Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)
open access
The Chinese city of Shenzhen in Guangdong province is often seen as the success story of China’s reform policies that were initiated by Hua Guofeng in the late 1970s, and popularised by Deng...Show moreThe Chinese city of Shenzhen in Guangdong province is often seen as the success story of China’s reform policies that were initiated by Hua Guofeng in the late 1970s, and popularised by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. Shenzhen – China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) – is also representative of the ideal of a new, modernized, and economically strong China. The communist ideals of the Maoist era have long been pushed aside to make way for newer ideologies such as ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, or more recently, Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’. These shifts in ideology have had a significant influence on the identity that the Chinese state wishes to convey to its citizens and beyond. This paper examines how national and regional identities and their subsequent narratives interact or conflict in the permanent exhibition of Shenzhen museum. Furthermore, I will look at how similar exhibition practices (Shenzhen Museum and the National Museum of China) are used to convey a different message. Shenzhen Museum plays an important part in communicating the city’s identity and its position in China as a model city both to the local population and beyond. Shenzhen illustrates that the way we perceive nationalism has to change in an ever-globalising world, where large cities within a nation can play as large a role in defining the nation as the country at large.Show less
