When the whole-nation system meets cultural heritage in China

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore how China mobilised its unique whole-nation system (juguo tizhi) to become a global cultural power, focusing on the encounter between Chinese and global heritage discourses. This article is based on field ethnography of three World Heritage sites in Hangzhou, China: The West Lake Cultural Landscape, the Grand Canal of China, and the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City. The juguo tizhi is a hierarchical system mobilised to achieve national goals. In the process of China’s ‘successful’ inscribing of cultural heritage sites based on juguo tizhi, we suggest that Chinese heritage discourses are compromised, and grassroots discourses are overshadowed. The juguo tizhi reinforces statist narratives more than it protects Chinese culture, which, we argue, is linked to the tensions between cultural and national nationalism. Furthermore, we suggest that China is now moving beyond the compromising Chinese heritage discourse phase to align with global heritage discourse, and has begun to present the Chinese discourse internationally, where the juguo tizhi is mobilised. It will be noteworthy to observe how this occurrence will affect China and the global heritage landscape in the future.KEYWORDS: Whole-nation system (juguo tizhi)cultural nationalismChinaChinese discoursecultural heritage AcknowledgementWe would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. We are deeply indebted to Mun Young Cho for her insightful comments.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementThe datasets generated or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy issues, but some are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Notes1. Figure 1 (Originally from Kuah and Liu Citation2017). We have changed the name of ‘Ministry of Culture’ in this figure into ‘Ministry of Culture and Tourism’ according to current name of the Ministry.)Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant [NRF-2019S1A6A3A02102843].Notes on contributorsZhaohui LiuZhaohui Liu is a professor at the Institute of Anthropology at Zhejiang University, China. He is also the director of the Centre for Intangible Culture Heritage Studies at Zhejiang University and is currently engaged in a project titled ‘Social Distinction and Constructed Boundary: The Life-World of Contemporary Boatmen on the Grand Canal of China’. He has rich research experience in Malaysia, Norway, and the United States as a visiting scholar and senior researcher. His research fields are mainly linked to cultural heritage, rural community development and resettlement, and environmental humanity. As an applied anthropologist, he has, in the last decade, presided over and participated in several development projects on cultural preservation, social assessment, and resettlement action plans funded by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as well as China’s local government agency policies, particularly focusing on the China Grand Canal, intangible cultural heritage, and museums, among others.Jung-a ChangJung-a Chang is a professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Cultural Studies at Incheon National University, South Korea. She is a cultural anthropologist trained at Seoul National University in South Korea. She has been leading several research projects, including one on Chinese sociocultural and economic practices and another on Greater China and East Asian Regional Order. She is the director of the Institute for Chinese and Overseas Chinese Culture at the Academy of China Studies at Incheon National University. She has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Yunnan, Hebei, Anhui, and Zhejiang provinces in mainland China and Hong Kong. Her research interests include nationalism and cultural heritage, citizenship and identity in mainland China and Hong Kong, and the politics of national boundaries and border areas. She co-authored Intangible Cultural Heritage in Contemporary China (London: Routledge). She is also the editor-in-chief of the Korean Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies.