14 Reconceptualizing Heritage in China Museums, Development and the Shifting Dynamics of Power Harriet Evans and Michael Rowlands
Heritage, as both discourse and practice, is a recent European import into China, but it already has powerful appeal across official and public domains, transforming the social, economic and cultural life of localities and reshaping domestic and global notions of China’s national identity. Heritage construction is a core feature of regional development strategies, especially in the historically poor and ethnically diverse regions of the southwest. Heritage tourism is promoted in diverse forms, from the ‘red’ sites commemorating the Communist Party–led revolution before the founding of the People’s Republic to the exotic ‘ocean of song and dance’ city of Kaili, Guizhou’s main city of Miao culture. However, between government policies and local communities whose claims to their own cultural past are being appropriated by political, developmental and commercial interests, heritage is a problematic term and practice, involving competition, conflict and new hierarchies of power in local communities. Articulated by international and national agendas and integrated into local development strategies, heritage is something that local communities find themselves obliged to engage with. But how? With what implications for local communities’ perceptions of their own cultural pasts and values, and for their transmission to future generations? What new conceptions and practices of heritage are emerging to contest the top-down imposition of heritage models that deny the possibility of locally embedded cultural renewal? And with what effects on the changing relationship between local communities and the state? UNESCO UNIVERSALISM AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA One of the main challenges to ‘World Heritage’ and the concept of universal heritage value has been the very idea of universality. UNESCO’s 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage embodied a set of Euro-American ideas of tangible cultural heritage on which it was assumed universal practices of conservation and preservation would be established, creating a consensus in public life within varying local
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 273 and national frameworks. Conceptual crises in both the ideas of universality and the definition of ‘heritage value’ emerged with globalization in the late twentieth century and with the recognition of alternative indigenous and ‘non-Western’ concepts of heritage. These critiques of ‘official heritage discourses’ embodied in the 1972 convention became loosely enshrined in the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, yet in turn this duality has also been criticized for continuing to maintain a Western bias toward the binarisms of modernity and tradition, nature and culture and mind and matter (Byrne 1991; Cleere 2001; Hall 1999; Karlstrom 2009). To counter such biases, critical debates have focused on indigeneity and the rights of minorities, recognizing heritage value in cultural forms that escape the dominant values of white settler classes in postcolonial contexts (Condori 1989; Kirstenblatt-Gimblett 2004; Smith 2004). The creation of a more academic and critical study of cultural heritage has also led to a move away from defining heritage value in things per se to emphasizing knowledge, performance and skilled practices consistent with the claims made by indigenous minorities for recognition of intangible heritage rather than monuments and sites as the basis for cultural rights (Holtorf 2001; Karlstrom 2009). While UNESCO has struggled to retain the principle of universality, it has only done so by extending the category to include a greater diversity of potential heritage values. Extending the Euro-American model developed from nineteenth-century nationalisms globally to countries and minorities with radically different concepts of heritage and ideas about development has stretched the principle of universality to a breaking point (Eriksen 2001).Yet it is interesting that, as far as we can tell, the point of breakage has not yet arrived. UNESCO retains considerable influence in maintaining ideas of universal heritage value while steering an increasingly fluid and negotiable understanding of how this might be interpreted at any local level. In the case of China, we can explore the reasons for this in a context that is radically different from the conditions that stretched the Euro-American model in Australia or America, for example, where recognition of the cultural rights of minorities emphasizes the relation of heritage value to cultural diversity (Harrison 2013: 156–165, 207–213; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006; Meskell 2010; UNESCO 2002). Ever since ratifying UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention in 1985, China has enthusiastically subscribed to UNESCO’s claims to universality as a positive contribution to legitimizing China’s burgeoning global role and status, but uses such claims in ways that are beyond UNESCO’s control (Oakes 2012; Su and Teo 2009). China’s signing of the World Heritage Convention manifests an ambiguity between a universalistic conceptualization of heritage that derives from a European epistemology and another idea of heritage rooted in the Chinese state’s selfrepresentation as the inheritor of a civilizational legacy of four thousand years. Far from being incompatible with state interests, China incorporates
