Museum set to focus on CPC heritage

New venue in capital will 'review the Party's history in a holistic manner'

A new museum in Beijing on the history of the Communist Party of China will open to the public next month ahead of the centenary of the Party's founding.

The new venue will "review the Party's history in a holistic manner and from multiple perspectives so that viewers will have a deeper understanding of the arduous process, tremendous changes, glorious achievements, and great spirit over the past century", Gu Yucai, deputy director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, told a news conference organized by the State Council Information Office on Wednesday.

Apart from the opening of the new museum, renovation of some key historical sites will be finished by next month, Gu said.

Renovation of the site of the first National Congress of CPC in Shanghai is coming to an end, and a project to conserve the "red building" in Beijing－the old campus of Peking University－is also close to completion. It will be turned into a gallery displaying the early history of communist activities in Beijing.

The CPC will celebrate its centenary on July 1, and on Wednesday the National Cultural Heritage Administration released a list of 109 highlighted exhibitions for the anniversary that will be held across the nation. Some are comprehensive exhibitions, like the one in the new CPC history museum in Beijing, but many more are smaller and more thematic.

For instance, an exhibition in Beijing will showcase gifts received by Party leaders on diplomatic occasions, and another will feature archival material related to Party history.

A museum at a steel plant in Anshan, Liaoning province, will reflect how the Chinese steel industry boomed in the past century. A museum in Shanghai will present how the capital market has been developed with Chinese characteristics following the leadership of the CPC.

"Many online virtual exhibitions and livestreams will be organized according to requirements to contain COVID-19," Gu added.

China now has over 1,600 museums and memorial halls on revolutionary history, and from 2018 to 2020, over 4,000 exhibitions on revolutionary themes were presented.

Over 1 million revolutionary relics have been collected by publicly owned museums in China, and 36,000 sites and historical monuments related to revolutionary history have been registered, said Liu Yang, director of the administration department in charge of revolution-related cultural relics.

Many such sites are popular tourism destinations. In 2019, for example, over 73 million visits were made to Yan'an, Shaanxi province, a hub of the Chinese revolution in the late 1930s and 1940s.