The Changing Role of Red Relics in Contemporary China

This talk will introduce the collection of ‘Red relics’, which are objects relating to CCP history. They include Mao badges, posters, stamps, as well as military artifacts from the revolutionary period and objects from everyday life that shared a ‘Red’ aesthetic from after 1949. Collections began to be formed in the early Reform era, and most academic literature has primarily understood them as a form of grassroots nostalgia for the supposed purity and equality of the Mao era and a reaction against the changes of the Reform era. Red collecting began, therefore, as a somewhat marginal subculture, but more recently, Xi Jinping’s focus on the importance of carrying forward the ‘red tradition’ and passing on the ‘red genes’ to the younger generations has brought these objects - and those who collect them - new prominence. This talk will look at the return to history in Xi’s China and what this means for Red collectors.
About the speaker
Dr Emily Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou. She is a cultural historian of modern China, with a particular interest Maoist material culture. Her first book, entitled Collecting the Revolution: British engagements with Chinese Cultural Revolution material culture, is forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield.