The Object as Ideology
There is something philosophically peculiar about the act of purchasing a replica. Unlike the original, which derives its authority from singularity — from having been there, having passed through time — the replica makes no such claim. It is avowedly a copy, a deliberate second. And yet across China, millions of people are queueing in the rain before dawn to buy one. Over 2.3 million units of a fridge magnet modelled on the fengguan phoenix crown of Empress Xiaoduan have sold since July 2024. Museum gift shop revenues in China grew 63.7 per cent year on year in 2024, then nearly doubled that figure in just the first half of 2025.
The question worth asking is not simply why people are buying these objects, but what kind of work the objects are being asked to do. Because when a commodity is purchased not for utility but for the feeling it produces — pride, belonging, historical continuity — it has crossed from commerce into something closer to fetishism in the classical Marxist sense. The object becomes a vessel for social relations, a crystallised form of ideology made purchasable. In China’s case, that ideology has a name: wenhua zixin, or cultural confidence.
Fetishism, Properly Understood
The word fetish carries too much psychoanalytic baggage in popular usage. Its more useful register is anthropological and Marxian. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism described the process by which social relationships between people come to appear as relationships between objects — the commodity conceals the labour and power structures that produced it, presenting itself instead as a thing with inherent, natural value. Cultural fetishism extends this logic: the artefact replica becomes imbued with the accumulated authority of history, civilisation, and national identity in a way that is not natural but socially constructed and ideologically maintained.
When a young person in Chengdu buys a miniature of the Tang Dynasty golden rice bowl, they are not simply acquiring a decorative object. They are, in a very real sense, purchasing a relationship — to history, to Chinese identity, to a narrative of five thousand years of continuous civilisation. The commodity becomes a shortcut to belonging. The replica does not merely represent culture; it is experienced as a piece of culture, portable and ownable. This is fetishism in its most structurally coherent form: the historical object, stripped of its singularity and reproduced at scale, paradoxically gains emotional authority through the market rather than losing it.
This matters because the fetishistic relationship is not incidental to China’s wenchuang phenomenon — it is constitutive of it. The 61.7 per cent of survey respondents who cited “emotional value” as their primary motivation for buying museum souvenirs are not irrational consumers. They are participating in a system that has been carefully engineered to make the emotional and the commercial indistinguishable from each other.
The State’s Hand in the Feeling
It would be a mistake to treat China’s cultural souvenir boom as a purely organic consumer movement. President Xi Jinping began urging cultural confidence as early as 2012, and in the intervening years, state investment in museums, cultural heritage sites, and the industries that surround them has been vast and deliberate. The guochao wave — literally “national tide,” the embrace of local brands, Chinese aesthetics, and heritage by younger consumers — did not emerge spontaneously. It was seeded by policy, irrigated by state media, and harvested by a consumer goods industry that learned to speak its language fluently.
This is not to say the feeling is false. Feelings produced by ideology are no less real as feelings. But the manufactured quality of cultural confidence as a political project means that the pride consumers experience when buying a fengguan fridge magnet is not purely their own. It has been, in a meaningful sense, supplied to them — by Xi’s speeches, by museum marketing departments, by Alibaba’s decision to invest in 100 new wenchuang products and dedicate a section of Tmall to iconic artefacts. The state is, in effect, monetising nationalism at scale. This is a remarkable feat: transforming a political directive into an affective consumer behaviour and then back into measurable GDP contribution.
The projected growth of China’s emotional economy to 4.5 trillion yuan by 2029 — nearly double the 2.3 trillion recorded in 2024 — is therefore not simply a consumer market figure. It is a measure of how successfully ideology has been incorporated into everyday purchasing decisions. When policymakers in provincial meetings speak of tapping the emotional economy to spur domestic demand, they are being unusually candid about the instrumentalisation of feeling for economic ends.
The Commodification Problem
Commodification of culture is not new. The souvenir industry is as old as pilgrimage. But the scale, sophistication, and ideological density of what is happening in China marks a qualitative shift worth examining carefully.
The classical concern about cultural commodification runs as follows: when cultural artefacts enter market exchange, they are necessarily abstracted from the contexts that gave them meaning. The fengguan was not made to be mass-produced in resin. It was made within a specific court economy, carrying specific symbolic weight in a specific dynastic context. The moment it becomes a fridge magnet, it undergoes what the cultural theorist Stuart Hall would call a process of encoding — it is reinscribed with new meanings (national pride, aesthetic pleasure, historical literacy) that serve present ideological purposes rather than recovering past ones. The replica does not give you access to the Ming Dynasty. It gives you access to what the contemporary Chinese state wants the Ming Dynasty to mean.
