various places across the country, collaborate and form small-scale communities. The official archives of the CR remain closed and scholarly discussions are taboo, but new source materials, predominantly vernacular, have become available. For instance, two octogenarian historians spent decades collecting and editing historical materials about the CR and eventually published a series of studies totalling six million words, in Hong Kong in 2008.8 Individual collections have also become cherished, irreplaceable sources. Here we see history written by the losers, by those who were condemned as counter-revolutionaries. Though motive and quality vary widely, their collective memories, self-printed and Internet-transmitted, offer perspectives that are missing from the official narratives and provide a belated but fitting recognition of their roles in the CR. Here we see that oral history plays a critical role in shaping difficult public memories. If every nation has its own indigestible historical narratives, in China, the voices remain scattered, largely underground and not yet matured into an inclusive national dialogue, although there is a glimpse of hope on the horizon. History education offers another view of the public history landscape. In China the history of history education is much longer than that of history itself as an academic discipline. History education is responsible for constructing historical consciousness and civic morals. It also makes vernacular narratives accessible to the general public, especially to students. It blurs the often self-imposed boundaries between the professional and the public and enjoys its greatest currency during times of greatest fluidity. Zhao Yafu, a leading voice in history education, draws a connection between public history and history education: ‘history education should absorb and practise the basics of public history, transforming from the traditional sense of “learning history” to a more advanced idea of “doing history”’.9 In 2015, the National Youth History Recording Competition first invited middle-school students to conduct family history.10 Li Yuanjiang, a young and innovative history teacher from an eminent middle school in Beijing, secured funds from a few nonprofit organizations.11 About a thousand schools participated, from nearly all of China’s provinces (except Tibet). Most students completed their fieldwork and wrote with passion and creativity, something that has long been missing from Chinese history education; the project seemed to have reanimated the historical imagination of the students. Family history, including that of the individual’s family, clan and hometown, reconnects them emotionally and geographically to history. In these personal encounters, history becomes palpable and visible. Many students continued a journey of self-discovery after completing the project. The projects sparked a search for historical truth, not through textbook factoids but through engaging with history close at hand and writing about their discoveries in clear and accessible language. Methodologically, students got their feet wet through guided fieldwork: they learned how to interpret material cultures – photographs, memorabilia, houses, landscapes and so on; they ventured into the local archives and libraries to do research to back up their suspicions; they engaged in a different writing style, one with literary tropes; and they built a community of sharing family stories, memories and history. The new pedagogy challenged the dull rote memorization all too common in Chinese history education. Around 200 schools participated, and then, with the power of all types of media and word of mouth, more schools joined the competition, and the impact continued to grow. Unfortunately, the competition was terminated by the government in February 2017, due to its massive appeal. In one sense, the competition has cracked the official history edifice. Historical knowledge in this model does not filter down either from a central authority or from the chosen few. Instead, it takes place in the locality; it subverts the traditional learning process. The memories and stories shared in the competition represented a deep yearning for personal and collective identity. Students were also encouraged to speculate, but to be meticulous in arguing, and to approach historical materials, analysis and writing with sympathy. Travelling down Memory Lane History and memory often merge in public history projects, most of which address how national symbol systems work to build identity. The China Memory project, a documentary by China Central Television (CCTV) in 2006, falls into this category. While this type of project celebrates official historical narratives and often involves little actual public input, another type of project explores the idea of vernacular memory. The Canal Memory project, for example, collected oral histories of forty-five boatmen from Jia Xin, Zhejiang Province who had worked on the Grand Canal. By recording boatmen’s memories and stories, struggles and aspirations, the project preserves a disappearing profession. Oaring, paddling, sculling, towing, pulling and sailing, along with other boat skills, are under threat due to the development of machines and technology. The fishing industry faces a similar dilemma: traditional skills are vanishing, with no inheritors. Deteriorating water quality and expanded freshwater fishing mean that traditional fishing skills are being lost, as are the sludge and silt dredgers, which were common along the Canal in the 1950s and 1960s. At stake here are not only the specific skills and labour but also the history and memory of boatmen, an increasingly marginalized group in an increasingly mechanical society. Unlike previous works on the history of the Canal, which unsurprisingly and dutifully studied the economic and political aspects of the Canal’s construction, this project captured a kaleidoscope of micro change. With attention to detail, an honest respect for grassroots expertise and knowledge, and a genuine sense of humanity and humility, the Canal Memory project demonstrates how individual stories, embedded in circuitous social relationships and cultural fabric, fostered an organic history of an occupation. It further shows how these stories reflect and represent the history of the Canal at the regional level. The Canal Memory: Oral History of the Jiaxin Boatmen,12 is interlaced with quotations incorporating micro perspectives and original research, duly footnoted and intermeshed with a different sense of history, a larger-than-life concern. In some cases, oral history, counterintuitively, can be elitist, yet here it ministers to its true purpose, to give voice to the voiceless from the very bottom of society. Readers encounter the shapes