Care across spaces: Chinese displaced artefacts in the British Museum and social media platforms

In June 2025, the hashtag #NoChineseCanLeaveTheBritishMuseumSmiling circulated widely on the Chinese platform RedNote, sparking public debate over the British Museum's Chinese collections. This article examines how displaced Chinese artefacts are framed differently in the Museum's Chinese galleries and on digital platforms. Data were collected between October 2023 and August 2025 through two rounds of exhibition fieldwork and through a stratified sample of 622 RedNote posts drawn from 2,310 items. In addition, 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted with museum professionals globally. Drawing on Heidegger's concept of care, we argue that curatorial practices enact spatio-narrative hegemony by embedding artefacts in universalist narratives, while digital publics exercise narrative sovereignty–renegotiating authority, memory and belonging across physical and digital contexts. Theoretically, the article advances a phenomenologically grounded framework for analysing contested heritage in hybrid environments. Practically, it suggests that museums adopt more participatory curatorial strategies when addressing displaced collections in the digital age.