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UNESCO’s universalism within its developmental interests of national modernization and to legitimize its own claims to a millennial legacy of civilization. The two universalisms are, therefore, joined not as a matter of scale in which the local stands in contestation of the national, but in which the operations of the Chinese state in its heritage policy and practice play out with different effects at different levels. While China’s economic ‘clout’ in the global political economy sustains its appropriation of UNESCO universalism in ways that a country like Mali cannot aspire to (Joy 2012; Rowlands 2002a, 2002b), the history and actuality of the Chinese state’s penetration of locality sees the same ambiguity at work in local heritage projects expressive of civilizational diversity. This suggests not a contestation of UNESCO’s universalistic ethos but an encouragement and extension of it in the service of different aims rooted in earlier perceptions of an imperial cosmology, in the early twentieth-century quest to establish the modern nation-state and its continuation during the Mao era and in contemporary strategies of economic development. A similar ambiguity can be seen in China’s collaboration on heritage with the World Bank. Since 1993, when China began to approach the World Bank for assistance in incorporating cultural heritage into development projects, the China–World Bank Partnership for Conservation has supported twelve projects, with loans totaling US $1.323 billion, including US $260 million of direct support for heritage projects. According to a 2011 World Bank report, ‘Conserving the Past as a Foundation for the Future’ (Ebbe, Licciardi and Baeumler 2011: xii), the Chinese government’s recognition of the challenge that rapid urban growth poses for cultural heritage conservation has led to World Bank support in three main areas: the strengthening of urban planning skills, upgrading basic infrastructure and improving traditional housing.1 Such ‘collaboration’ suggests that China is a willing partner to World Bank interests and is in a position to obtain significant loans under the name of heritage conservation. Far from contesting the World Bank’s conditions, the raw figures of China’s relationship with the World Bank would indicate that China goes along with them, but in practices that suggest a filtering out of requirements or obligations that do not correspond with China’s national interests of self-legitimation. By 2011 China had forty-one World Heritage sites, twenty-nine of which are cultural heritage sites, including monuments and old towns, eight natural heritage sites and four cultural and natural (mixed) sites, ranking third in the world. The most recent addition in 2011 was Hangzhou’s West Lake cultural landscape. China ratified UNESCO’s Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004 to protect oral, performative and handicraft cultural practices described as ‘masterpieces of mankind’ and including cultural expressions ‘in need of urgent safeguarding’.2 In 2006 work began on preparing a new law on the protection of intangible cultural heritage. This was finally passed by the National People’s Congress in early 2011 and took effect in June of the same year. According to the law, the
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 275 country would give particular assistance to intangible heritage-protection efforts in ethnic minority, remote and poverty-stricken areas. It also stipulated that ‘cultural authorities must provide necessary places and funds for representative heirs to pass on related skills and knowledge and encourage participation in non-profit social activities’ (‘China Adopts First Law’ 2011). UN statistics show that by 2011, China had 1,028 state-level intangible cultural heritage items and 1,488 state-level representative heirs or transmitters (chuanchengren).3 The scale of the Chinese government’s enthusiastic adoption of UNESCO’s formulations on heritage is indicated in a spectacular explosion of local interest in acquiring heritage recognition. In villages and small towns across the country, China’s 2004 participation in the Convention on Intangible Heritage gave official authorization to entrepreneurs, officials, festival organizers and philanthropists to respond to the rise of domestic and international cultural tourism by transforming local heritage into a new source of income. Applications for heritage status became a highly competitive state-run phenomenon—although, as we point out below, within a limited ideal type of heritage conservation—fostered in significant measure by the lucrative profits gained by entrepreneurs and local provincial- and county-level government interests. The scale alone of some of these initiatives is spectacular. For example, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, was designated a Museum City in 2009, and Anren, just north of Chengdu, is now officially described as the ‘museum town of China’. The Chinese state nominated twelve National Archaeological Site Parks in 2010, several of which are in Sichuan Province. By late 2011, the country’s total intangible cultural heritage resources reportedly amounted to nearly 870,000 items.4 In the southwest, the main region of our interest in this chapter, the ‘old town’ of Lijiang, in Yunnan Province, has had a particular influence as a model of heritage construction. Included on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1997 following a devastating earthquake that destroyed many of the town’s old buildings, it was the first inhabited ethnic cultural environment in China to be awarded UNESCO recognition. Lijiang had already been awarded status as a National Historic and Cultural City by the nation’s highest organ of state, the State Council, in 1986, and backpacker tourism in this ethnically diverse area had already brought its natural beauty and ‘exotic’ cultural practices to the attention of international tour agencies. World Heritage status, however, rapidly transformed what had been a small town off the beaten track into a major destination for domestic and international tourists, attracted by the romantic ‘authenticity’ of its cultural landscape (Su and Teo 2009). Despite tensions and conflicts surrounding its reconstruction and reinvention of local ethnic tradition, it has played a crucial role in Yunnan and beyond as a model for how heritage, ethnicity and culture can become resources for generating wealth and acquiring a ‘modern’ identity (Lofblad 2011).
