Public History or Public Toilets in China?

Editor:  Ms. Torres attended a meeting of the National Council for Public History in Monterey, California in April.  This is one of the reports she filed for HNN.

Na Li, who received her PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, along with a Graduate Certificate in Public History, spoke about the possibilities of “public history” in China. She now works as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Chongqing University, China. She is also an adjunct professor at Shanghai Normal University.  

Is public history possible in China? The simple answer, according to Na Li is yes. “We have yet to develop public history in China. We cannot simply translate the ‘same kind of public history institutions’ from the US.” 

Li spoke about the difficulty of translating “public history,” as Americans understand it, into Chinese. “The problem lies in the world ‘public.’ In the Chinese language, we have different phrases for this word. For example, for public toilet, we use one phrase to describe toilets in the public arena.” Public History, according to Na Li “does not simply mean history that happens in the public space; it also means the public is actively involved in a dynamic thinking space. In this way, they take ownership of that space.” With those connotations, she suggests we use a different word for “public” history in the Chinese language (rather than the one used for toilets). She insisted that, while developing grass roots forms of public history, it is also important that local Chinese people can make sense of what “public history” is. She stressed the way in which “public” gets lost in translation and the importance of finding the correct nuance to describe what she hopes will one day be a large-scale project.

Another challenge in developing a “public history” in China is not semantical, but logistical. There are political and bureaucratic challenges that make this “public history” ideal difficult to achieve. “It all boils down to the idea of authority-sharing. Official history is still authoritative and controlling.” Na Li explained how, because of the government, there is an “official” history of China. The idea of a peoples or popular history is just barely coming into the mainstream. 

Nevertheless, Na Li described her students as very passionate about history and excited to engage with the history around them. 

Lastly, she described the History Carnival 2013 and the Memory of the Nation. History Carnival 2013 was the fourth annual History Carnival which was co-initiated by Our History and Chinese Financial Museum. The themes at the events were history as “relevant, interesting, and useful.” The goals of the projects were to share memories, encourage public participation in history, and carry on traditions. The most important goal of Memory of the Nation was to encourage Chinese to write their own history.