and colours of ordinary boatmen's lives. In the process, official narratives are challenged by new questions about how everyday lives are shaped by infrastructure, how collective identities are formed through shared memories, and how working people figure in the story of national development. Visuals as Public History Living in an increasingly image-conscious society, people become visually literate from a very young age. Images invite a different path of historical inquiry and challenge the evidentiary status of written documents. Most visual products come with very little interpretive analysis. Two examples, however, offer points of departure. One is a fascinating study of Nianhua by American historian James Flath. (Nian means ‘year’, and huan, ‘drawing’.) This is a type of popular folk art expressing beatitude and luck, and used to decorate houses during the Chinese New Year. In exploring how the past is visualized through Nianhua Flath argues: There is more than one way to tell a tale through the graphic text. There have always been multiple ways in which the past could be read, and through their particular forms of representation, the theatre, finer arts and literature all offer unique interpretations of history. Each has its own logic.13 Posters also recount history in a visually striking manner. The Shanghai Propaganda Posters Gallery, a private museum in Shanghai, exhibits posters from the Maoist period of communist China, a significant portion of them from the CR period. The gallery is located in the basement of an apartment building in Huashan Road, in the former French Concession area. It consists of only two rooms but has a rich collection of rare, unique posters. The owner of the museum, Mr Yang Pei Ming, who started collecting the posters as a hobby in 1995, is keeping the posters as an art form, with the gallery as a story-telling space. While the gallery’s use of the word propaganda (xuan chuan) implies a pejorative take on history, the presentation of the posters nevertheless gives a very palpable access to the past, while also showing how state-appropriate mass-produced knowledge affects ordinary people’s lives. Visual materials not only have an edge over written texts in satisfying the popular appetite for immediacy, presenting history in lifelike detail, and more importantly, being accessible to the general public, they also open up history to a wider set of narratives beyond the official ones. This is probably why historical documentaries enjoy such popularity. To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Sino-Japanese war in 2015, a documentary, Behind the Frontline, was created for a local television station in the wartime capital Chongqing. Its makers trawled local, national and international archives to present an iconography of the national past from 1937 to 1945. The project narrates China’s national interest, identity, history and dream through stunning televisual landscapes. The tone is celebratory, glossing over detail for a more generalized aura of pastness. Chronologically organized, with about fifty minutes devoted to each of the twelve episodes, it demonstrates both an honest respect and a reasonably objective approach to the internal conflicts, especially the tumultuous collaboration between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party. The filmmakers do not mince words, and the driving force behind Behind the Frontline is its service to the national interest, which affects material selection and screening, narration and interpretation. A battery of archival images, covering mobilization, dealing with aerial bombs, and more momentously, the psychology of the grassroots, tell the story of how, by force of necessity and urgency, the war shaped individual lives. The presentation, interspersed with oral histories of eyewitnesses and interviews with eminent historians, provides multiple glimpses into historical events, the details of which are either glossed over or silenced. Here, the visuals expand, if not subvert or challenge, the historically known, which is a momentous step in China. Wenguang Wu, a pioneer of independent documentary film in China, is known for his unflagging devotion to searching, recording and preserving vernacular memory. His Vernacular Memory Plan and Grassroots Studio project represents a journey in public history. Its origin lies in recording the history of the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. The Plan takes a pro-active approach to history, an attempt to integrate images, art and memory into rural villages. More pertinent here is that the journey of recording and documenting individual stories and memories through visual agency often, and quite unwittingly, translates into a search for and reflection upon a renewed sense of citizenship, an alternative understanding of history. Around twenty participants – villagers, innovative documentary filmmakers and young students – were involved in the first year of the project (2011). Students returned to their own villages, conducting oral history with eyewitnesses of the Famine. Through a snowball effect, by 2012 the number grew into sixty people, who visited 300 villages and interviewed some 1,000 elderly people from nineteen provinces. As the Plan evolves, the subjects have expanded to include land reform, the Great Leap Forward and the CR, and Wenguang is exploring the possibility of building an archive of these visual and oral materials. The documentaries provide a historical and imaginative space for active contemplation. Visuals acquire additional dimensions through a connection to material cultures of memorabilia and ephemera, such as family photographs, keepsakes, souvenirs and tokens. In Chinese and the Pasts, a recent study on the historical consciousness of ordinary Chinese, the largest number of respondents (over 80%) reported taking photographs and videos (with examining family photographs as a subcategory); watching movies (including documentaries) and television programmes and attending family reunions or other reunions were also popular.14 Collecting family photographs has organically restored and reaffirmed family roots. Heritage: from an Enthusiasm to an Industry As an aesthetic, educational, pedagogical, ideological, political and cultural hybrid, the idea of heritage travels between the tangible and intangible, the real and the imaginative, the material and the symbolic. It helps to create space for public history in museums, historical districts and landscapes and contributes to tourism as a renewed source of soft power, an increasing priority in China.15 Museum development runs parallel with nation-building, and in 1949 the newly established government nationalized cultural institutions across the country, aligning the museums with the dominant