On September 29, 2024, the USC U.S.-China Institute hosted a workshop at the Huntington’s Chinese garden, offering K-12 educators hands-on insights into using the garden as a teaching tool. With expert presentations, a guided tour, and new resources, the event explored how Chinese gardens' rich history and cultural significance can be integrated into classrooms. Interested in learning more? Click below for details on the workshop and upcoming programs for educators.
Socialist China’s New Exhibitions: Rethinking Class, Material Culture, and Propaganda
UC Berkeley's Institue of East Asian Studies presents a colloquium on material culture and its relation to socialist propaganda.
Where
This talk examines the origins and Mao-era elaborations on “new exhibitions” in socialist China, the practice of displaying personal possessions as a way to articulate meanings of class in both “old China” and “new China.” During the Socialist Education Movement, “class education exhibitions” linked material objects to class status, arguing for the persistence of class and the need for “continuous revolution.” When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, Red Guards created exhibitions from the confiscated materials of the “house search.” Taken together, these two kinds of exhibitions demonstrate the role of material culture in political propaganda. The two case studies, part of the recent book Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge, 2018), suggest that the exhibitionary culture of the Mao era taught individuals how to participate in its political campaigns.
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