The curator,the investor,and the dupe: Consumer desire and Chinese Cultural Revolution memorabilia

The ethics of collecting and the primacy of history

In August 2006, the monthly affiliated with the Shaanxi Provincial Museum in Xi’an, Collections (Shoucang), released a special issue entirely devoted to Cultural Revolution memorabilia. This was the first time the magazine had given such prominence to the topic, a point of great interest for many of its readers. Indeed, given the succession of collecting ‘fevers’ (re) tied to Mao and the ‘Red Era’ (1949–1976) that began in 1993 (Barmé, 1996, 1999), in many respects, the special issue was long overdue. Like other similar magazines, Collections, which itself started in 1993, had certainly acknowledged this collecting phenomenon with isolated articles, but the publication had maintained its primary focus on objects more commonly understood as ‘antiques’. The timing of Collections’ more protracted foray into the contemporary arena was by no means accidental: it marked the 40th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution and the 30th anniversary of its conclusion. Moreover, it was specifically in August 1966 that Mao first reviewed Red Guards from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, arguably the Cultural Revolution’s single most iconic event. The significance of this anniversary was not lost on the magazine’s editors – or its readers, one of whom later lamented that Collections was one of the few fora where this important milestone had been discussed (‘“Wenge” yu shoucang wenhua bitan’ du hou gan, Shoucang, 2006). The reason for this general oversight, as another reader (no doubt correctly) asserts, was the continued political sensitivity of the Cultural Revolution, limiting the places and ways in which it could be discussed. The Chinese Communist Party’s verdict on the Cultural Revolution, rendered in 1981, may well have declared the era an unmitigated disaster (CCP Central Committee, 1996), but there has been precious little official interest in exploring the scope and shape of the ‘calamity’ (zainan) and, predictably, even less interest in excavating any of its more ambiguously positive characteristics. Indeed, resolute silence seems to be the Party-state’s preferred strategy in dealing with historical anniversaries of this kind. ³ Wading into this vacuum – that is, saying anything at all in print, really – was therefore, and remains, something of a risky proposition; better to avoid the whole thing altogether. But unlike many other Chinese publications, Collections found itself in a fairly advantageous position in this regard: while informed discussion of the Cultural Revolution may well be in short supply in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), objects (purportedly) from the Cultural Revolution abound. These objects and their collection provided a politically acceptable point of entry into the tumultuous history of the Cultural Revolution decade. In essence, the magazine’s focus on contemporary collecting gave it some political cover. ⁴

Politically acceptable though it may be vis-à-vis the Party, however, the collection of Cultural Revolution artifacts is nonetheless often cast as morally questionable, a fact implicitly acknowledged in the special issue by Collections’ managing editor, Yang Caiyu. Yang (2006) begins his article on the dual nature (liangmianxing) of Cultural Revolution collecting by articulating some of the editors’ central concerns as they considered putting the dedicated issue together. ‘Was it wise?,’ Yang asks, ‘Could it lead readers into an ambiguous land full of pain, pitfalls, and confusion? Into burning flames?’ (my translation). Setting aside Yang’s paternalistic tone here, these questions point to the extent to which the Cultural Revolution was (and still is) understood as a physically and emotionally scarring time. Indeed, we need only consider the range of Chinese cultural products that engage with this theme – from the advent of ‘scar literature’ (shanghen wenxue) in the late 1970s and early 1980s to contemporary films like Zhang Yimou’s immensely popular Coming Home (Guilai) (2014) – to recognize its power and pervasiveness. The notion of the Cultural Revolution as not just a political mistake – as the Party’s official political verdict holds – but as a lived trauma understandably colors discussions of artifacts from this period as well. After all, there is something discomfiting, if not crass, about the circulation of emblems of suffering, violence, and death as ‘collectibles.’

The source of this moral disquiet, it seems to me, is ultimately the commodity status of the collectible, specifically, the extent to which the object/collectible is constituted by and participates in a system of consumer desire. ⁵ To cast Mao badges as ‘collectibles’ (shoucangpin or cangpin) is to render them desirable, to render them objects of desire, in a way that risks effacing their role as indexical traces, and therefore reminders, of historical trauma. Were a total effacement of this kind to take place, it would be tantamount to a disavowal of that trauma having ever occurred. Cultural Revolution collectibles, then, always threaten to become agents of trauma’s erasure by virtue of the way in which they circulate. Indeed, for some (e.g. Dutton, 2005), such commodified collectibles are constitutive of not only desire, but a pleasurable politics of distraction, such that these objects’ commodity status preempts their participation in any kind of critique. If anything, this view holds, there is a potentially unnerving parallel here between the consumer desire these collectibles engender today and the politically and ideologically inflected desire these objects are originally thought to have embodied and produced. ⁶ One sometimes sees, therefore, a conflation of the two, such that the purchase of a Mao badge in 2016 is reduced to a tacit approbation of the policies, chaos, and violence of 1966. ⁷