ideology. Political upheaval dominated the historical landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the Cultural Revolution (1967–76) proved to be key stumbling blocks: the museum fever abated and most collections were dispersed. With the rapid economic development and urbanization of the 1980s, the government refocused on museums as part of ‘spiritual civilization (jingshen wenmin)’. In the 1990s, a national patriotic education programme drew on the pedagogical potential of museums, revamping old ones across the country. In 2009, a State Council meeting upgraded culture to the level of a strategic industry. Museumification had become a national pursuit. Alongside government efforts, rich Chinese collectors constructed private museums to show off their treasures. In many cases, private museums represent a different, more daring picture than public ones. Although most such institutions focus on art and culture, some deal with history. The Jianchuan Museum Cluster, funded by rich entrepreneur Jianchuan Fan, is located in the town of An Ren just outside Chengdu and epitomizes how private collections and public presentations attract educated minds beyond the tourist gaze. The Cluster challenges the idea that museums exist in isolation, with dusty objects standing inside glass boxes; instead, it connects up small-scale museum halls focusing on exhibitions, education and research, tourism, collections and connoisseurs, art and history and filmmaking. All of these go beyond the traditional idea of a museum, earning the Cluster national and international recognition. The Cluster is organized around several themes presented as contradictions – collecting wars for peace; collecting lessons for the future; collecting disasters for peace; collecting folk culture for inheritance. These branch out into series – wartime history, folk culture, the red years, disaster prevention and salvage – with collections displayed in thirty sub-exhibition halls, twenty-eight of which are open to the public and are further divided into different sub-themes, such as the Anti-Japanese War, Folk Cultures and Earthquake Commemoration. Compared with written texts, material cultures that represent history in an oblique way remain relatively unthreatening to the authorities. French historian Pierre Nora argues that the discontinuity characterizing modernity led to a proliferation of collective memories, which put pressure on how history itself is written.16 Heritage, allied with memory, becomes a symbol of national identity. In many ways, the Jianchuan Museum Cluster fits into the ruling politics of preserving and revitalizing history and culture, part of Chinese civilization, for future generations. It also accommodates changing public demands for getting in touch with history, seeking historical truth beyond state-controlled narratives, or personal recollections. At the urban level, many cities are scrabbling for ‘historical’ status, eyeing commercial possibilities. Turning from urban destruction to preservation, China is turning every trace of the past into a piece of heritage, with heritage tourism representing a collective cultural and political identity that evokes revolutionary memory to build an imagined shared community. Initiated by the State Council and the Central Communittee in 2004, Red Tourism has been a key front for patriotic education. The CCP uses the association of the colour red with the revolution in nearly all symbols and rituals, for instance in the National Flag, the National Emblem, the CCP Emblem, and in the names of a range of revolutionary places. These sites have been revamped, restored and revived, with the HongYan (Red Crag) Circuit, which connects different revolutionary sites in the city of Chongqing, representing one such effort. The Circuit is based on two major museums: the Red Crag Revolutionary Memorial Hall Cluster (Fig.1), and the Gele Mountain Cluster. These places offer different perspectives: one tells the story of the Southern Bureau, the central office of the CCP from 1938 to 1946; the other centres on the Nationalist prisons and camps and the martyrs who died on 27 November 1949 when their prison was set on fire. For each place, material culture – original sites of massacres, museums, memorials, sculptures and landscapes – is shaped to feed the HongYan spirit, the revolutionary spirit to sacrifice and to die for one’s country. The Red Crag Circuit merges these two narratives into an organic whole. Numerous original sites are scattered around two adjacent districts – Yuzhong and Shaping – including the Southern Bureau, the Guiyuan Signature Place for Collaboration between the CCP and the Nationalist Party on 10/10 (10 October 1945), the residence of Premier Zhou Enlai and the original site of the Xin Hua News Daily. The Anti-Japanese War education museum and the Democratic Parties History Museum have been added to enhance the organic experience. The government has appropriated site selection and management to reinforce official revolutionary narratives. The Circuit foregrounds the memories of those who lived through the revolutions led by the CCP, by inviting visitors to walk the same route as their comrades once did, to eat the same food and sing the same songs. In foregrounding these memories, it also fosters ‘correct’ historical understanding in younger generations. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Map of sites in the Revolutionary Memorial Hall Cluster, part of the HongYan (Red Crag) Circuit near Chongqing. Author’s photograph. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Map of sites in the Revolutionary Memorial Hall Cluster, part of the HongYan (Red Crag) Circuit near Chongqing. Author’s photograph. These historic sites are supplemented by various literary and artistic representations, including HongYan, a national best-selling novel; the mural Baptism in Blood and Fire; a sculptural cluster called Long Live the Revolutionary Spirit; an oil painting of Premier Zhou Enlai and His Friends; a stage play; a night tour to Baigongguan and Zhazidong (former Nationalist concentration camps); and the large-scale artistic landscape, Soul of Red Crag. All connect material cultures and artistic interpretations, threading them with revolutionary narratives and illustrated with original objects, historical photographs, audiovisual materials and sculptures. Modern media technology adds another layer of sensory experience for visitors to reflect and reminisce. The semi-panorama 11.27 Massacre at the Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum, for example, depicts war stories, creating a bodily engagement with history. Narrative representations of historical pasts in the public space are often multi-referential, contested, conflictual, political and configurative. The