This is not necessarily corrupting in a simple way. Cultures have always reinterpreted their own pasts for present purposes — that is what living traditions do. The concern is more specific: when the reinterpretation is mediated entirely through market logic, the only meanings that survive are those that are commercially viable. The aspects of the past that are inconvenient, ambiguous, or resistant to affective packaging tend to disappear. What remains is a curated heritage, smoothed into palatability, available for purchase at 88 yuan plus shipping.
There is also a deeper structural problem. The more a culture’s relationship to its own history is mediated through commodity exchange, the more that relationship becomes dependent on market conditions. The boom in wenchuang is partly a function of constrained consumer alternatives — young Chinese, facing a difficult job market, high housing costs, and limited avenues for outward aspirational consumption, are turning inward toward identity-affirming purchases. This is emotionally coherent but economically contingent. The question of whether cultural pride can substitute for structural economic opportunity is one that no fridge magnet can answer.
What Replicas Do to the Original
There is a secondary effect of the replica economy that receives less analytical attention: what it does to the original object, and by extension to the institutions that house it.
Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction argued that mass reproduction destroys the “aura” of the original — that ineffable quality of being a singular, authentic object in a specific place at a specific time. Benjamin was writing about photography and film, but his argument applies with equal force to the wenchuang phenomenon. When the fengguan is available as a fridge magnet to 2.3 million buyers, what happens to the experience of encountering the original behind glass at the National Museum of China?
The answer is more complex than Benjamin anticipated. The replica economy may actually increase traffic to original objects by creating desire for the “real thing” that the commodity can only approximate. There is evidence of this in China’s booming museum attendance figures. But it also fundamentally restructures the terms of that encounter. People arrive at the original already knowing it through its commodity form — they come with brand familiarity rather than aesthetic openness. The museum visit becomes a form of product validation rather than discovery. This is a subtle but significant transformation in how historical objects function in public life.
Furthermore, museums that become financially dependent on gift shop revenues — and with Chinese museums recording 9.7 billion yuan in cultural product sales in the first half of 2025 alone — face structural pressure to select and present their collections in ways that are commercially optimised. The artefacts most likely to be replicated are those most easily narrativised and most aesthetically appealing. Complicated, ambiguous, or politically sensitive objects are unlikely candidates for mass reproduction. Over time, gift shop logic shapes curatorial logic, and the museum’s interpretive authority is gradually subordinated to consumer preference.
Singapore: The Parallel and the Divergence
Singapore presents a fascinatingly distinct case study in the intersection of museum culture, national identity, and commodity. As a city-state with a deliberately constructed multicultural identity and a relatively short postcolonial history, Singapore’s relationship to heritage artefacts and their reproduction is structurally different from China’s — and in some ways more strained.
The National Museum of Singapore, the Asian Civilisations Museum, and the Peranakan Museum all operate gift shops that have grown more sophisticated in recent years, and Singapore has not been immune to the broader Asian wenchuang trend. Batik-printed tote bags, Peranakan tile-inspired ceramics, and Merlion adjacents have long populated these spaces. But the emotional charge attached to these objects is qualitatively different from the fengguan fridge magnet. What, exactly, is the Singaporean equivalent of five thousand years of continuous civilisation?
This is not a rhetorical slight. It is the genuine problem facing Singapore’s cultural institutions. The Singapore Tourism Board has long wrestled with the tension between marketing heritage and the fact that Singapore’s heritage is inherently plural, contested, and relatively recent. The Peranakan Museum’s beautifully crafted souvenirs carry real emotional weight — but for which community? Singaporean Chinese consumers may feel a version of the cultural pride their mainland counterparts feel, complicated by the fact that Singapore’s Chinese identity was forged in diaspora and colonial context rather than continuous civilisation. Singaporean Malays engaging with objects from the Malay world encounter a heritage that both is and is not theirs in the national narrative. Tamil Singaporeans encounter objects that gesture toward a South Asian civilisational heritage while their specific contribution to Singapore’s founding is underrepresented in the national imaginary.
The risk, in the Singapore context, is not the same as in China. Singapore is not in danger of the state successfully packaging a monolithic cultural identity for mass consumption — the multicultural reality is too genuinely complex for that. The risk is almost the inverse: that in the absence of a coherent singular heritage narrative, the gift shop defaults to the safest, most touristically legible version of Singaporean identity — the Merlion, the shophouse, the hawker centre — producing a heritage that is primarily legible to outsiders rather than to citizens. This is commodification in a different register: not the mobilisation of pride but the management of legibility.