Yang Caiyu, for one, is very much disturbed by the potential convergence of present consumption and past politics, and he is therefore at pains to distinguish between two modes of Cultural Revolution collecting, one despicable in its naïveté, the other morally unimpeachable. For Yang (2006), the popular term ‘hongse shoucang,’ or ‘red collecting,’ is decidedly pejorative and must not be confused with the practice of ‘huise shoucang,’ or ‘gray collecting,’ which, as its name suggests, concerns itself with the less laudatory:

The Cultural Revolution, that total (quanjuxing) blunder and period of nationwide chaos, also involved the sabotage carried out by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing’s two counterrevolutionary cliques. The situation was very complicated. Only those official objects reflecting the positive [parts of the Cultural Revolution] can be deemed ‘red’ collecting. Correspondingly, things reflecting the dark and evil [elements of the Cultural Revolution] cannot be called ‘red’ collecting; this is called ‘gray’ collecting. (my translation)

The red collector does little more than gather generic, official, mass-produced trinkets with positive connotations. Moreover, I would argue that red collecting here is fundamentally about emotions – chief among them desire – and an affective connection to objects yoked to a nostalgic enterprise. When deployed as a negative term, as in Yang’s (2006) editorial, this nostalgia is understood as uncritical and non-reflexive; it constitutes the perfect alignment of present consumer desire and a (real or imagined) past ideologically-driven desire. Gray collecting, by contrast, does not merely focus on the positives; it is not nostalgic in the sense of expressing a yearning to go back to the way things were (or the way we imagine them to have been). Rather, it seeks to offer an ‘objective’ take on both the merits and suffering of the era and, in doing so, distinguishes itself, on the one hand, from the affective approach of red collecting as well as, on the other hand, the intrinsically self-serving position of the Party. If the idea of the Cultural Revolution collectible seems morally questionable, gray collecting as a practice promises to counteract the underlying consumer desire on which it is based with a dedication to staring historical complexity and trauma squarely in the face.

Yang Caiyu’s advocacy for a critical engagement with the collection of Cultural Revolution artifacts only goes so far, of course, as his reference to the ‘counterrevolutionary cliques’ of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing makes clear. Gray collecting, as described here, is not meant to question the applicability or power of such labels. Insofar as it is meant to be a form of critique, its targets remain the usual suspects. For all the political leeway permitted by a focus on material culture and the concern that red collecting is far too celebratory, Collections’ special issue does not stray very far from the beaten path, reproducing accepted narratives of the Cultural Revolution – that Mao was led astray by ultra-leftists, for example – with an added emphasis on suffering and loss. Simply put, the purpose of Yang’s gray collecting is not so much the interrogation of History as an exercise in its (purportedly objective) memorialization. In this sense, we see in Yang’s call for gray collecting a recurring trope of much of the discourse surrounding Cultural Revolution collectibles: instead of a morally dubious act, collecting Cultural Revolution artifacts is recast as a service to History. The power of consumer desire, that most unsettling of forces, is thereby subsumed by the notion of historical worth and responsibility. One does not collect because one wants to own and/or consume an object; one acquires an object because it is historically meaningful (you lishi yiyi), and because one must do so for the good of all. Moral qualm is made moral imperative.

It is not surprising, perhaps, given the emphasis on collecting as memorialization that we see from Yang Caiyu, that this ‘historical responsibility’ (lishi zeren) to collect (XT Wang, 2006: 73) is typically invoked in concert with the notion of a Cultural Revolution museum. The prominent author Ba Jin (1904–2005) repeatedly called for such an institution in his ‘Random Thoughts’ (Suixiang lu) column, published in the Hong Kong newspaper Ta kung pao’s literary supplement. Most famously, in a piece printed in August 1986, Ba Jin (1988: 381) wrote extensively about the need to remember and memorialize the past, claiming that the building of a Cultural Revolution museum was ‘something for which every Chinese should take responsibility’ in order to prevent history from repeating itself. This call has been repeated in turn, so much so, in fact, that one can now hardly invoke the notion of a Cultural Revolution museum without mentioning historical responsibility and Ba Jin, even when one disagrees with his vision of what a museum should actually look like. Wang Xintang’s (2006: 74) treatment of the Cultural Revolution museum question in Collections is illustrative in this regard. Only after the obligatory Ba Jin quote about responsibility can Wang discuss recent events and his understanding of the museum enterprise, which, as we see here, is markedly different:

On April 17, 2006, Shantou dushi bao reported the news that ‘Chenghai pagoda park [had] founded the country’s first folk (minjian) Cultural Revolution museum,’ attracting much media attention, both domestic and foreign. But this museum is mainly a denunciation and condemnation of the politics of the Cultural Revolution. It is characterized by new buildings, like the ‘Epitaph for the Suffering Fallen’ and the ‘Pavilion of Long Sounding Alarm,’ but real, authentic objects of historical, cultural, and artistic value are scarce. As I see it, Cultural Revolution museums that decry politics and criticize ideology should not be undertaken by individuals. Individuals should focus on small museums specialized in art. The artifacts must be authentic (zhenshi), classic, and rich, because only exhibitions with strong cultural context and independent cultural objects can enlighten (qidi) viewers to the importance of the living Cultural Revolution archive without qualm. (my translation)

