This project examines if and how Overseas Chinese museums in Southeast Asia offer alternatives to the nationalist discourses embedded in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) memorialization of history, forcing us to problematize our understanding of decoloniality and its transnational applications.

The term Overseas Chinese (huaqiao) was coined at the beginning of the twentieth century to refer to Chinese residing outside their motherland. Migration from China to countries in Southeast Asia started as early as the sixteenth century, but it peaked in the second half of the nineteenth century with the advent of Western imperialism in Asia. Following the Opium Wars (1839–1860), Chinese labourers emigrated around the world. Seeing the large number of Chinese living abroad, the Qing court (1644–1912) started calling emigrants huaqiao, a term that recognized these individuals as Chinese subjects despite their displacement from their native land. By the early 1940s, there were around 8.5 million Chinese emigrants worldwide, over ninety per cent of them in Southeast Asia.

Nowadays, there are several history museums in the PRC. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forces institutions to comply with its sanctioned version of history, these museums tend to offer very similar nationalistic versions of the country’s past. The same can be said about the museums of Overseas Chinese, which structure the modern history of the Chinese diaspora according to the nationalistically charged time frame of official historiography.

A decolonial approach would allow Chinese museums to offer a more multifaceted representation of Overseas Chinese and their entanglement with colonialism and national history. In the last ten years, decoloniality has emerged as a keyword in the fields of history, museology, heritage studies, and beyond. Following the decolonial turn, museums—considered strongholds of colonial thinking—have been called to restitute artefacts stolen during the colonial era, reorganize their knowledge production, take into account multiple perspectives, and confront historical injustice in their practices, narratives, and collections.

Decoloniality, however, is not practiced in Chinese institutions. The reasons are multiple: first, the CCP exercises full control over museum narratives, blocking bottom-up initiatives that are considered the motor of the decolonial movement; secondly, since China was a victim of Western colonialism, decolonial practices like those carried out in European museums are often deemed unnecessary in Chinese institutions.

This project proposes to examine if and how Overseas Chinese museums outside the borders of the PRC converge or diverge from the nationalistic representation of history advanced by Chinese communist institutions. Because of their large number of ethnic Chinese citizens, Southeast Asian countries—namely Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia—are particularly suitable for this research. These countries host at least thirty museums entirely dedicated to the history of local Chinese communities; furthermore, several other museums mention Chinese history and the Chinese diaspora in their exhibitions.

These institutions differ greatly from one another: some are national museums, while others are projects curated by local communities. Since they still need to comply with national regulations and are at times influenced by the PRC’s economic and political power, their narratives are not by default “decolonial.” Nevertheless, these institutions offer multiple historical narratives. In particular, they tackle the history of China and colonialism from different perspectives, sometimes portraying China as a colonial power in the region and revealing how Chinese communities adjusted to Western colonialism. These perspectives add complexity to the otherwise monolithic representations of Chinese overseas communities and their entanglement with colonialism and nationalism offered by PRC museums.

During this project, the investigator will visit museums dedicated to Chinese history in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, analysing how their narratives compare and whether they differ from the CCP’s sanctioned vision of the past, with particular attention to the history of colonialism. In addition to collecting data on historical exhibitions, the investigator will interview and collaborate with local curators and scholars to analyse the impact of decolonial theories on their curatorial practices. The result will be a series of articles and a monograph on representations of Chinese histories in Southeast Asia and on how these case studies help to problematize decoloniality as it is understood in Western institutions.