China's heritage governance blueprint: Revisiting evolutionary trajectories, reframing institutional priorities and mapping the national registry

China's heritage conservation system is at a pivotal moment, navigating the intersection of historical preservation and rapid socio-economic transformation. While UNESCO world heritage sites often dominate global discussions, China's extensive registry of over five thousand major cultural heritage sites under national-level protection remains comparatively underexplored. This paper introduces a comprehensive ‘heritage governance blueprint’, integrating elements such as historical evolution, stakeholder interactions, policy and practice shifts, research priorities and tempo-spatial-typological mapping of the national heritage registry. The proposed framework identifies a hybrid governance model, blending centralized regulation with localized experimentation and technocratic innovation. It not only documents the progression of regulatory policies and stakeholder interactions but also utilizes geocoded datasets and clustering algorithms to visualize heritage assets. Findings from diverse materials — policy documents, national research grant data and heritage registries — highlight the transition from traditional rescue-based restoration toward more advanced practices including environmental monitoring, preventive conservation, digital twin technologies and the heritage revitalization endeavors within broader development narratives. The study makes a dual contribution. Theoretically, it recontextualizes global heritage norms, such as authenticity and conservation, within China's developmentalist framework. Methodologically, it bridges qualitative and quantitative approaches, offering a new paradigm for heritage governance. This hybrid governance model holds significant relevance for development-intensive nations and opens the door for future comparative studies and more inclusive global discourse on cultural heritage conservation.