Seeing History: Public History in China

When public history was imported from the United States to China around the turn of the twenty-first century, it was introduced as a sub-field within history, and has developed along that path ever since. Professional historians in China, even some forward-looking ones, see public history as merely presenting a change in the patterns of participation in history-making. This book offers a sharply different view.

It contends, essentially, that public history represents more than a research domain within history or within any existing discipline, nor does it fit into any established narratives, but rather, a fundamental change of the entire process of history-making in China. In this process, the public is prosuming history. Public history makes obsolete the old structure for building and acquiring historical knowledge: it challenges the old assumptions, supersedes the rigid academic hierarchy, and stirs the imaginations of the multitudes. With an assemblage of case studies, this work makes a case for a system view of public history making, or public history(ing), and launches a concept, complex public history, i.e. public history(ing) as complex adaptive systems.

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Na Li is a public historian and urban planning scholar. Her research focuses on public history and urban preservation. During her decade-long work in China, Na Li has pioneered the field of public history in China. She was appointed Research Fellow/Professor at Department of History, Zhejiang University (20172022), and the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Chongqing University (20122017). She is Founding Editor for Public History: A National Journal of Public History (). She served on the Board of Directors for the National Council on Public History (20172020) and has written two books, Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto's Urban Landscape (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and Public History: A Critical Introduction (Peking University Press, 2019), which focus on public history and urban preservation. She is Associated Researcher, Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna.