Exhibiting Growth: Producing State-Market Hybridity in China's Museum Industry

Abstract

As China's growth slows, the government targets high-value-added services for development. These policies can surface in unexpected places. One is the booming museum industry where, as local governments build museums as part of development projects, museum production companies grow rapidly on government capital. For one design firm, the theme of ‘growth’ animated not only a history museum they designed, but also directors’ stories about the firm, and rituals celebrating their IPO. I find that all these narratives of growth celebrated the enmeshment of state and market. The ethnography of state-market hybridity shows how market freedom is an ideology requiring constant maintenance. But in China markets are understood as tools for government caretaking, raising instead the question: when state-market hybridity is the explicit ideology, how is it maintained? I argue that ‘exhibitions of growth’ do this by claiming that this hybridity itself will drive growth and transform the economy.