Wang offers us a version of the Cultural Revolution museum that, in its particulars, seems to fly in the face of Ba Jin’s museological dream, in which the sounding of alarms was precisely the point. Indeed, whereas, in 1986, Ba Jin (1988: 384) was adamant that the museum would be a collective responsibility (and, presumably, government-run), for Wang in 2006, it is the burden of the individual. We might well speculate that this shift, which essayist Zhu Jianguo (2006) contends is widespread, is in part a function of the general increase in marketization and privatization in the PRC since Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour, but I am more immediately concerned with how this altered notion of responsibility repositions the individual, whose role it is not to pontificate, but simply to collect and display. ⁸ It is now incumbent upon ‘historically responsible’ collectors to operate as though they were curating their own museum (whether or not this is actually the case), exhibiting and juxtaposing objects in order to contextualize both the beauty and trauma of the Cultural Revolution. ⁹

‘Curating’ one’s own museum is, we should note, a relatively common occurrence in the PRC. ¹⁰ Consider the closest thing to a Cultural Revolution museum in China today: the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren, Dayi County, Sichuan, which boasts China’s largest collection of Cultural Revolution objects on display in its many museums. Like so many other museums in contemporary China, it is a private venture undertaken by one of China’s super-rich: real-estate mogul Fan Jianchuan. While subject to Party censors – like everything else in Mainland China – it is not, strictly speaking, state-run. The items exhibited in the museum cluster are, essentially, Fan Jianchuan’s private collection, making Fan the very embodiment of the notion of the collector/curator. Indeed, as a figure repeatedly invoked in collecting publications, Fan’s project and approach have become emblematic – even for small-time collectors and hobbyists – of what ‘responsible’ collecting/curating means.

The key to this discursive construct of responsibility is a shift from the logic of private ownership and consumption to one of addressing and informing an audience. The collector/curator, who collects as part of a personal responsibility to History (in contradistinction to political obligation or affect), is, among other things, a pedagogue; he or she collects in order to teach and ultimately to prevent history from repeating itself. The Jianchuan Museum Cluster motto, etched on the wall of the museum cluster’s visitor center, for example, firmly situates Fan Jianchuan’s museological project within exactly this framework: ‘To collect war for the sake of peace; to collect lessons for the sake of the future; to collect disaster for the sake of tranquility; to collect folklore for the sake of heritage’ (my translation). Each of the motto’s four clauses corresponds to one of the museum cluster’s main thematic divisions: the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Red Era, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and folklore (minsu). The multiple museums dedicated to the ‘Red Era,’ filled with all manner of objects – from porcelain statuettes to musical instruments to ration coupons – are meant to serve as ‘objective’ lessons (jiaoxun) above all else; they are a pedagogical endeavor rooted in the act of collection, yes, but also in the act of display, targeted first and foremost to those to whom ‘the future’ ostensibly belongs. ¹¹ Wang Xintang (2006: 73) similarly formulates the collector/curator’s responsibility as follows: to ‘leave a historical archive that is as authentic (zhenshi) as possible for future generations’ (my translation). Collections here are meant to be seen and experienced by individuals other than the collector himself or herself, and it is the very notion of a would-be audience that works to transform the figure of the Cultural Revolution memorabilia collector from a private consumer of questionable morals to a selfless collector/curator dedicated to the good of all humankind.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that all collectors collect with the intention of opening a private museum. Though considerably more prevalent in the PRC than in the contemporary United States, for example, the notion of every purchaser of a Mao badge opening a museum in which to exhibit it is patently absurd. What I am suggesting, however, is that one of the dominant strains of discourse pertaining to the collection of Cultural Revolution artifacts casts such behavior as acceding to a moral, historical imperative in largely pedagogic, museological terms. It is precisely this process that allows Zhu (2006) to claim that, in fact, China ‘already has thousands of inchoate Cultural Revolution museums,’ since ‘every market and store selling Cultural Revolution artifacts can be considered a Cultural Revolution museum in disguise’ (my translation). Collecting within this discursive framework tries to negate the possibility of individualized consumer desire – or any other affective connection to a particular object – through a radical decentering of that desire. One does not collect – one does not trade, purchase, and consume – for oneself; one does so on behalf of History for an imagined, future viewer other than oneself. The collector/curator’s troublesome status as a desiring subject in his or her own right is thereby diffused.