There is also Singapore’s specific anxiety about its relationship to China’s cultural confidence. As China’s soft power investment grows and its cultural products — including wenchuang — circulate more widely, Singaporean Chinese consumers are increasingly exposed to a compelling narrative about Chinese heritage and identity that originates elsewhere and serves interests not entirely aligned with Singapore’s own multicultural project. The fridge magnet is not just a fridge magnet when it is purchased by a Singaporean Chinese who finds in it a more emotionally saturating sense of historical belonging than anything the National Museum of Singapore has offered them. This creates a soft-power asymmetry that Singapore’s cultural institutions have not yet fully reckoned with.
The Emotional Economy as Substitute
Both in China and in Singapore, the emotional economy framing reveals something important about the present historical moment: that affective consumption is partly functioning as a substitute for other things — political participation, economic security, and social belonging — that are unavailable or constrained.
In China, young people facing structural unemployment, a property crisis, and limited avenues for political expression are turning to culturally sanctioned forms of emotional investment. The wenchuang phenomenon gives them something to be proud of in a context where other sources of pride are either inaccessible or politically risky. This is not cynical manipulation on the part of consumers — they are doing what people do, finding meaning where it is available. But the state benefits from this channelling of energy in ways that deserve scrutiny.
In Singapore, the emotional economy intersects with a distinct set of pressures: the anxiety of a small state navigating great-power competition, the perennial question of what it means to be Singaporean beyond economic pragmatism, and a younger generation that is, like their Chinese counterparts, looking for identity frameworks that feel historically substantial rather than merely bureaucratically managed.
The Heritage Festival, SG Bicentennial programming, and the ongoing expansion of cultural institution gift shops can be read as attempts to supply this emotional demand. But Singapore’s version of the emotional heritage economy remains thinner than China’s, partly because the raw material — a deep, singular civilisational narrative — simply is not there, and partly because the multicultural imperative places genuine constraints on how far any one heritage thread can be pulled.
The Replica’s Ambivalence
It would be too easy to conclude that the commodification of culture through replica fetishism is straightforwardly bad. The more honest position acknowledges its ambivalence.
There is something genuinely valuable in a young person learning about Empress Xiaoduan because a fridge magnet made her curious. There is real cultural transmission happening through these objects, however mediated. The wenchuang boom has coincided with measurable increases in museum attendance, in public interest in archaeology and history, and in the kind of intergenerational storytelling — “let me tell you about this piece” — that cultural institutions have always aspired to facilitate. If the commodity form is the vehicle through which historical consciousness reaches people who might otherwise not have encountered it, that is not nothing.
The problem is not that replicas exist. The problem is when they become the primary mode through which people relate to their own cultural heritage — when the curated, commercially optimised, emotionally engineered version of the past displaces more direct, more ambiguous, and more critical forms of historical engagement. The replica is always an interpretation. The danger is mistaking it for the thing itself.
For Singapore, the more pressing question is whether its cultural institutions can produce objects that carry enough emotional charge to anchor a genuinely plural national identity — objects that make a Tamil Singaporean and a Malay Singaporean and a Chinese Singaporean all feel that something essential about their presence in this place has been recognised, rather than objects that merely make the city legible to tourists and alumni donors.
That is a harder design brief than “phoenix crown, fridge magnet, 88 yuan.” But it is the right one.
Conclusion: Pride, Purchase, and the Limits of the Commodity Form
The fengguan fridge magnet is a remarkable object precisely because of what it concentrates: state ideology, consumer desire, historical narrative, and market logic, all compressed into 12 centimetres of resin. It is not cynical. The people buying it feel something real. But what they feel has been carefully arranged for them, by institutions with interests in the feeling’s direction.
The commodification of culture through artefact replicas does not destroy culture. It reshapes it — selecting some elements and suppressing others, making certain relationships to the past available while closing off others, converting historical depth into emotional product. This process is not neutral, and its effects compound over time. As the replica economy grows — and at 9.7 billion yuan in six months, it is growing fast — the questions of which objects get replicated, whose histories get merchandised, and what version of the past gets delivered to consumers become questions of considerable political and cultural consequence.
In China, those questions are being answered by a combination of state direction and market logic, with a degree of alignment between the two that is historically unusual. In Singapore, they are being answered more tentatively, against the backdrop of a genuinely complex heritage landscape and the competitive soft-power pressure of a neighbour whose cultural confidence is, whatever its ideological provenance, increasingly difficult to ignore.
The replica cannot bear the weight of civilisation. It was never designed to. But it reveals, with unusual clarity, how much we are now asking commodities to carry.