Museums, Geopolitics, and Relational Localisation: The Making of China (Hainan) Museum of the South China Sea in a Fishing Town

This paper examines the relational and multi-scalar dynamics of museum geopolitics in China through a case study of the China (Hainan) Museum of the South China Sea in Tanmen, Hainan Province. Drawing on ethnographic research, it moves beyond state-centric, exhibition-focused, and visitor-oriented approaches by adopting a holistic lens to examine the processes of museum-making, including its birth, location, architecture, exhibitions, and everyday engagements outside the museum’s walls. These processes are framed by the interplays of national sovereignty, provincial development projects, and local fishing livelihoods, an intersection remains under-explored in museum literature. The findings demonstrate that the museum’s role as a soft-power instrument of territorialisation is not a straightforward projection of state authority, but a relational process co-produced through multi-scalar negotiations among groups with diverse interests. Local communities emerge not as passive recipients or simple resisters of museum representations and the national sovereignty discourses they articulate, but as active agents who pragmatically align with, reinterpret, and strategically appropriate them. The analysis further reveals how geopolitical discourses are embedded, negotiated, and consumed in everyday life through tourism practices and livelihood economies, extending the reach of state agendas beyond the exhibition space. By foregrounding these dynamics, this paper argues that museums’ geopolitical power does not reside in exhibitions alone, but is assembled through material emplacement, vernacular engagement, and everyday circulation. In doing so, it advances a relational understanding of museums as open spaces where sovereignty is negotiated, enacted, and performed through multi-scalar interactions that transcend static binaries including power/resistance, national/local, representation/everyday practice, and passivity/agency.