reasons for the sudden surge in interest in the historical and the cultural are many, yet the message is clear: history is marketable. Different tourist routes package and sell revolutionary stories, and heritage is becoming an important local economic strategy. Different forms of representation work together to invent a tradition that connects to national identity. In Michael Kammen’s words, ‘the repression of memory can be a matter of state policy in totalitarian regimes, … museums and historic sites have been used by dominant groups in “free” societies to rationalize and perpetuate their partisan vision of the nation’s evolution’.17 That these also have the capacity to convey authenticity and legitimize rulers is clear, as Donald Horne argued: ‘It really should not be news to anyone with a critical interest in modern industrial societies that monuments have a rhetorical function – more likely than not to serve certain prevailing interest – and that rhetorical function shifts, as society shifts.’18 Virtual History: Thousands of Invisible Hands Media technology enables and enfranchises, as Ludmilla Jordanova observes: the Internet ‘altered modes of learning and teaching, access to original sources and to information’.19 With the extensive use of the Internet, the public consumes history in its own fashion. In creative engagement with new material sources, tools and archives, they start to ‘take control of historical information from the academic gatekeeper and develop their own narratives, stories and experience’.20 A diverse range of virtual re-enactment of history has flourished since 2000. Historical video games, for example, have attracted a steadily growing attention from ordinary Chinese people. Koei’s Romance of Three Kingdoms21 is set in one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history, the time of the Three Kingdoms (220–280 AD), when three emperors separately claimed to be the legitimate successors of the Han Dynasty. Affective, imaginative, playful, interactive and immersive, video games in this well-designed series have created their own publics and shaped the historical consciousness of the players digitally and collectively. The thirteenth instalment was released across multiple platforms in 2016. A virtual, disembodied community – history aficionados, legions of practitioners, amateur historians – directly engages with its own history, develops skills related to information management and preservation and builds up its own archives. For Jerome de Groot virtual history comes ‘with digitized information, sources and archives, revolutionizes how knowledge is accessed, evaluated, analyzed and transmitted among millions of audiences, regardless of physical and geographical boundaries’. He continues: ‘New media and new technology diffuse identities and notions of self both in terms of mediation of culture and our definition of the past’.22 In a similar light, virtual history, as a new form of participatory public history, is born in this renewed and active sense of identity, ownership and citizenship in China. When historical information goes online and becomes accessible to the public, the authoritative status of the professional historian is threatened. Born-digital historical documents also profoundly influence how people approach history, the types of knowledge that are accessed and created and ultimately, the authority of historical knowledge. The modes and style of mass communication have transformed traditional archival structures: virtual archives and digital literacy establish this trend. A parallel revolution occurs in public history institutions, especially museums. The challenge lies in how to demonstrate the intellectual complexity of good history in the digital and public environments. Public historian Sharon Leon rightly stresses that ‘aspects of historical complexity’ should be ‘central to drawing users in and convincing them to stay with content in a meaningful way… Thus, sites that raise issues of multiple causality, issues of multiple perspectives and influence of context in a particular time and space, questions of contingency, questions of historical significance and the role of changing interpretation have the greatest possibility of communicating the rich landscape of history to users’.23 Even with political censorship still in place, the technology revolution in China has seeped into the social fabric. We see a tug-of-war between censorship and creativity. On the one hand, the government is using big data in a massive social-credit system to control its citizens. This system aims to keep score not only of citizens’ credit ratings but also their social, and possibly political, behaviour. The ‘digital dictatorship’, bold as it sounds, is an ambitious and systematic experiment in the digital revolution, though it faces two major technical hurdles – the quality of the data and the sensitivity of the instruments to analyze it.24 On the other hand, various historical simulation games, such as Great Voyage of Zhenghe,25 are designed for use in educational settings to help students interact and experience history in an alternative space. Virtual heritage projects, such as the Forbidden City virtual heritage tour based on 3D modeling,26 also enjoy a renewed public interest in the ancient heritage. Digital technology in this way becomes a cultural agency to build a creative interface, or to deliver a sense of empowerment. Digital history embodies a different type of public history, engaging the actual public, and with very little scholarly involvement. At the grassroots level, the public has not transformed its abundant information into knowledge, for example, writing history on social media, building local and community archives, and designing virtual museum exhibits, remains messy and fragile. All require further intellectual skills of the trade. If digital technology implies the power of media, then language and style of transmission, as Gellner recognizes, also matter. He argues with eloquence, ‘only he who can understand them, or can acquire such comprehension, is included in a moral and economic community’.27 Right now, dialogue between and among the government, intellectuals and the public has begun, yet has not yet culminated in constructive partnerships for public history projects. TRACING THE ORIGINS Genealogy The above sketch presents not a holistic but a prismatic view of the public history landscape in China. