Barclay Bram

There was more than one America in the Chinese imagination. There was the imperial America of the Mao era, ‘which oppressed its own people, and people all over the world’. But that vision of America had faltered when Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979. Images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must have something figured out. Wang wasn’t so sure. The America he saw was neither an imperialist paper tiger nor universally prosperous. He kept noticing its contradictions.

In​ 2015 Fan Jianchuan was invited by the Chongqing government to open a new branch of his eponymous museum chain just outside the vast city. The original, the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren, a small town of some 80,000 residents in south-west China, is the largest private museum in the country: it contains eight million items spread across 29 separate museum buildings covering 82 acres,...