New Open Access Publication: The Digitalisation of Memory Practices in China: Contesting the Curating State28.11.2025 {en}
The Digitalisation of Memory Practices in China: Contesting the Curating State
Edited by Maximilian Mayer and Frederik Schmitz
This edited volume examines how the use of information technologies is reshaping and expanding the production and contestation of collective memory in China. It is the first in-depth analysis of how and what digitised memory and heritage practices are emerging in Chinese society. Its main theoretical intervention is to conceptualise the Chinese party-state as a curatorial actor, a ‘curating state’, and to analyse how curatorial practices are becoming more distributed and hybrid as a result of digitalisation, enabling new infrastructures, forms, arenas of narrative power, but also challenging the party-state’s hegemonic control over how the past is memorialised in China. Bringing together contributions from leading Chinese and international scholars, it explores how different media enable practices that empower marginal non-state actors to participate in the curation of memory and heritage, challenging the official state-curated narratives, archives and content erasure. Contributing to an understanding of the capabilities and constraints on what contemporary digital authoritarianism in China can achieve in terms of erasing and narrating history and shaping both individual and collective memory, and examining the interactions between official curation, commercialisation, a variety of different digital media, platforms, the Internet and private “memory work”, this book offers conceptual and empirical insights for scholars, professionals and students in China-related fields of study. Given its broad interdisciplinary approach, it also invites non-specialist readers from a range of disciplines, including memory studies, cultural studies, political science, media studies, ethnography and area studies, to explore the digitised making and remaking of collective memory in non-Western societies.
Published Sep 29, 2025 I ISBN 978-1529253597 I Bristol University Press
Dr Maximilian Mayer is Junior Professor of International Relations and Global Politics of Technology at the University of Bonn. His research interests include the global politics of science, innovation, and technology; China’s foreign and energy policy; global energy and climate politics; theories of International Relations.
Frederik Schmitz is a Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Bonn. His research focuses on memory politics in China and how emotional legitimacy is created through immersion in ‘red’ history.
Open Access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.25968897
Publisher: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-digitalisation-of-memory-practices-in-china