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the past remains very much a part of China’s present. Public histories, cosmopolitan and motley, develop from remarkably diverse origins. Unofficial sources and presentations prevail. Oral history enjoys enormous popularity. Memories on various scales emerge. Images speak boldly and challenge the authority of written documents. Heritage develops from an enthusiasm to an industry. And virtual history whets the public appetite for immediacy and efficiency. In this unregulated, undisciplined and daring context, knowledge does not filter down from the top; instead, it is vernacular. The extraordinary stories of ordinary people are told, not in lofty intellectual prose, but in the language of the street. History, under various disguises as memory or heritage, is used for social cohesion and identity-building. This quest for national identity can also be fuelled and sustained by populist nationalism. State-sponsored public history projects, such as commemorations, feature very little public input, yet enjoy widespread appeal. Three new national holidays were introduced in 2014: Memorial Day for the 1937 Nanjing massacre, Victory Day to mark Japan’s surrender at the end of the Second World War and Martyrs’ Day dedicated to those who died fighting Japan. All represent a renewed attention to China’s wartime past. History, as Hobsbawm wrote, is used ‘as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion’. Every revolutionary movement supports its innovations by reference to the ‘people’s past’, he continued: The element of invention is particularly clear here, since the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so.28 In the contemporary People’s Republic of China, to recentre the history of Japan’s defeat is a priority for formulating Chinese national identity. Cultural identity is bound up with national identity in China. Rituals and symbols of every description help to hold a unified culture together. Oral traditions of myths, rituals – flags, holidays, tales of national heroes, villains, battles and standardized rites and unifying symbols – do not qualify to be dignified as history. As James Watson argues, the role of ordinary people is that of ‘farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, midwives, silkreelers and labourers – both male and female – of every conceivable description. It is these people, together with local elites, scholar-bureaucrats and even the emperor himself, who were engaged in the construction of a unified culture… People at all stations in life are perceived as actors rather than reactors’.29 While cultural traditions abound, the genesis of modern public history in China can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century: specifically, from the late Qing period to the People’s Republic era, under another name, New Cultural Movement, which broadly occupied the years 1895–1919. These cut-off dates are utterly arbitrary, but the time frame helps us give a broad brush of the social context – a growing sense of national crisis, the development of Marxism in China and the 1919 May Fourth Movement – accompanied by a collapse of the idealized version of national identity advocated through the ideas of the elites. In response to the national crisis and internal conflicts, Sun Yet-Sun’s Alliance Society promoted the Han (the largest ethnic group in China) as a collective agent capable of seizing control of the historical process and bringing about China’s emancipation from feudalism and foreign control. Sun’s Three Principles of People – nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood – delegitimized the past in a way that laid it open to human transformation and offered a vision of the present opening the way to a bright future of national renewal. Sun’s vision became that of the Nationalist Party, established in 1912. When the intellectual idealists began to change their attitudes toward the masses, they brought in Marxism and transformed a cultural shift into a revolutionary movement. Marxism was presented as a stimulating and progressive approach to the manifold problems of history that recognized the power of the working class and the growth of working-class consciousness. Li Dazhao, a nationally known revolutionary intellectual, pictured an ideal world of the working class and glorified ‘being a worker’ in his ‘The Victory of the Plebeian’ (1918).30 Although this impulse should be applauded, its message was not shared by the working class in China, and its vision was mainly limited to the intellectuals themselves. Historically, the concept of class finds a particular expression in China. As Wang Hui writes, it is ‘not merely a structural category centred on the nature of property ownership or relation to the means of production. It is rather a political concept based on the revolutionary party’s appeal for mobilization and self-renewal’. Similarly, the concept was used within the CCP to stimulate debates and to avoid depoliticization under the conditions of the party’s administration of power: ‘The concept denoted the attitudes of social or political forces toward revolutionary politics.’31 In the dominant rhetoric the CCP, as a working-class party, represented the interests of the public. However, the CCP did not truly nor fully represent the grassroots, as it claimed, since the voices at the bottom had not found a place in top-down official narratives. Why? The groundswell of public opinion about populism and equality directly challenged the feudal culture based on Confucian thought, resulting in the collapse of both the outlook based on heavenly principles and efforts to construct a new worldview and a psychological yearning for roots. This helter-skelter approach led to changes in core social structures, penetrating Chinese society, animating its latent vitality and enthusiasm for new perspectives on the past. In this liberal climate, traditional culture, philosophy, law, political thought, education, art and literature, linguistics, natural science, journalism, library science, museums and of course, history breathed the air of freedom, and new ideas were exchanged and sparked. In the field of history, the slogan ‘turn to the West, and learn from the West’ appeared in the early twentieth century, and New History flourished. Advocated by the eminent historian Liang Qichao, this New History challenged traditional history in fundamental ways. First, it emphasized the progression of history, which is not about a return to an ideal past, but about development and the prediction of the future based on the present. The idea of the world citizen, in this progression, injects a cosmopolitan perspective. History, it was said, should record the living panorama of the entire society. Thus, history became endowed with new significance for the present. Second, it called for a humanistic return to the people and foregrounded historians’ social responsibility. As Liang argued: History is about using the past for directing the future. We, as contemporaries, shoulder the responsibility to communicate, propagate and pass down this civilization… the purpose of history lies