Disseminating the policy narrative of ‘Heritage under threat’ in China

ABSTRACT

Originating from within the UNESCO, narratives on ‘heritage under threat’ tell the story of how and why intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practices are valuable, why are they disappearing, and how they can be protected from destruction. Focusing on PR China, this paper conducts a frame analysis to identify narratives on ‘heritage under threat’ as employed by the UNESCO, the Chinese party-state, and academics. The study argues that while policy narratives in any country undergo a process of congruence-building, circulation, and implementation, these processes take distinctive forms in authoritarian countries due to the states’ discursive and political monopoly: While non-state actors are involved, the state primarily steers the appropriation process. Nevertheless, once established, the policy narrative transforms across time and space, enabling local actors to use it to pursue their own interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Narratives
• policy
• intangible cultural heritage (ICH)
• UNESCO
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

2. Laurajane Smith (2006) has argued that the UNESCO, via its documents, Conventions and expert bodies, is disseminating an ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) which determines what heritage is and what it is not according to a Western understanding of heritage.

3. The author used the Crossasia.org database of the People’s Daily to obtain data from 1949 to 2012. As the database ends in 2012, the 2013 to 2017 data were retrieved from the CNKI database of the People’s Daily, which ranges from 1979 to the present.

4. The key word ‘cultural heritage’ was used instead of ‘intangible cultural heritage’, as the results of the analysis will refer to all articles on tangible and intangible cultural heritage and highlight how often the key words used were included in earlier articles during the 1990s, when ICH as a term was not used in China.

5. As Chinese laws, policies and media articles often employ official discourses in a verbatim manner, the author chose to select central key words from the State Council’s 2005 policy to identify the policy narrative in texts. However, the author is aware that the same narrative may also be told using non-official words.

6. During the 1950s, People’s Daily articles created a narrative in which the threat of American imperialism was in part associated with destroying heritage in China and in other countries of the Global South.

7. The China Academic Journal (CAJ) database is compiled by the prestigious Tsinghua University and contains all articles of China’s most frequently read academic journals from 1949 to today in some cases also from the pre-PRC era. As in the analysis of People’s Daily articles, the search was conducted using the keyword ‘cultural heritage’ (subject) in combination with one threat-related keyword (full-text), namely ‘threat’, ‘imminent danger’, ‘disappear’, ‘die out’, ‘attack’ and ‘rescue’. The CAJ database is available via Crossasia.org.

8. Articles featuring the term ‘cultural heritage’ and at least one of the identified keywords are considered to include the ‘narrative of threat’. In most cases, the articles, however, included more than one of the keywords.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Maags

Christina Maags is Lecturer in Chinese Politics at the Political Science Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Christina’s research interests focus on the politics around cultural heritage in PR China unfolding, for instance, within the Chinese Living Human Treasures System, ICH policy implementation and diffusion processes, ICH tourism, and expert-state cooperation in ICH safeguarding. Most recently, Christina has co-edited a volume on Chinese Cultural Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations at Amsterdam University Press and published an article titled ‘Replicating Elite-Dominance in Intangible Cultural Heritage Safeguarding: The Role of Local Government–Scholar Networks in China’ in the International Journal of Cultural Property (2016).