Negotiating remembrance: the colonial past in China’s built heritage

The legacies of fraught encounters with foreign powers during the 'century of humiliation' between the midnineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries had a profound influence on China that continues to resonate today (Gries 2004, 43; Wang 2012, 7;Bickers 2017).Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the nation has pursued a trajectory characterised by selective forgetting and sanctioned remembrance of this period (Pendlebury et al. 2018;Ching 2019;Barber 2022;Zhang 2024).This special issue stimulates cross-cultural scholarly debate on China's contemporary engagements with its colonial past, specifically the built remnants of foreign invasion and imperial intervention.Through this collection, we pose two central questions:-How is the material legacy of foreign colonialism in China recontextualised and reinterpreted today?-How do state narratives, local practices, and material remains interact to shape contemporary heritage?The use of heritage to represent this 'difficult history' reveals a persistent paradox between the commodification of colonial exoticism and the commemoration of national humiliation (Shepherd and Yu 2013;Maags and Svensson 2018;Ludwig et al. 2020).By situating this paradox within China's evolving-and often unresolved-relationships with former imperial and occupying European and Japanese powers, this special issue examines the politics of remembrance as articulated through architectural and urban practices.