in studying the intricate connections between the past and the present, in which history is part of, and closely related to, the present (to enrich the living present, to enjoy the rich heritage).32 In this light, history is not written for the powerful, nor for the intellectuals, but for the general public. Liang later expands the point, ‘History, the most profound and critical of all scholarship, is the mirror of ordinary people’s lives, and the source of patriotism’.33 This challenged understandings of the connection between the past and the present, and between the general public and the educated elites. It also enlarged the scope of historical material sources to include oral transmission, material cultures and archeological findings. Eventually, New History broadened the intellectual scope of history. Instead of being an inward-looking and isolated subject, history became associated with geography, geology, religion, ethnology, linguistics, sociology, law, economics and many other disciplines.34 New History envisioned a moral ideal of collectivity, a society with ‘a high level of autonomy and freedom and a bottom-up structure, with the moral principles appropriate to this kind of civil society. Here, the collective, or society is…a mode of social construction’.35 The conception of history, the idea of source materials, historical research methods, a truth-seeking spirit and vernacular writing styles, all have a relationship, however fortuitous, to what we later called ‘public history’. In this light, the philosophy of New History prefigured the rise of modern public history a century or so later. In the search for national identity, the spirit of New History was revolutionary, humanistic, generously borrowing and constantly reinventing. What is different, however, is that a century ago, history from below, or grassroots history, was advocated by cultural elites. Those sitting at the top of the social and cultural hierarchy did not understand the actual stories of the people at the bottom, so they could not speak with confidence about the public’s thoughts and feelings, much less about writing their history. Today, modern public history enjoys massive appeal precisely because it meets a felt – though vaguely understood – need, and it fills an emotional – though not necessarily a historical – void, among various groups of people. It speaks directly, in a timely fashion, to the concerns of the public. Past-in-the-Present: Issues and Challenges Probing deeper into the mobilizing effect of public history brings us closer to the ground, where we encounter the idea of revolution. The original meaning of ‘revolution’ indicates a revolving movement in space or time. Its political implications evolved first as an action against established order and then developed from the literal renewal of war to the general sense of armed rising or opposition, and by extension to open resistance to authority. The circular meaning gave way to a rising one, implying fundamental change that is restorative and innovative and brings about a whole new social order.36 This suggests novelty, acceleration, transformation (above or below), alteration (of the future based on a changed view of the past), social emancipation and the permanence of change.37 This helps to explain why and how public history leads us to ask new questions, to inquire into old issues in a new way, to uncover hidden, even shameful, historical chapters, and to articulate history differently. The past is chimerical, no longer a petrified fact with absolute objectivity waiting to be discovered and analyzed by a professionally trained few. Public history attempts either to bridge the ‘gap’ in existing historical narratives, or to question (if not challenge) them, affecting both the style of historical writing and modes of dissemination. Despite some scattered and ambiguous successes, public histories have experienced their share of challenges. The grassroots impulse often epitomizes a celebratory mode backed by a sense of empowerment among the historically or culturally marginalized. Most projects in China fail either to pose bigger questions or to locate narratives within a specific historical context, much less to stimulate methodological thinking or present multiple perspectives.38 Take oral history, for example. Interviewing techniques and skills play an important role in extracting nuggets of information, such as how to animate interviewees to recount their years of experience and to share their lives and memories. This requires a solid grounding in the subject prior to the interviews, a rapport embedded in the emotional context and mutual respect for reminiscence during the interview process. As well, appropriately framing and asking questions in oral history has a direct impact on the quality of the interviews; our basic social assumptions, prior knowledge, experience, ideology and even hunches and instincts influence the kind of interviewees we select and the questions we ask. The interpretation based on these sources may also be skewed. Gerald Strauss asks, Is it honest for those of us who do ‘history from below’ to extol popular mental habits and behavior when these are safely distanced from us in the past, while shunning, not to say recoiling from, the expressions of common belief and taste in our own time and place, many of which we find offensive and alienating? A question of professional discrimination is involved here.39 With no training, no ethical standards, and no systematic transcribing procedures and evaluations, most grassroots projects stop at the collecting phase. The appropriate way to interpret the facts remains unexplored. E. H. Carr reminds us in What is History that the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, as they are always refracted through the minds of the recorder, and historians must engage in ‘imaginative understanding’ of the minds of the people with whom they are dealing, for the thought behind their acts.40 Even if they do attempt this, the impact of their work seems limited to the scholarly context, and the stories elicited rarely travel beyond a small circle. Further concern arises from the field: for example, how far individual biography of the inheritor can generate larger historiographical questions concerning the intangible heritage? The fallibility of memory poses a further question. Most oral history today is personal memory, which is a defective reservoir, a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts. At the most fundamental level, is this … history? The question may insult the moral and intellectual capacity of the majority, but it is worth pondering, and I am asking it with some genuine doubt. In the spirit of public history, the immaculate conception of knowledge, as Samuel quite poignantly