Going to the People

Abstract

Scholarship on museums situated in the People’s Republic of China privileges the analysis of exhibitions over visitor studies. Based on the author’s research on the reception of the Shanghai History Museum’s representation of colonial history, this paper sheds light on the opportunities and difficulties of working with museum audiences in China. The article presents a qualitative analysis of the collected data, showing how visitors personalize and criticize the state-sanctioned anticolonial and nationalist version of Shanghai’s history. It argues that visitor studies are a useful method for examining how museum audiences renegotiate the meaning of exhibitions under an authoritarian regime.