Cultural Values in the Making: Governing through Intangible Heritage

Integral to the emergence of any modern state, the preservation of the traces of national past has become a major prerogative of today’s governments, and China is no exception. A broad consensus now globally prevails on the a priori significance of “heritage” as a set of sites, constructions, and practices that deserve special treatment for their perpetuation and transmission. Taking shape mainly through the regulations of UNESCO, this “raison patrimoniale ” (Poulot 2006: 16) is no longer just a matter for states; it concerns humanity as such, and one of its grounding ideas is the living and evolving nature of heritage, which “includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants.”1 At the same time, if the notion of heritage as a classifying term entails widely shared meanings, as an institutional device it is actualised in local contexts that are necessarily made of various references and complex realities. In the Chinese case, after a gradual emergence at the very end of the Qing empire and in the Republican era (1912-1949), followed by a period of selective denigrations and destructions during the Maoist era, the People’s Republic of China has finally made its own the requirements to preserve and value heritage, making use of different labels and managing units at various levels for that purpose (Fresnais 2001, Zhang 2003). Although strongly rooted in the prerogatives of the socialist state under construction, this process has been largely inspired by foreign models, and has led not only to a successful integration into the world heritage lists, with 56 Chinese items now recognised as World Heritage Sites,2 but also to an active participation in heritage-related discussions and operations under the umbrella of UNESCO. Obviously, this massive commitment to heritage preservation does not simply reiterate a normative repertoire from international bodies: it also reflects endogenous trends, which are themselves part of a long-term trajectory regarding the sense and political use of the past (Gao 2000). Analyses of the making of Chinese heritage must keep this background in mind for a proper understanding of what is actually at work today in China’s efficient mobilisation of this global discourse.