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LEGACIES OF HERITAGE AND DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA This UNESCO-inspired boom did not take place in a void. State policy for the preservation of heritage inherits a legacy of archeological excavation, collection, documentation and registration of relics, ritual texts, ethnic customs and religious beliefs that goes back to the 1920s struggle to establish China as a modern nation. The end of the nineteenth century in China was marked by intellectual and political challenges to the imperial cosmology of tianxia (generally translated as ‘all under heaven’, a worldscape that encompassed everything from earth to heaven and everything in between). Different schools of intellectuals were responsible for assimilating Western political theories and ideas of social Darwinism and evolutionism into China, mainly via Japanese translations, leading to the conversion of the sense of tianxia to shiijie (world) as a more limited idea of the world of China as territorially bounded and based on European ideas of nationhood. It was a shared sense of the inadequacy of China’s sociopolitical structures and cultural traditions to protect China from international imperialist domination that drove many of these intellectual movements to look for an evolutionist path to renewed national strength, with profound consequences for much of the rest of China’s twentieth-century history. At the same time as China’s new Communist Party was forging its own brand of rural revolution, anthropologists and archaeologists were sent to the West to be trained in the new ‘sociological’ and historical approaches that would provide a positivist base for understanding China’s past to contribute to the construction of the new nation. This policy continued as part of the new state’s assertion of national authority during the 1950s, when eminent ethnologists and anthropologists were officially appointed to document and film ethnic cultural practices in the southwest. Paradoxically, such efforts were even sustained—albeit on a much smaller scale and in very different ideological terms—during the violent years of the Cultural Revolution. A politics of class struggle unleashed wide-scale destruction of temples and shrines, monuments and artifacts, including objects of everyday use, and popular cultural practices were routinely condemned as ‘feudal superstition.’ Nevertheless, as the anthropologist K. C. Chang argued long ago, the politicization of cultural and scientific practice in the name of serving the masses led to the dissemination of new techniques and methods leading to major archaeological excavations (Chang 1977). And while attacks on the ‘four olds’ (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas) resulted in massive devastation of material objects and buildings, archival evidence suggests that considerable efforts, in some areas at least, went to salvaging and preserving cultural antiquity (Ho 2011). The common slogan, ‘using the old to serve the present’ (gu wei jin yong) offered a way of legitimizing the protection of cultural relics as ‘a mission of the Cultural Revolution’ (Ho 2011, 690). Significant archaeological excavations also continued during the 1960s and 1970s, including the
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 277 large-scale renovation of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, and the excavations of the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE) Mawangdui tombs at Changsha. Local folk, religious, ethnic and cultural practices were routinely suppressed throughout China during the Cultural Revolution, but they were kept alive in diverse forms and scales, in the clandestine preservation of materials from dismantled temples, for example (Jing 1996), or in Hakka women’s songs and laments used to express emotions that were forbidden public articulation (Johnson 2003; Watson 1996). Between the late 1980s and 1990s, the removal of the label of ‘superstition’ facilitated the resurfacing of local cultural practices, and official legitimation of them under the government’s official recognition of intangible heritage has seen their reappearance and reinvention in vast numbers of local rituals and festivals. Moreover, official satisfaction that many such activities pose no ideological threat to Chinese Communist Party authority has begun to result in the apparent ‘withdrawal’ of state intervention from intangible heritage activities in moves to return control and management to local communities.5 Over the past two decades, sociopolitical debates in China have been urging a reappraisal of traditional Chinese cosmology and philosophy as a source of relevant political concepts for understanding the growth of China as a global political force. Encouragement to look to the Confucian classics for their insights into notions of humanity and governance is one facet of this. In fact this is a wider phenomenon in much of East and Southeast Asia, as debates on the relevance of ideas of nation and state are questioned and the value of premodern concepts are investigated and transformed within new settings of geopolitical power. China’s implementation of international principles of heritage conservation on the one hand retains the legacy of how Western evolutionist ideas of modernization and development were integrated at the state policy level from the 1930s onward.6 In contrast, what is now emerging is an intellectual commitment, notably in anthropology, philosophy and history, to return to a longer-term historical understanding of the ‘development’ of China as a ‘civilization’ (Feuchtwang 2012; Wang 2009). CONFLICTING TRAJECTORIES OF HERITAGE AND DEVELOPMENT The ambiguities in the Chinese government’s acceptance of UNESCO universalism and its place in development strategies play out with diverse effects at local levels. UNESCO-inspired government encouragement of local heritage projects has contributed to a significant increase in regional and local incomes, yet it has also provoked tensions over how cultural heritage is perceived and implemented. At different scales, official policies have promoted a monumental vision of heritage, most notably in museum building, as part
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of the process of acquiring prestige and urban status through the possession of a unique heritage value. The conservation of ‘ancient villages’ and local cultural festivals and performances are key elements of provincial and local development strategies of boosting commercial tourism through promoting cultural ‘authenticity’. Thanks to the boom of global tourism and the heritage industry since the end of the twentieth century, it has become common practice for the Chinese state to use ancient artifacts in promoting its significance in the global arena, transforming the country into a kind of gigantic museum. At other scales, vernacular practices and local perceptions of the value of restoring cultural pasts have been encouraged and rewarded through such activities as the awarding of prizes, status-led competitions and festivals and visits abroad. As we have noted above, vernacular practices are routinely supervised, if not directly controlled by the local authorities, reshaping locally embedded cultural activities such as folk festivals, dance and religious rituals. Another kind of transformation of locality is also underway. The changing socioeconomic, demographic and physical composition of local communities within the processes of ‘local development’ has involved the dislocation of local peoples and the destruction of local communities, in some areas on a vast scale. The tourist reconstruction of small towns such as Lijiang or of museums such as the Jinsha Site in Chengdu has, for example, involved the demolition of vast areas of local housing, the relocation of local residents and their replacement by migrants from other parts of China eager to benefit from the tourist boom. Linked to development strategies, heritage construction