criticizes, ‘with its insistence on keeping inquiry within the boundaries of the discipline, and its refusal to countenance any traffic between the imaginary and the real’,41 has already started to disintegrate. Nevertheless, the inquiry process leading toward knowledge, however generous, has not. Knowledge (various forms) Judging, inferring, and constructing ↑ Writing & presenting Selecting, sifting, arranging, and analyzing ↑ Locating & delimiting the problem (a problematic situation) Judging ↑ Historical facts → data (records, documents, oral evidence, material cultures, etc.) Judging ↑ Facts/information Most public history activities in China have not gone beyond the data-collecting phase. Sometimes they have attempted to authenticate information, however very few draw connections, make inferences, analyze causal relationships, or in simpler terms, take the time to locate information in a changing social/historical context. A very small number of such activities, such as reinterpreting a historical event in the light of newly found sources or reordering/rearranging the historical data, reach the second phase outlined above, and then only partially. Few of those involved actually engage in writing history, and even fewer produce quality history writing or create historical knowledge. The ensemble of such activities in the name of public history represents, at its best, the phenomena, appearance, or fragments of historical inquiries. Despite these challenges, public history practices and inquiries, large or small, focus on either an official or an unofficial scale, ask new questions, utilize new and different materials, adopt a refreshed (if not completely novel) approach, reveal a different interpretation, follow a distinct line of inquiry, and ultimately, lead to different products and naturally, a different impact on historical conscience. They travel between the past and the present, or in John Dewey’s words, ‘it is a matter of elementary logic that the historian always studies the “past-of-the-present” rather than the past in its own terms’.42 If, as Dewey explains, the past is of logical necessity to the past-of-the-present and the present will be the past-of-a-future-living present, history will always be rewritten. As the new present arises, the past is the past of a different present.43 We rearrange, combine and permutate source materials to form a new understanding of the past. Herbert Butterfield rightly argues, ‘It is in this sense that history must always be written from the point of view of the present. It is in this sense that every age will have to write its history over again’.44 Similarly, François Hartog reminds us that continuity, rather than change, is the interpretive framework of modern Chinese history: ‘Rather than making the rupture of a revolutionary moment in the mid-century the central turning point, there has been a move to suggest a longer, more undifferentiated continuity in the trajectory towards a still hazily defined modernity’.45 CONCLUSION If historical knowledge includes discovery and explanation, public history activities and practices in China have accomplished the first and fallen short on the second. To quote Hobsbawm, There is an enormous temptation in history simply to uncover what has hitherto been unknown and to enjoy what we find. In addition, since so much of the lives, and even more of the thoughts, of the common people have been quite unknown, this temptation is all the greater in grassroots history, all the more since many of us identify ourselves with the unknown common men and women – the even unknown women – of the past… curiosity, sentiment and the pleasure of antiquarianism are not enough. The best of such grassroots history makes wonderful reading, but that is all. What we want to know is why, as well as what.46 Identifying the silences and filling the gaps offers, at best, a start. Public history requires more, not less, from the academy.47 Thinking about the future of public history in China, I advance the following three propositions. First, we need to adopt an open attitude toward the materials with which and the people with whom historians are working. This will result in a different writing style that appeals to the public while retaining rigour and honesty. Popular history writing calls for a return to the old tradition in which history was a branch of literature, albeit a different genre characterized by a different vocabulary, rhetoric, tropes, grammar and style. Beneath the seemingly playful approach to historical subjects lies a serious search for historical truth, with a particular assiduity perhaps, but the same elementary rules of the trade. Historians need to speak directly to the minds and hearts of the public. What Carr calls an ‘imaginative understanding’ of the thoughts, feelings and stories behind their actions provides an appropriate direction that could facilitate this direct communication with the public. Second, it is important to have a broader and more liberal understanding of history. When academics proceed with a cramped sense of possession, they fail to understand the soul of public history, which is downright democratic, generous and unrestrained. Jargon-sprouting writings rarely interact with the public they claim to service. When academics talk down to the public as though they are slow students, even if their intentions are perfectly pure, they cannot probe the minds and hearts of the public. Sharing authority does not come easily. Historians need to become more charitable about their information, knowledge and skills. Finally, rigorous inquiry lies at the heart of all public history projects. No public history survives by short-cutting this process. This is, I believe, where historians make the greatest contribution to public history. Their visions and crafts will push the movement forward with intellectual heft, and ultimately with staying power. After all, public history – if ‘the public’ means grassroots in a genuine sense – represents a vision of reality. Na Li is a Research Fellow at the Department of History, Zhejiang University. She is Editor for Public History: a National Journal of Public History, and International Consulting Editor for The Public Historian. She serves on the Board of Directors for the National Council on Public History. Her research focuses on public history and urban preservation. Her first book, Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto’s Urban Landscape (University of Toronto Press, 2015) investigates ethnic minority entrepreneurs in one of Toronto’s most diverse neighbourhoods, incorporates collective memory in urban landscape interpretation, and suggests a culturally sensitive narrative approach to urban preservation. Her second book, Public History: a Critical Introduction (Peking University Press, 2019) surveys the key issues in public history. Footnotes 1 Na Li, ‘Past-in-the Present: Public History in China’, in What is Public History Globally, ed. Paul Ashton and Alexander Trapeznik, London, 2019, pp. 51–62. 