This is not to say that the figure of the collector is rendered insignificant by any means. On the contrary, collector/curators distinguish themselves from their imagined audience by virtue of their ability to ‘objectively’ appraise the historical (and pedagogical) value of any given artifact. Unfettered by the vagaries of their own personal consumer desire, idealized collectors can give free rein to their considerable powers of discernment, powers honed through the reading of publications like Collections as well as catalogues devoted to specific classes of objects (see, for example, Cui, 2006 and Fan, 2002). The very same publications that produce the discursive figure of the collector in museological terms also work to separate the collector/curator from his or her would-be audience of supposed naïfs. In this context, the collector is conceptualized as part of a power dynamic based on access to and mastery of a particularized kind of knowledge. The collector’s ability to discern a rare item, rich in historical significance, from mass-produced, ‘worthless’ fakes is neither ideologically neutral nor innate. What we are talking about here is an acquired proficiency in navigating and manipulating culturally constructed notions of value, historical, cultural, and artistic. In other words, we are talking about connoisseurship as a basis for culturally appropriate modes of appraisal.

A detailed analysis of the ideological and political stakes in the production of this particular brand of connoisseurship is beyond the scope of this article. It may, however, be helpful to briefly note the extent to which the ‘historical value’ (lishi jiazhi) afforded Cultural Revolution memorabilia within this framework – the collector/curator’s purported chief priority – tends to deviate emphatically from the value judgments articulated in Party histories, corresponding instead to the typical modes of valuation of antiques and collectibles. Concerns such as authenticity, condition, rarity, provenance, ties to significant events or people, and the quality of craftsmanship and artistry are foremost in the collector/curator’s mind, just as we would expect them to be in the mind of the auction house appraiser. And this is precisely the point. For all the claims being made about historical responsibility and a higher purpose separate from, and even at odds with, the consumer desire that fuels the market, at the end of the day, the selfless collector/curator must master the same forms of knowledge, the same brand of connoisseurship, as his or her discursive double and apparent opposite – the collector/investor – to which I now turn.

Collecting exchange value

If collector/curators are at pains to characterize their collecting as being in the service of something greater than themselves, i.e. History, collector/investors are decidedly untroubled by such concerns. On the contrary, they are unwaveringly preoccupied with the interests of their personal pocketbooks. They are in this business for money. And that’s exactly what collecting is to them: a series of business transactions. At its most undiluted, the figure of the collector/investor is embodied in the form of Cultural Revolution memorabilia brokers. Shen Hong opens his Cultural Revolution Artifacts (Wenge wenwu) (2003: 3–5) with an account of three such merchants, brothers from Wuhan, Hubei, and their respective businesses selling Cultural Revolution objects in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. As other antique dealers in the city, faced with dropping prices, fell on hard times in the late 1990s, the brothers’ businesses only grew, catering to both Mainland Chinese, like Shen Hong himself, as well as Hong Kong brokers, buying for international collectors. Shen begins his book with a depiction of the brothers’ trade in order to indicate the extent to which the collection of Cultural Revolution artifacts has become a global activity, but his initial focus on the middlemen who facilitate the consumption of others does more than simply establish the scope of international interest in the material culture of the Cultural Revolution. It also establishes a prescribed mode of interaction between collector and object in which the name of the game is not ownership, but rather investment.

The key word here is touzi, meaning capital investment or investing, a byword of for-profit collecting as well as Chinese postsocialist society more generally. I use the term ‘postsocialist’ cautiously here; after all, according to the Chinese Communist Party, China is still very much a socialist country. Even so, there is no denying that the PRC’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi), especially as carried out since the early 1990s, looks suspiciously like market capitalism. Nor is there any denying that this constitutes a significant departure from the dominant economic policies of the Mao period. Jason McGrath (2008) has characterized this change as part of an ongoing societal shift from a state heteronomy to a market heteronomy, that is, from an environment in which nearly everything was controlled by the Party-state to one in which market structures increasingly hold sway. To the extent that this is the case, China’s reforms have resulted in a sea change very much in the order of post-Soviet Russia and the former-Eastern Bloc. It is precisely because of this parallel that the notion of a ‘postsocialist’ China remains useful, despite its unsettling ‘post-.’ ¹² To wit, the vast scholarship on postsocialism has paid great heed to issues of economic insecurity and commodity consumption in a way that resonates with the Chinese case. ¹³ I would like to argue here that changes in investment practices – in who can invest in any given kind of venture for personal or corporate remunerative gain – have likewise been constitutive of postsocialism in the Reform Era. Post-Mao ‘development’ (fazhan) and ‘modernization’ (xiandaihua) have largely been defined in relation to the process of marketization, but the success or failure of these efforts is consistently measured in terms of a return or loss on investment. Indeed, investment has become an increasingly important means through which Chinese postsocialist subjects understand, interpret, and interact with the world around them. I am suggesting, in essence, that one might consider ‘investment’ a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977: 128–135) in the contemporary PRC.

