Curating “Mother of the Nation”: The Politics of Open Access and Archival Control in the Case of Song Qingling, 1981–2025

Song Qingling’s life is one of the most exhaustively documented and carefully curated of all women in Chinese history. More commonly known in the West as “Mme Sun Yat-sen,” she led a long and complicated life. Born into a wealthy Christian family in Shanghai, she eloped to become the wife of Sun Yat-sen, a man nearly thirty years her senior. After her husband’s early death in 1925, she became a staunch supporter of the left-wing of the Party he founded in defiance of its new leader Chiang Kai-shek. While her siblings moved to Taiwan or the United States, Song remained on the mainland and became a ceremonial head of the PRC, lending the Communist Party an aura of revolutionary continuity, gender inclusivity, and democratic legitimacy.

This paper uses research on Song to explore the Chinese government’s archival control and the politics of using “open access” digital platforms to shape public memory and historical research on Song. The main challenge in studying Song’s life has been rather different from the issues facing historians of gender in imperial and modern China: it lies in sorting through and making sense of the enormous amount of texts and materials curated by the state, which were dictated by the political agendas or personal interests of those who published them, including Song herself. How does one read “against the archival grain” when the grain itself has been smoothed, curated, and digitized, leaving few clues for how to read against it? Is it possible to recover an “authentic voice” when the subject herself intentionally hid behind the voice of others? Does an over-abundance of state-curated, open-access materials call for new research and interpretive methodologies?