2 Confucius, The Great Learning. In today’s vocabulary, ‘crowd sourcing’. 3 Wuzhu were higher intellectuals in ancient times, who claimed knowledge of astrology, geography, and the human world. Wuzhu also claimed to be able to communicate with the unknown, thus were revered. 4 Fu Sinian, An Introduction to Historical Methods (Shi Xue Fang Fa Daolun), Beijing, 2015, p. 5. 5 For an investigative report on the old industries in the north-eastern China: http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7bdEzddS-pNkOInCPWtRnQ. 6 Jia, in the Chinese language, connotes an emotional attachment to family, hometown, and the nation (Guo); Spring and Autumn borrows the names of two seasons, indicating a flow of time and a sense of continuity. The funding sources included the Beijing Yongyuan Foundation, the Zhejiang Dunhe Foundation, the My History NGO, the China Salvation Foundation, and the CuiYongyuan Oral History Center at the Communication University of China. 7 Yesterday (Zuotian), which is published electronically, is banned in China yet enjoys enormous popularity among Cultural Revolution researchers and witnesses. It is organized around different themes, for example, Truth and Reflection (2013) and Responsibility of Witnesses (2014). 8 Private correspondence between He Shu and Na Li, 7 July 2015. 9 Zhao Yafu, ‘From “Learning History” to “Doing History”’, in Public History, a National Journal of Public History, ed. Li Na (Zhejiang University) 1: 1, 2018, p. 23. 10 The basic procedures include advertising, training, submission, multiple rounds of evaluations, an awards ceremony, summer camp, and publishing. Submissions are evaluated by about fifty scholars specializing in history and culture from both within and outside the colleges and universities. 11 The competition was first funded by the Rainbow Foundation, a Beijing-based nonprofit organization. From 2015 it was independently run by the Beijing Yiai Suyuan Cultural Company and financed by nonprofit organizations. Another charity, DunHe, has been involved in funding the competition for two years. 12 The Canal Memory: Oral History of the Jiaxin Boatmen (Yunhe Jiyi: Jiaxin Chuanmin Shenghuo Koushu Shilu), ed. Jiaxin Literature and Arts Association, Shanghai, 2016. 13 James A. Flath, The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China, Vancouver, 2004, introduction. 14 For more on the Chinese and the Pasts project, see Na Li, ‘Chinese and the Pasts: Exploring Historical Consciousness of Ordinary Chinese – Initial Findings from Chongqing’, in Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field (Making Sense of History vol. 6), ed. Anna Clark and Carla L. Peck, New York, 2019, pp. 125–41. 15 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: the Means to Success in World Politics, New York and Oxford, 2004. 16 Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: the Construction of the French Past vol. 1, New York, 1996, pp. 1–20. 17 Michael Kammen, Mystical Chords of Memory: the Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, New York, 1991, p. 691. 18 Donald Horne, The Great Museum: the Re-presentation of History, Pluto Press, 1987, p. 251. 19 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, London and New York, 2000, p. 189. 20 Jordanova, History in Practice. 21 The story is based on the classic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by Luo Guanzhong in the fourteenth century. 22 Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, Hoboken NJ, 2008, p. 90. 23 Sharon M. Leon, ‘Complexity and Collaboration: Doing Public History in a Digital Environment’, in The Oxford Handbook of Public History, ed. Paula Hamilton, and James Gardner, New York, 2017, p. 49. 24 ‘China’s Digital Dictatorship’, The Economist, 17 Dec. 2106, p. 14, p. 20. 25 The game was designed to celebrate one of the seven monumental voyages (1405–33) led by Zhenghe in the Ming Dynasty for exploration and cultural exchange. 26 See http://www.openculture.com/2008/10/virtual_tour_of_the_forbidden_city.html. See also Fang Liu, Forbidden City: an Immersive Virtual Reality World, MFA thesis (unpublished), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2017. 27 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), New Perspectives on the Past, intro. John Breuilly, Malden and Oxford, 2006, p. 122. 28 Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Terence K. Ranger, Cambridge, UK and New York, 1983, pp. 12, 13. 29 Lowell Dittmer, Samuel S. Kim. China's Quest for National Identity, 1993, pp. 17–19, 81. 30 Li Dazhao, ‘The Victory of the Plebeian’, New Youth, 5: 5, 1918. 31 Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, London, 2009, p. 10. 32 Liang Qichao, Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Zhongguo Lishi Yanjiufa Bubian, Zhonghua Shuju, Beijing, 2015, p. 4. 33 Liang, Zhongguo Lishi, pp. 8–9. 34 Liang, Zhongguo Lishi, pp. 180, 224, 230–2, 191–2. 35 Liang, Zhongguo Lishi, p. 163. 36 Raymond Williams, Keywords, a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Oxford, 1983, p. 270–4. 37 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. Keith Tribe, New York, 2004. 38 Na Li, ‘Public History in China: Past Making in the Present’, in What is Public History Globally? Using the Past in the Present, ed. Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik, London, 2019, pp. 51–62. 39 Gerald Strauss, ‘The Dilemma of Popular History’, Past and Present 132: 1, 1991, p. 133. 40 Edward Hallet Carr, What is History? (London, 1961), New York, 1967, pp. 24–25. 41 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, London and New York, 1994, p. 431. 42 John Dewey, Logic, the Theory of Inquiry, New York, 1938, pp. 231–7. 43 Dewey, Logic, pp. 238–9. 44 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), New York, 1951, p. 91. 45 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, transl. Saskia Brown, New York, 2015, p. 9. 46 Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, pp. 214–15. 47 Some works exploring historians and their uses of the past include: Hilda Kean, Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now, London, 2000; Jorma Kalela, Making History: the Historian and Uses of the Past, Basingstoke, 2011. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Origin of Modern Public History in China
JF - History Workshop Journal
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbz033
DA - 2019-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-origin-of-modern-public-history-in-china-JCZ9agdaaD
SP - 252
VL - 88
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -