Heritagising the South China Sea: appropriation and dispossession of maritime heritage through museums and exhibitions in Southern China

ABSTRACT

With the emergence of critical heritage studies, scholars show that ‘bottom up’ initiatives that blur the boundaries between private, civil, and state have arisen not as a modernising vision to legitimise national authority but as ‘rooted in identification with local community’, linking past and future. In China, such studies demonstrate the emergence of a different kind of museology – with ‘private’ heritage initiatives on behalf of individuals and groups – tolerated by the state authorities through investments that link heritage tourism to development. However, when a maritime vision of national history is at stake, the central state would co-opt ‘private’ heritage initiatives to subsume them under the wider, sanitised narrative of Chinese maritime civilisation that requires a different relation to the past and its extraction from the localities that do not inscribe their heritage into these universalised visions. Zooming in on three museums in Hainan related to the South China Sea (SCS), I reveal the contradictory claims made by different actors regarding the use, representation and ownership claims of historical seafaring in terms of cultural heritage. Therefore, I argue that heritagisation of seafaring in the SCS represent proprietary and thus territorial claims for China’s rhetoric of maritime ecological civilisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Seafaring
• maritime ecological civilisation
• muzealisation
• heritagisation
• South China Sea

Acknowledgements

In researching and writing this article I have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 802223). I am very grateful to anonymous reviewers for their supportive and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names of informants are pseudonyms.

2. ‘Sovereignty Declaration taking shape’, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016–07/12/content_26051484.htm

3. The South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China), PCA Case No. 2013–19, Award of 12 July 2016, para. 965. Available at: https://www. pcacases.com/web/view/7 (Accessed April 21, 2023).

4. The South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China), PCA Case No. 2013–19, Award of 12 July 2016, para. 965. Available at: https://www. pcacases.com/web/view/7 (Accessed April 21, 2023).

5. Xi Jinping Presides over Ecocide in the South China Sea, https://victorrobertlee.medium.com/xi-jinping-presides-over-ecocide-in-the-south-china-sea-b3830d7afd67 (Accessed April 18, 2023).

6. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china −36,545,565 (Accessed April 4, 2023).

7. ‘China Museum Of The South China Sea/Architectural Design Research Institute of SCUT’. Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/928029/the-south-china-sea-museum-architectural-design-research-institute-of-scut (accessed April 4, 2023).

8. The South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China), PCA Case No. 2013–19, Award of 12 July 2016, para. 965. Available at: https://www. pcacases.com/web/view/7 (Accessed April 21, 2023).

9. Online Exhibition of the National Museum of the South China Sea available http://www.nanhaimuseum.org/411899/418246/index.html (Accessed March 3, 2023)

10. Exhibition’s photo and fieldnotes, November 2019.

11. Exhibition’s photos and fieldnotes, November 2019.

12. Fieldnotes, November 2019.

13. The South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China), PCA Case No. 2013–19, Award of 12 July 2016, para. 922. Available at: https://www.pcacases.com/web/view/7 (accessed 9 March 2023).

14. ‘The Vision for Maritime Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative’. Available at.

http://english.www.gov.cn/archive/publications/2017/06/20/content_281475691873460.htm. See also (Fabinyi et al. 2021; Li and Shapiro 2020; Roszko 2023).

15. National Museum of the South China Sea, Exhibition’s photos and fieldnotes, November 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [802223].

Notes on contributors

Edyta Roszko

Edyta Roszko is a Research Professor and social anthropologist at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. She is leading the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilities in and out of the South China Sea (TransOcean) that historicizes fishing communities in relation to and beyond the nation-state, security concerns and territorially bounded fisheries. She is the author of Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam co-published by NIAS and the University of Hawaiʻi Press (Open Access at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/76750).