is widely predicated on the assumption of dislocation and displacement and the idealization of newness as a process of removing evidence of decay and returning relics to their ‘authentic’ states in ‘modern’ ways. There are numerous examples of local movements and communal responses to such scales of destruction in which heritage is seen as part of the process of modernization. In Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, for example, the decision to undertake archaeological excavations and create an archaeological theme park led to the massive displacement of population and the destruction of local houses, eventually resulting in the gentrification of a new community in the center of Xi’an. None of this was done without resistance and some violent responses, which in turn were ‘managed’ under the ethos that a new kind of heritage value would emerge through this development process. At yet another scale, small-scale conservation of sites of local cultural and religious value for tourist development may result in a more subdued but nevertheless negative response. The Beijing-based art historian, Liao Yang (2011), for example, has conducted a study of local government attempts to restore an important Buddhist monastery in the cave complex of the southern border of the Tengger Desert to draw in tourist income. The authorities’ decision to build an exhibition hall of restored statues and the involvement of the monastery’s monk with the tourist developer caused considerable friction. Under local government control, the monastery’s management
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 279 committee recognized the need for the monk’s religious guidance in maintaining the ritual life of the monastery; for his part, the monk dreamed of building up the local Buddhist community. However, the management committee was also concerned that he would share the monetary donations made to the monastery by lay Buddhists, with negative effects on its authority. When the local cultural relics authorities decided in 2010 to sign a contract to strengthen its scheme to develop the monastery, both the monk and local lay Buddhists withdrew from negotiations with the authorities, despite their donations to the monastery. Such a response can be interpreted as an instance of the local opposition to top-down controls that now fuels popular protest in China.7 Questions about what does or does not get conserved have to be situated, therefore, in the context of a contested politics of heritage conservation articulated by different interest groups. Thus, we must address the apparent paradox—not addressed in official documentation—of a dominant UNESCO-inspired preserved heritage practice implemented on a massive scale as part of China’s development strategy, yet premised on acceptance of the destruction of local cultural and natural heritage as part of the development process. It is important to note that there is a long-standing ideal of preservation through renewal and reconstruction in Chinese—and, more broadly, in Southeast and East Asian—attitudes to the past (Karlstrom 2009). The classic example is the Ise Grand Shinto Shrine in Japan. Originally built in the eighth century CE, every part of the temple has been renewed many times over, with parts of the oldest components redistributed to other temples in Japan (Lowenthal 1985: 384–385).8 This apparent paradox of preservation and renewal through destruction is part of the general heritage scene in China, of which Lijiang’s ‘old town’ is one example. Driven by local government, entrepreneurs and real estate interests, monumental museums, new heritage sites and theme parks are appearing in the place of old buildings, neighborhoods, small towns and villages, selectively commemorating the past as an adjunct to commercial tourism and local economic development. However, in recent years, the scale of destruction and dislocation carried out in the name of heritage protection has led not only to complaints, protests and resistance, but recently to recognition in the highest echelons of government that this has resulted in the erosion of cultural sustainability and reproduction at local levels. Such recognition is emerging within the broader context of growing—if ambivalent—official acceptance of the need to respond to the evidence of social and cultural anomie by encouraging more participatory approaches to local governance (Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party 2011; UNESCO 2011). ALTERNATIVE HERITAGE VISIONS? The alternative conceptualizations of heritage discussed above find form in diverse local heritage initiatives in China, promoted by varying combinations
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of international and domestic NGO, local government and private agencies. These include three initiatives in the southwest, where the authors of this chapter are carrying out ethnographically based research.9 This research focuses on sites in Yunnan and Sichuan where the heritage industry constitutes a major part of local economic strategy but where the extensive mobilization of heritage in the past decade has encouraged alternative, private responses that depart from dominant government approaches and in which heritage value is seen as the shared ownership of a cultural past for the public good. One of the two Yunnan sites we have been researching hosts a Naxi dongba cultural center, where its founder, Mr. He, seeks to bring together regional ethnic Naxi interests in revitalizing Naxi artisan knowledge and knowledge of local folk religious ritual as the basis of local cultural and ethnic sustainability. The other Yunnan site in our project, the Tea and Horse Route Museum in Lijiang, consists of a huge diorama of the production and trade of the region’s famous pu’er tea, in the ancestral home of its founder, Mr. Mu. Both of these initiatives are small scale and low key, and, in contrast to the spectacular tourist appeal of the commodified heritage projects in the region where they are located, they do not substitute kitsch reconstruction for contemplation (Benjamin 1992). The third site we are investigating is the vast Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren in Sichuan Province, which is devoted to restoring the ‘truth’ of China’s twentiethcentury revolutionary history. The region in which these sites are situated has long been marked by tensions with the central Han authorities, and local ethnic and cultural identities remain strong despite the contribution of economic development and commercial ‘heritagization’ to transforming the meaning of locality and place. These three initiatives claim to represent and protect a perception of cultural value that is rooted in local memories, locally embedded cultural knowledge and privileged access to historical truth. They therefore imply a demand for recognition of ethnic difference that the government’s application of its understanding of heritage-as-development has effectively denied. These initiatives also depart from mainstream heritage initiatives in that they appear as largely private ventures. The market thrust of the region’s heritage development—particularly around tourism—is a global tendency, and that ‘private’ interests in China should be involved is hardly surprising. However, the idea and actuality of the ‘private’ in China demands some explanation, since China’s long history of state penetration of local community life privileges official involvement in what might be described as ‘private’ heritage projects. Indeed, the sustainability of initiatives such as those we have been researching depends on the successful accommodation of the state’s political, economic and commercial interests through appropriating and contesting the commodification of heritage, and negotiating complex relationships between individuals, communities, entrepreneurs and official agencies. How these ‘private’ initiatives respond to state-driven interests thus has a significant bearing on the character of their heritage projects.