Just as the collector/curator need not have concrete museological aspirations to be constituted as such, then, the collector/investor need not run a business devoted to the buying and selling of Cultural Revolution memorabilia at a profit – that is, he or she need not be an actual ‘middleman’ – in order to approach collecting as a form of investing. The collector/investor of whom I speak is, first and foremost, a discursive figure, the product of an elision of ‘collecting’ (shoucang) and ‘investing’ (touzi) of the kind we see prominently displayed in Shen Hong’s Cultural Revolution Artifacts (2003): each chapter title ends with the combination of the two terms, ‘collection investing’ (shoucang touzi), ¹⁴ as though the two were inseparable and the particular object(s) of investment made little difference, i.e. the ultimate concern is, quite simply, monetary value. This formulation of collecting as a form of investment is perhaps most powerfully borne out and produced by the promotion of a particular narrative trope: the tantalizingly high profit-margin of ‘the treasure collected by the people’ (min cang baowu).

The standard narrative goes something like this: a man buys a porcelain cup at a flea market for a few hundred RMB, only to discover that it was made at Jingdezhen in 1975 for Mao’s particular use; several years later, the man sells the cup at auction for over a hundred times what he paid for it; he is instantly wealthy (yiyebaofu). This classic tale of striking it rich by unearthing a treasure, undervalued by the average appraiser, is told and retold through the pages of magazines like Collections, Collection World (Shoucang jie), Collectors (Shoucangjia), and China Auction (Zhongguo paimai), to name a few, and the reproduction of this narrative, with the reader as protagonist, becomes the goal of such collection investment guides as Cultural Revolution Artifacts. The fantasy of happening upon an object of value overlooked by everyone save the discerning, visionary investor is not, of course, limited to the world of Cultural Revolution collectibles or even collectibles in general. We have entered the world of speculation, in which the venture capitalist and the amateur antiquer are equally at ease: one invests in a tech startup, hoping it will be the next Google (or Baidu), while the other buys a flea-market vase, believing it to be centuries old.

The seductive power of this narrative should not be underestimated, especially when it comes to the object world in which we live, where ‘investment opportunities’ appear ubiquitous. This is, after all, one of the underlying reasons for the success of appraisal television programs (jianbaolei jiemu) in the PRC as elsewhere. China Central Television’s Appraisal (Jianbao), rebooted in 2008 (and still on the air) as Treasure Hunt (Xun bao), pioneered the genre in the PRC in 2003 (for more on the history of the genre, see Zhang, 2011). The show’s success quickly led to a rash of such programs, totaling, by one estimate (JX Wang, 2011), nearly 20 in the early 2010s, on regional and provincial outlets. Of these, Beijing Television’s World Collections (Tianxia shoucang) made the biggest splash: from its inception in 2007 through the summer of 2013, ¹⁵ the program’s host, Wang Gang, wielded a ‘treasure-protecting hammer’ (hubao chui) with which he smashed artifacts deemed fake (feipin) by the show’s panel of experts. Controversial as this practice was, ¹⁶ it capitalized on the drama of the ‘reveal’ structure inherent to the appraisal program as a genre (Clouse, 2008). ¹⁷ In fact, the hammer was only one of many other more conventional tools used on the show to accentuate the suspense of finding out whether an object was ‘real’ and how much it was worth monetarily. A financial benchmark was set, for example, in the initial segment of each thematic episode, which featured an authentic ‘national treasure-level’ (guobao ji) piece, whose price, frequently in the millions of Chinese RMB, celebrity guests were asked to guess. Members of the public who participated in the show then emphasized the life-changing potential of collection investing by establishing how – and for how much – they had acquired their collectible and therefore how much they stood to gain from a favorable appraisal. The greater the return, the greater the drama, and the greater the allure of collecting as a path to sudden wealth.

Of all the stories told in appraisal shows, however, the most enticing are those that involve the discovery of exceptionally valuable artifacts in the most unlikely of places. Making an advantageous purchase at an antique shop is not nearly as romantic as uncovering an heirloom secreted away in one’s house. Moreover, the latter does more than simply encourage laypersons to join the collection-investing fray. It also effectively recasts domestic objects not in terms of use-value or aesthetic value, but monetary, i.e. exchange, value. As one essayist (Chen, 2012) describes it: ‘Many people have started rifling in walls and upending shelves, searching their homes and having old trinkets appraised. They fantasize that their ancestors passed treasures down to them and that they will make a fortune overnight’ (my translation). Accurate assessment of behavior or not, who could blame these dreamers, really, when appraisal programs themselves keep proclaiming the existence of ‘treasures’ among the people? This is precisely their raison d’être. Such programs both incite and require viewers to ask of everything around them, ‘How much is this worth?’ and, by extension, to use the answer to this question to their advantage when raiding a flea market stall or divvying up a great-aunt’s tchotchkes. The genre promotes not only fantasies, but an appraiser–investor mentality through its narrative structure and emphasis on easily accessible objects.

