L'empire de l'éternel présent. Dans les musées de la République populaire de Chine

Processes of urban renovation and modernisation have remodelled Chinese cities at astonishing speed since the 1980s and led to the disappearance of “traditional” districts and ways of life. The last few years, however, have witnessed the emergence of efforts to reappropriate some aspects of this heritage. This can be seen in the creation of museums, but also in the establishment of monuments deemed typical of national culture and history. The upshot has been a blurring of boundaries between the “authentic” and the recreated, between historians’ history and the history of state institutions, and between exteriority and interiority. The past is reinscribed in the present by means of an act of forgetting its shadow-side. This article explores some of these intermediate spaces where spatial and chronological fixed points begin to blur.