“This book will be of great interest to students of the Mao years focusing on both intellectual history and popular culture…I see in Ho’s book a new perspective on the dense enmeshment of the political and popular culture of the time; the book shows how the objects and narratives involved in exhibition mattered both for politics and for individual curators and visitors.”
Leksa Lee, The PRC History Review
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“Denise Y. Ho’s book, impeccably grounded in archival and oral research, analyzes how certain objects of Mao-era politics (1949-1979), glossed as revolution, came to be organized for exhibition in local- and national-level forms…She reveals how material objects were made to take on meaning through their contextualization into various narrative strategies, and she explores how narrative strategies were bent to fit the materialized realities of ever-shifting political life itself.”
Rebecca Karl, The Public Historian
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“Ho’s point is that museums and exhibitions served two distinct and sometimes conflicting goals in Mao’s time: state legitimation—a proper state conserves and shows its heritage—and mobilization—displays to mobilize the masses to revolutionary action…This is rich grassroots history grounded in both the operations and the documents of the party and the voices and experience of ordinary people.”
Denise Y. Ho 