Much of the discourse surrounding collection investing in Cultural Revolution memorabilia works in a similar way, for one of the many reasons one might invest in such artifacts is not just their high auction prices, but also their availability. Unlike imperial jades, lacquers, and porcelains, China is full of objects (purportedly) from the Cultural Revolution. Who’s to say that a well-informed trip to the antique market won’t yield a vase worth upwards of a hundred thousand RMB? ¹⁸ Or perhaps one might stumble on the Holy Grail of Cultural Revolution porcelains, the so-called ‘7501 porcelains’ or ‘Chairman Mao porcelains,’ specially made by Jingdezhen’s famed masters to be used in Zhongnanhai, in the hands of a clueless peddler? The key to capitalizing on these investment opportunities is, ultimately, knowledge, precisely the kind of knowledge found in publications and media outlets crucial to the production of the collector/investor as a discursive figure, namely, connoisseurship. For if collector/curators seek to distinguish themselves from their (imagined) audience as a function of their status as connoisseurs, collector/investors likewise seek to distinguish themselves and profit from the ignorance of the naïf and/or dupe.

Ideally, of course, successful collector/investors capitalize on trends before they develop; they ‘see first what others see eventually,’ as Franklin Templeton Investments puts it in their ads. The savvy collector/investor is as much the visionary as the Wall Street financier who knew enough to invest in Microsoft ‘on the ground floor’. ¹⁹ In the world of Cultural Revolution collecting, the archetypical visionary is Dr Yeo Seem Huat (Yang Xinfa), a Singaporean psychiatrist and private collector, who began buying up Cultural Revolution porcelains in the early 1990s. The (oft repeated) story goes that Dr Yeo visited Beijing in 1993 where he ran into an unnamed American collector, who remarked, ‘We’re collecting Chinese Cultural Revolution memorabilia, but you’re all collecting Coca Cola bottles’ (my translation, Shen, 2003: 6). Duly chastised, Dr Yeo quickly set about cornering the market in Cultural Revolution porcelains, amassing the largest collection of 7501 porcelains in the world, largely before anyone else knew anything about them. Partly because of his own single-mindedness in acquiring these objects, their prices rose steeply, in some cases, by up to tenfold in under five years (Shen, 2003: 6–7). They rose so high and so quickly, in fact, that by the time other collector/investors sat up and took notice, most had been priced out of the market, the notable exception being the aforementioned Fan Jianchuan.

But what the average collector/investor lacks in vision, collecting discourse seems to argue, he or she can make up for in connoisseurship. As economics reminds us, asymmetric information – that is, information available to only one party in a transaction – helps insiders achieve excess returns on their investments; an informational advantage translates into a market advantage. The connoisseur will outperform ill-informed competitors, buyers, and sellers. Indeed, one profits in the collectibles market, as elsewhere, when someone else undervalues something valuable or overvalues something worthless, that is, when someone else appraises something ‘incorrectly,’ or, in what amounts to the same thing, calls upon a different system of valuation. The idealized collector/investor, the consummate connoisseur, has the requisite knowledge, discernment, and foresight to fully capitalize on these ‘missteps’ and asymmetries when they appear, but ultimately what this means is that the success or failure of the collector/investor is just as dependent on the dupe’s naïveté and/or adherence to alternative motivations and systems of value as he or she is on his or her own connoisseurship. The ignorance of others is instrumental to one’s own market performance. As George Stigler (1961: 224) argued in his pioneering work on the economics of information, so central is ignorance to the workings of the economy that ‘it would be wholly uneconomic entirely to eliminate all its effects’.

I would stress, however, that the key difference between the collector/investor and the dupe, discursive figures we should think of as mutually constitutive, is not simply a question of the acquisition or lack of specialized knowledge. Rather, it is a difference in the mode of interaction of person and thing, which quite neatly reproduces Susan Stewart’s (1984) distinction between the collectible and the souvenir. For Stewart, ‘the collection is … the most abstract of all forms of consumption’ (p. 165). Cut off from the circumstances of its production and use, the collectible is an object strangely detached from its own materiality.

In its translation back into the particular cycle of exchange which characterizes the universe of the ‘collectable,’ the collected object represents quite simply the ultimate self-referentiality and seriality of money at the same time that it declares its independence from ‘mere’ money … All collected objects are thereby objets de luxe, objects abstracted from use value and materiality within a magic cycle of self-referential exchange. (p. 165)

The cyclicality implied by the collectible is crucial here, for the collector/investor always buys with a future sale in mind; an investment in an object only truly comes to fruition when it is resold for a profit. It is the combination of the two transactions – the initial purchase as well as the resale – that finally proves the collector/investor’s prowess. While an object is in the collector/investor’s possession, it exists in suspension as a crystallization of exchange value, not unlike money, which constitutes the collector/investor’s ultimate concern. In this abstracted state, it is difficult to think of the collector/investor’s relationship with his or her ‘investments’ in terms of consumption at all. The collector/investor does not desire a collectible as a particular material object; materiality is only relevant insofar as it affects the collectible’s exchange value (its condition, for example). For that is truly what he or she desires: its exchange value, i.e. what somebody else will pay for it.