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 281 They also raise questions about definitions of and boundaries between private, civil and state that complicate the binary state/society and top-down/ bottom-up divides characteristic of many academic debates about China’s civil society. Questions about what constitutes cultural heritage in China are therefore becoming increasingly diverse as new locally inspired and private heritage projects come to the fore. Private associations and NGOs working to conserve buildings and local cultural practices abound, and young people, journalists, local activists and many others are lending their support in increasing numbers to small-scale, often privately inspired conservation projects. In a lecture given in May 2010 in London, Zhu Shuxi, director general of the Cultural Bureau of Chengdu, described his goal to ‘build Chengdu into a national example for developing private museums’ (Zhu 2010), suggesting that privatization is the way forward for China’s future museum development. He singled out the Jianchuan Museum Cluster as a notable example. The founder and curator of this museum, Fan Jianchuan, is now offering his expertise as a consultant advising other private museum ventures in different parts of the country. However, as we have briefly noted above, privatization may be defined in various ways. At its simplest, it refers to the use of private sources to fund privately managed initiatives, but in the Chinese context this neither precludes the involvement of diverse stakeholders, including local governments, from the negotiations and investment to advance such initiatives, nor obviates political involvement in the procedures that have to be observed to advance such initiatives. Nor, in itself, does it assume a conceptualization of heritage that departs from the state’s as a crucial source of income to fund national and local development strategies. In very distinctive ways, the key individuals involved in the three initiatives introduced above are driven by ethical concerns with memory, history and ‘truth’ as the conditions for community sustainability. If their concerns foreground notions of collective identity and historical responsibility that are implicitly antagonistic to state-led modernization programs, they also reveal accommodations of diverse community, private and state interests in creatively thinking of the past as a resource for the future. The notion of the heritage activist comes to mind: an individual who is inspired by a vision, and a mission, to retrieve memory and history of place, practice and object, as the foundation of collective sustainability. The key individuals involved launched their ‘heritage’ projects after successful careers in the army, politics and business; all, therefore, tap into extensive and influential social and political networks. Moreover, the physical sites of their initiatives are all situated in or near other massive heritage projects; they are well acquainted with the concept and practice of ‘heritage’ as an economic and cultural resource crucial to the economies of the two provinces. They are not immune to its ‘trickle-down’ effects. However, the particular histories and cultural practices these individuals seek to conserve belong to a geographical and ethnic terrain at the margins of the main preoccupations
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of Han-centered histories. Sichuan and, particularly, Yunnan are known for their ‘exotic’ mix of ethnic cultures, their economic distance from the powerhouses of the twentieth-century economy and a history of fractious relationships with the Han state. The passionate commitment each of these individuals demonstrates in the time, energy and resources they put into their projects cannot be dissociated from their identification with communities, places and histories far removed from the dominant concerns of state. The age and gender of the three founders of the projects we are studying are also significant. All are men in their mid-fifties, nurtured by the communities that facilitated their success, who now, in their own terms, want to give something back to the collectivity. On a grand scale, the same kind of impulse is played out in the examples of Chinese billionaires buying Chinese art works in the global auction market to donate them to China’s museums (‘Look for Patriotic New Collectors’ 2010; Wang 2012). In the Confucian tradition, such impulses associate the act of donation with surrendering ancestral substance to the cosmological center, and are ultimately associated with an ancestral notion of gaining immortality not by remembrance but by the fusing of substances (Thompson 1988). While the founders of the three initiatives in our study are palpably aware of the commercial demands of their projects, they do not posit heritage as a commodification of the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ to correspond with national narratives of progress and modernity. The value of material objects and displays in their projects derives not from their materiality per se in giving form to an abstract notion of times past overcome by modernity, but in their materialization of cultural, emotional and, we argue, kin, ethnic and regional ties rooted in identification with local community, and linking past and future. Their vision, as seen in their ‘heritage’ projects, suggests a material ontology in which places, objects and practices are inscribed with an ethical power to cement local memories, histories and temporalities that diverge from those of the state, as the condition of sustainability into the future. These ties are also inflected by ethnic and gendered considerations. Their projects illustrate processes in which material objects and persons are inseparably linked with temporalities, places and materialized knowledge that sustain a sense of local identity and historical truth. Drawing on our ongoing research, then, we consider how each of these projects sheds light on heritage as a changing discursive practice inflected by local cultural identities as well as an ethical and ontological concern. THE DONGBA CULTURE VILLAGE Situated at Baidi, high up on a small plateau in the mountains near the Tibetan border, the Dongba Culture Village consists of a small circular arrangement of single-story, single-room, wooden-beam houses, at the center of which is a water mill and vegetable garden. The form of the buildings,
