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.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.