The collector/investor and collector/curator are therefore similarly characterized by a decentering of individual consumer desire. Whereas the latter purchases on behalf of History for the benefit of an imagined future audience, the former hopes to cash in on the consumer desire of another would-be buyer. In their purest discursive forms, both figures act not as desiring subjects in their own right so much as middlemen – like the brothers from Wuhan – mediating the desires and interests of others: History, on the one hand, and some unsuspecting, irrational dupe, on the other. In both instances, the status of the middleman as intermediary works to counteract and allay moral qualms arising from the recasting of the Cultural Revolution artifact as a commodity constituted by consumer desire. In the case of the collector/curator, as we have seen, acting as a broker for History and those in need of edification transforms moral unease into a call to action. The collector/investor goes to the other extreme, focusing on exchange value to such an extent that material specificity becomes largely irrelevant. There is no question of conflating the collector/investor’s purchase with an endorsement of Cultural Revolution policies, for the particularities of the object are inconsequential to the act. He or she could just as easily invest in stocks or bonds. As a mere placeholder for exchange value, the thing itself disappears, in a sense, and it is this disappearance that prevents the object from being embroiled in an ethical tug of war. In the end, one cannot sully something that is not there.

It is easy to see from these structural similarities how the discourses surrounding and producing the figures of the collector/curator and the collector/investor, though apparently diametrically opposed, come to overlap. Exchange value is, after all, affected by such concerns as historical importance, and both the collector/curator and the collector/investor must be well versed in the same brand of connoisseurship. Indeed, it may behoove us at this juncture to refrain from speaking of two separate discursive figures and instead speak of two related modes of collecting, the curatorial and the investitive, constituted in contradistinction with the nostalgic and/or affective modes associated with Yang Caiyu’s red collector, the dupe, and Susan Stewart’s (1984) understanding of the souvenir.

The souvenir and the quest for the inalienable

If the collectible for Stewart is tied to the abstraction of consumption and a crystallization of exchange value, the souvenir remains enmeshed with its materiality. Whereas the collectible ‘says’ nothing, the souvenir facilitates a narrative of origins, origins that belong to the individual, not the object. It is not a story of production; it is a story of lived experience. As a result of this very particular relationship between person and thing, Stewart argues that souvenirs, like experiences, are non-transferable. The exception to this rule is the heirloom, which acts as a souvenir on behalf of a group or lineage (pp. 136–137). I would suggest that Cultural Revolution memorabilia can similarly act as a souvenir of collective experience, even for those individuals, like many collectors with whom I have dealt, who did not live through the Cultural Revolution themselves. But the often-collective nature of the narrative brought about by a Cultural Revolution object/souvenir need not detract from its affective power or the strength of the attachment between individual and thing. Indeed, it is precisely the particularity of this attachment that separates this mode of consumption from those examined above. This person–thing interaction is not conceived as being ‘on behalf of’ anyone else; this is not the territory of middlemen. One purchases a Mao badge in this mode because one wants it. This is Yang Caiyu’s ‘red collecting,’ in which the desiring subject is alive and well, as is the materiality of the object.

The resurrection of the desiring subject in Cultural Revolution discourse again raises uncomfortable questions concerning the ethics of such desire, questions the curatorial and investitive modes of collecting try very hard to skirt, as we have seen. To the extent that souvenirs evoke origin narratives, it seems inevitable that this kind of desire be largely understood as nostalgic, that is, as longing for a, in this case, temporally conceived ‘homeland’. There are additional explanations for this nostalgic turn as well, as I outlined above, but I am primarily concerned here not with the political implications of nostalgia as a potentially restorationist mode of consumption (Boym, 2001), but rather with the way in which the invocation of the Cultural Revolution object as a desirable souvenir (inadvertently?) reenacts a Maoist quest for an inalienable relationship between person and socialist thing.

We see here in the juxtaposition of the commodity, constituted by and constitutive of exchange value, and a claim to individualized affective ties between persons and things something very much akin to what Lynn Festa (2006: 69) describes as ‘the paradox of the sentimental commodity’ in 18th-century British sentimental fiction:

As the eighteenth-century market in articles like ‘Yorick’ snuffboxes attests, sentimental objects and texts are not simply beloved possessions or gifts; they are also commodities whose strongest selling point is, paradoxically, their sentimental value. The very notion of a sentimental commodity is anomalous, representing the infusion of human particularity into the interchangeability of the commodity as an aspect of its value. The sentimental commodity brings together things that are meant to be kept discrete: the interchangeability of the market and the singularity of a thing that one loves; the authenticity or spontaneity of one’s personal ties to the world and the notion that emotional relations (to persons, to things) can be borrowed, rented out, had for money. (emphasis in the original)

The same might well be said of the Cultural Revolution object/souvenir. It, too, brings together things that are meant to be discrete, the interchangeable and the particular. By contrast, the Cultural Revolution object/collectible presents no such predicament; indeed, it puts the commodity’s metaphorical status as a stand-in for something else (exchange value, other commodities) to work, even as it seeks to displace the consumer desire the commodity implies. In the investitive mode of collection, interchangeability is precisely the point, so much so that the materiality of any given object, let alone its particularized affective potential, all but disappears. In the curatorial mode, an object is similarly rendered interchangeable with a generalized moral lesson. But, for its part, the souvenir is in fact predicated on particularity, on the inalienability of its ties to a given individual.