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 283 shrines and objects of the village are defined through their association with the Naxi dongba religion, a shamanistic folk religion shaped by an agricultural society. The houses have been reconstructed from the materials of the houses that Baidi’s Naxi population used to live in before they were pulled down to make way for the two- or three-story concrete houses that now dominate the original town, which is set apart from the Dongba Culture Village by a road between them. The Culture Village is surrounded by a stone trail lined by painted stone carvings of and shrines to the dongba deities. One of the wooden houses contains a display of photographs and objects of the papermaking craft for which the local Naxi used to be famous, and which earned national acknowledgement as ‘intangible cultural heritage’ in 2007. Another of the houses is used as an exhibition hall and contains the paintings and writings of Dongba Xi, a dongba elder who came to the village to teach Mr. He how to read the dongba scripts. Another house displays a plaque noting the name of a Taiwanese dignitary, a member of Taiwan’s tourism bureau, who had visited the center. At the time of our initial visit there, in the summer of 2010, a film crew was on site, filming a TV play due to run more than sixty episodes. The initial inspiration to build the Culture Village came from the aforementioned Mr. He, a charismatic man in his early fifties, who had been a local official and, between 1999 and 2002, head of the town of Baidi, with its population numbering some eighteen thousand, including eleven different ethnic groups. While he was still an official, in 1998, he initiated a small pilot project for what he called the Dongba Center, the main aim of which, he explained to us, was to train local young people to perform dongba rituals. ‘They already knew how to do them’, he said, ‘but don’t do them properly’. In 2002, together with other elder dongba in Baidi, he began to formulate a fuller project, and identified a particular site in the foothills of a mountain associated with one of the main dongba deities. After being given official authorization to proceed in 2004, and with loans totaling 27 million yuan, largely from local individuals and dongba, he then set about using the wooden beams from demolished Naxi houses—saving them from being burned—to build an ‘old village’ to preserve Naxi culture. According to He, the labor for the construction work came largely from local young people who seemed to like the idea of being able to develop a better understanding of their own past. By 2007, the reconstructed village had already attracted some international interest, and, following a visit by Japanese tourists, He and Dongba Xi were invited to visit Japan to look at examples of their recent heritage initiatives. He described a number of objectives inspiring his project. First, he wanted to build a physical site as a center of the preservation of ritual meaning, surrounded by a road or trail on which Naxi history would be carved. Located on a site long known for its associations with the Anni dongba, the village would be the main Naxi center for rituals to the Anni dongba, and would attract dongba from Yunnan and Sichuan. Sichuan dongba had
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long traveled to Baidi, although the numbers dwindled during the Mao era. In the reconstructed village, these dongba would become teachers training a younger generation of dongba. The Dongba Culture Village would also offer classes in both Naxi and Chinese languages, and He hoped that eventually it would also offer classes in English. Alongside these activities, a key purpose of the village was to revitalize local handicrafts for which the local Naxi were known: papermaking, leather making, and wine making. These were envisaged as ongoing projects oriented to sustain local forms of knowledge in what he called chuanxi suo (centers or institutes for cultural transmission) embedded in ‘traditional’ cultural and economic practices. His emphasis here was not on traditional objects or knowledge per se, but on processes and skills that could continually reproduce knowledge into the future. One of He’s main concerns was the financial sustainability of the village. He explained that once the construction of the village was completed, he hoped by March 2011, it would attract increasing numbers of visitors. His aim was to attract some 350,000 to 400,000 visitors each year, each of whom would have to pay an entrance fee. He seemed fairly clear that the local government would not step in to make money out of his venture, because, as he said, the village would not host any performances or tourist activities. As a commercial venture, the center would be open to visitors, but they would not be able to participate in the dongba rituals; dongba beliefs were to be kept separate from commercial interests. He is inspired by a passion and a vision: a passion for a cultural past embedded in rituals, language, place, space and material objects and processes, and a vision of a future in which these things continue to cement a notion of cultural community. His idea of ‘heritage’ consists of a constant movement between past and future, in which looking forward and thinking of his community’s future are grounded in looking backward and to the past. His energy in going about talking to people, obtaining loans and donations, mobilizing young people to physically participate in the construction of the village, and doubtless much more, is inspired by what he describes as a clear sense of responsibility to a cultural past. He and the places, activities and objects he is committed to conserving become the vectors of cultural transmission to protect the ritual and cultural future of his community in ways that ideally will be integrated with but not swamped by developmental interests. The future of his efforts remains uncertain, although his commitment is unequivocal. THE TEA AND HORSE ROUTE MUSEUM, LIJIANG The Tea and Horse Route Museum is situated in the heart of Lijiang’s reconstructed ‘old city’, adjacent to the town’s official Dongba Cultural Research Institute, in the spacious open floors of a three-story mansion that
