Revolutionary Filial Piety: Red Collecting and the Creation of Intimacy

This chapter introduces the collecting practices of contemporary Red Collectors, individuals who collect objects from the revolutionary and Mao eras, and which reference the CCP, the PLA, or socialism more broadly. It is often thought that the Mao era represented an attack on much of the Chinese familial tradition, including practices of filial piety. This chapter suggests instead that filial piety was not simply destroyed but was reimagined and adapted, in which the traditional obligation to parents was decentred (but not entirely replaced) by devotion and obligation towards the Party, the nation, and Mao himself, a practice we might call revolutionary filial piety. In this chapter, I argue that the collecting practices of contemporary Red Collectors, most of whom were children in the Mao years, and who frequently come from families with close links to the revolution, the Party and/or the military, represent an act of revolutionary filial piety in the contemporary period, in which they fulfil their obligations to their families and the broader community through accumulating and displaying these objects. I argue that understanding Red Collecting in this way allows us to see the practice as a method of creating intimacies with their revolutionary ancestors through the demonstration of devotion and respect towards objects that represent this family history.