The socialist critique of the commodity-form, of course, is centered on its role as an emblem of and participation in the alienation of labor under capitalism. A socialist alternative to the commodity-form, however, was not easy to come by. The Russian Constructivists, for example, attempted to conceive the socialist thing as comrade – though what such a reconceptualization meant in terms of aesthetic practice was much more difficult to identify (see Kiaer, 2005). Faced with the same problem of how to deal with the commodity, Chinese Communists, for their part, did not fare much better than their Soviet brethren. Instead of calls for Constructivist novii byt’, the Chinese Communist Party turned to political economic justifications for the temporary necessity and revolutionary utility of the socialist commodity, on the one hand, while promoting ‘newborn socialist things’ (shehuizhuyi xinsheng shiwu) as contemporary manifestations of the commodity-free communist future, on the other. That the notion of the newborn socialist thing was prey to many of the same problems as the commodity-form – including the evacuation of material specificity, for example – is a testament to the precariousness of the effort to replace the (capitalist) commodity and/or put it to work for the socialist project (Coderre, 2015: 12–48). This apparent difficulty to escape the commodity-form notwithstanding, Cultural Revolution newspapers – both official Party organs as well as publications put out by Red Guard groups – are positively replete with exhortations to support (zhichi) newborn socialist things. For our purposes here, the success or failure of the endeavor to usurp the position of the commodity is ultimately less important than the strength of the desire to do so indicated by the prevalence of the term, a desire brought in part to fruition, in a rather ironic twist, in the form of the postsocialist Cultural Revolution object/souvenir.

If the souvenir is wrapped up in nostalgia, then, I would like to suggest that, in the case of Cultural Revolution collecting, that nostalgia is at least in part geared toward an alternative mode of consumption – of interaction between person and thing – than is currently prevalent (and promoted) in the contemporary PRC. To purchase a Mao badge in this mode of collecting – to desire it, form an affective bond with it, and let it tell one’s story – is to engage with and enact a kind of ‘push-back’ against the commodity-form much sought after during the Mao period. Never mind that this ‘resistance’ (I use the term cautiously) is and was always incomplete. Nostalgia, as Stewart (1984: 23) reminds us, is ‘the desire for desire’. In this case, it takes the form of consumer desire for something other than consumer desire.

For all the negative portrayals of dupes and/or ‘red collectors’ found in the pages of magazines like Collections, they are strangely self-aware as they grapple with this paradox, purchasing items with little regard for whether they are ‘authentic’ or ‘fake’. If the desire to own is ultimately understood in terms of a desire for an alternative to ownership as a mode of person–thing interaction, such questions of ‘authenticity’ become largely irrelevant. Indeed, the priorities of the kind of connoisseurship espoused by the collector/curator and collector/investor are entirely inverted. What matters instead is the extent to which one can relate to any item – the extent to which it can ‘speak’ on one’s behalf – rather than some other, more ‘appropriate,’ curatorial and/or investitive concern. In this way, the purported dupe upends the implicit assumptions regarding value and valuation on which these other modes of collecting depend. The dupe ultimately values precisely that which the curatorial and investitive modes are, by their very nature, blind to: material specificity and its affective (Stewart might say ‘narratorial’) power. That the dupe must, in the end, translate his or her quest for this power into monetary terms is more a testament to the centrality that the (market) commodity-form and its consumption have in contemporary Chinese society than an indication of support for this system of valuation. There is no escaping the commodity. The question is, rather, how one deals with it, how one uses the commodity and the system of desire it produces and structures. The dupe and his or her souvenir are wrapped up in this endeavor, trying to yoke consumer desire to the pursuit of its antithesis.

Insofar as the collector/curator and collector/investor are constructed, as discursive figures, in contradistinction to dupes, they are also dependent on them, as we have seen. In the case of collector/investors, in particular, their very success as investors is a function of their dealings with the dupe-as-dupe: the greater the discrepancy in their foresight and knowledge of the market, the greater the return on the investment. What this ultimately means, then, is that the curatorial and investitive modes of collecting are implicated in the nostalgic enterprise against which they are so vigorously and vocally opposed. On the one hand, curators evaluate historical and pedagogical value as a function of what will reach their affectively susceptible audience. On the other hand, to invest is to speculate in things someone else will be willing to pay for, in what someone else will value. In this particular case, therefore, to invest in Cultural Revolution memorabilia is, in a sense, to foster the denial of the possibility of exchange even as the accrual of exchange value is the end goal.