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 285 was the home of the family of the museum’s founder, Mr. Mu. The museum’s main exhibit is a massive diorama on two floors that depicts the ‘tea and horse trade route’: a network of mule caravan trails through the high mountains of Yunnan Province. More than a thousand years ago, the route linked Yunnan, one of the first tea-producing regions, with northern India, Tibet and central China. Starting with its origins in Pu’er County, near Simao Prefecture in Yunnan, the diorama shows the changing landscape of the route’s six thousand kilometers as well as the activities of and encounters between the mule drivers, traders, tax officials and innkeepers as the tea was transported in panniers carried by horses. The ground floor of the museum sells a few items associated with the tea and horse trade, including pu’er tea bricks, bags and teacups. But apart from these, the exhibit contains no ‘authentic’ objects collected from the route, and its small captions make no more than brief references to its historical and cultural importance as China’s ‘Second Silk Road’, as it is sometimes described. From the perspective of the founder-curator of the museum, its main public purpose is to reestablish the links between the tea and horse route and its Naxi environment. However, the simple but intricate exhibit conceals other passions and commitments behind its status as a local museum in a World Heritage site. The son of a wealthy Naxi family, Mu had a long and successful career in the army before moving into business in 1997. Between 1997 and 2007, he worked in Hainan, Guangxi and Shenzhen, becoming a prosperous entrepreneur dealing in environmental equipment, among other things. His initial interest, as he described it, was to do something that would make him happy (weile kuaile). He spent years thinking about how to set up a museum and visited museums throughout China, eventually developing the idea of establishing a museum and hotel rolled into one. However, his family mansion, which had been converted in 1998 into what Mu described as Lijiang’s ‘best’ hotel, did not have enough space to include a museum as well. A 2006 visit to a Guangzhou film studio, where he saw a background diorama used in a film set, gave him the idea of creating his own diorama. Since he was not a collector and did not have access to artifacts, he decided to recruit young people to train as the craftspeople making the diorama figures. He posted an advertisement in the local employment center and recruited twenty high school graduates, including many who had grown up in the poorer mountainous regions surrounding Lijiang. By 2007, he had still not found an adequate space for his museum, so he decided to convert his family hotel. Lijiang officials had been very supportive, so he said, but he rejected their offer to give him space and funds for his museum since he wanted it to be his own personal project, even though it cost him an investment of 12 million yuan. ‘I want to do one good thing in my life’, he noted. Mu was explicit about the economic difficulties facing him. When we met him, he was already negotiating with Lijiang’s state tourist agency, the lüxing she, to establish what percentage of the income he would give it
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in return for its support of the museum, but as he put it, he wanted to attract ‘real’ visitors, not those included in lüxing she package tours. He was already charging an entrance fee of 30 yuan, but the tourist agency wanted to increase this to 60 yuan. The museum attracts an average of fifty to sixty visitors per day, including a number of local people. Elderly local women and men, in particular, would point out familiar places represented on the diorama and say things like ‘that is where I lived’. Though he acknowledged that an increase in fees might reduce its appeal to the local population, it was clear that this was one of the means Mu envisaged of making the museum sustainable. Neither of He’s nor Mu’s projects are ‘spectacular’ in either theoretical (Benjamin 1992; Debord 1994) or entrepreneurial terms. The simplicity of Mu’s museum, and the tranquility of He’s village with its few wooden houses and stone walkway, offer a striking contrast, both physical and emotional, to the exotic ethnic heritage of Lijiang’s ‘old city’. Their curators’ political experience and entrepreneurial expertise undoubtedly tap into sources of support which we have not yet been able to explore. However, the expertise of both suggests that they are both interested in local developmental strategies and able to integrate their projects into these agendas. Both initiatives have emerged at a time when such projects are being explicitly encouraged by the state authorities’ drive to develop the southwest through investing in heritage tourism. Both also stand to gain economically from the already well-established place of Lijiang and its environs in UNESCO’s listings for tangible and intangible heritage. The extent to which their projects succumb to or are appropriated by the powerful economic exigencies of the market and the political interests of the state in prioritizing the developmental gains of heritage construction remains a matter for future investigation. THE JIANCHUAN MUSEUM CLUSTER The Jianchuan Museum Cluster is by far the most ambitious and politically vulnerable of the three sites we visited during our preliminary field research in southwestern China. The museum is the brainchild of Fan Jianchuan, a former People’s Liberation Army officer from Sichuan who turned to business and real estate, and is situated on the edge of the historic small town (zhen) of Anren, home to several renovated mansions and recently officially named as China’s first ‘museum town’. The Jianchuan Museum is a vast complex of eighteen exhibition halls and installations devoted to China’s twentieth-century history, covering an area of five hundred acres and featuring some eight million exhibits, including some classified as ‘national treasures’. It is the largest private (minjian) museum in China, but although, as we noted above, it is upheld as a model for museum privatization in Sichuan, it is also not infrequently criticized by the central authorities for its
