Culture-led rural revitalisation in China: Relational practices of materiality, creativity, and sustainability

Abstract

Rural Revitalisation is a prominent national policy agenda in China, which regards rural areas as a new frontier of development and governance. Culture plays an abiding and increasingly prominent role in this campaign, with policy objectives as diverse as the generation of economic value based on the assetisation of culture, capacity building for rural communities, the coordination between cultural and ecological conservation, and the provision of cultural goods to enhance communal cohesion. This paper engages with the existing literature on culture-led development and regeneration to understand culture as a source of economic value and a conduit of governance capacity, but cautions against its tendency towards conflating situated, dynamic, and more-than-human practices with state- and governance-centred epistemologies. Instead, the paper is informed by the relational approach of culture, which theorises culture as a relational network, a meeting point of plural human and non-human actors. This approach thus makes room for theorising the roles of non-state actors and interests, and examines how specific objectives are experimented to generate wellbeing for people and communities within specific relational entanglements. The empirical sections draw on a large depository of second-hand online materials collected with the data-mining method and probe into culture-led rural revitalisation in China along three themes – architectural materiality, arts/creativity, and sustainable development.