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Collecting the Revolution

British Engagements with Chinese Cultural Revolution Material Culture
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In the late 1960s, student protests broke out throughout much of the world, and while Britain's anti-Vietnam protestors and China's Red Guards were clearly radically different, these movements at times shared inspirations, aspirations and aesthetics. Within Western popular media, Mao's China was portrayed as a danger to world peace, but at the same time, for some on the counter-cultural left, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) contained ideas worthy of exploration. Moreover, because of Britain's continued colonial possession of Hong Kong, Britain had a specific interest in ongoing events in China, and information was highly sought after. Thus, the objects that China exported - propaganda posters, paintings, Mao badges, periodicals, ceramics etc - became a crucial avenue through which China was known at this time, and interest in them crossed the political divide. Collecting the Revolution uses the objects that the Chinese government sent abroad and that visitors brought back with them to open up the stories of diplomats, journalists, activists, students and others, and how they imagined, engaged with and later remembered Mao's China through its objects. It chronicles the story of how these objects were later incorporated into the collections of some of Britain's most prominent museums, thus allowing later generations to continue to engage with one of the most controversial and important periods of China's recent history.
Emily Williams is Lecturer in Chinese Society in Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou China.
Part I: Shaping Impressions: Britain and Cultural Revolution Culture 1. Visualising the Cultural Revolution: Maoist material culture in British popular culture 2. Idealising the Cultural Revolution: Huxian peasant paintings and the British art world 3. Experiencing China through Material Culture: the British in China and their objects Part II: Transnational Collecting and Exhibiting 4. Private collections: the global journeys of Cultural Revolution objects 5. Exhibiting the Revolution: Collection and display of Cultural Revolution objects in British public institutions 6. Archiving the Revolution: The University of Westminster China Poster Collection Conclusion: Legacies of Engagements with Cultural Revolution Objects: Historicizing Development and the Dilemma of Adopting Western Models in Nigeria
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