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 287 ‘controversial’ narrative of China’s twentieth-century history, with sporadic removal of some of its potentially unacceptable didactics.10 The museum’s exhibits are currently presented under four main themes, each displayed in distinctive installations and impressive exhibition halls designed by contemporary architects, all supervised by Fan Jianchuan: the Second World War and the War of Resistance against Japan, the Red Era, folklore and culture, and the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. The first five exhibition halls devoted to the 1937–1945 period opened in October 2005. The Red Era halls were opened in 2008 and were followed by two contrasting earthquake halls. The first earthquake hall is an official exhibition in a building constructed by Fan Jianchuan and sold to the provincial authorities. Here, in an imposing space fronted by monumental pillars and echoing the daunting style of official museum architecture, is a depiction of the nation’s leaders’ magnanimity to the local population. The other earthquake hall, immediately adjacent, displays rubble, crumpled vehicles and the remains of furniture and household items, juxtaposed with photographs of grief and loss. The installations of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster are monumental and moving. In themselves, they are spectacular without apparent touristic and commercial compromise (there were virtually no visitors in sight during the three days we spent there in July 2010), although its lakes, restaurants and hotels beckon in that direction. These museums are aesthetically extraordinary in their combination of contemporary designer architecture, symbolic use of space and color and objects that speak of a brutal as well as exhilarating history. The use of photography, texts and objects, in spaces that both explicitly and implicitly tell of a historical truth excluded from official historiography, makes a direct appeal to memories of suffering and hardship, courage and achievement. In all, the museum cluster’s vast quantities of everyday objects, from enamel wash basins, diaries (five thousand from the Cultural Revolution), letters, sewing machines, bicycles, matchboxes, towels and flannels, mirrors, chopsticks, badges and posters, papercuts and toys, shoes and satchels (all presented in cabinets and displays with captions personally written by Fan Jianchuan) offer the visitor an overwhelming emotional experience.11 It should be noted that the exhibits and their captions are subjected to detailed scrutiny by Beijing’s officials, who periodically demand the removal or revision of selected items. The museum’s official website is often inaccessible, and Fan Jianchuan’s plans to open an exhibition hall about with the Great Famine (1959–1961) in 2010 seem to have been thwarted. Fan Jianchuan was born in 1957 to military parents. His father, born in Shanxi, joined the army at the age of thirteen, and fought in the War of Resistance (1937–1945), the War of Liberation (1947–1949) and the Korean War (1950–1953), and was the only survivor of thirteen brothers. He gave his son the name Jianchuan when he moved south to Sichuan in the
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early 1950s. Condemned as a capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution, Fan describes his father as the ‘most powerful influence on [his] life’.12 Despite Jianchuan’s memories of a childhood of fights, hanging out with mates and getting into scrapes, his father instilled in him a personal morality of responsibility, righteousness and humanity (Xiong 2004: 6). Fan Jianchuan started collecting things when the Cultural Revolution started, when he was just nine years old. He had witnessed his father being beaten up when he had to accompany him to his rural exile during the Cultural Revolution, and his interest in collecting, as he came to realize, was motivated by a search for the truth of his father’s life. What had happened to provoke such brutal treatment of a man who had devoted his life to the Party? By 1979, when Fan Jianchuan enrolled to study at university in Xi’an, he started to collect Cultural Revolution artifacts more systematically, trawling through rubbish collection depots for badges, sheets, ration tickets, mirrors and much more. Fan Jianchuan initially proposed to create a museum to house his collection in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, but permission was not forthcoming. In 2003, however, permission was granted for the museum to be developed in the historic town of Anren. Fan Jianchuan had already amassed considerable wealth through real estate, and the commercial possibilities of the ‘old streets’ and ‘mansions’ of Anren offered a means of generating income to develop the museum. The government promised Jianchuan 3000 mu of land (about 200 hectares), and he bought up fourteen buildings occupied by the army. Following the State Council’s 2005 decision on nonstate capital intervention in cultural industries, the museum took off under the management of the joint venture Jianchuan Company, with significant though minority investment from the official Chengdu daily newspaper. According to the museum guidebook, lakes with recreational boats, hotels and restaurants, a vegetable garden and parks offer visitors a comprehensive experience of ‘viewing artifacts at leisure, thus appeasing both mind and body’. History, memory and heritage intersect in different ways in the objects, sites, practices, narratives and performances articulated in the displays of the Jianchuan Museum. There is a clear difference between Fan Jianchuan’s sense of individual responsibility in wanting to remember his father and the greater emphasis his museum gives to collective representations. Indeed, Fan’s insistence on claiming the museum as personal testimony—despite the collective memories it hails—is present in his minute attention to every detail of the museum, from the items and spaces of display to his authoring of each interpretive text and label. The figure of the father looms large in the museum, which, as Fan told us, was inspired by his desire to honor his father through finding out the truth about his life. Moreover, his search for moral redress for the wrongs done to his father recently took on a new dimension in his decision to bequeath his museum to the nation either on his death or in the event of not being able to sustain it.13 As part of the nation’s
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 289 heritage, his museum would effectively grant national recognition both to his father and the individual and collective histories the museum invokes. In this light, the commemorative impulse of the Jianchuan museum cluster can be seen as a commitment to going back to the past as the condition of cultural transmission, cemented by an almost ‘traditional’ sense of a son’s filial responsibility to his ancestors. Though very distinctive in the contents, scale and orientation of their heritage initiatives, the other two projects of our study demonstrate a similar commitment to honoring their pasts through their filial attachment to place and cultural practice. Their heritage projects are structured emotionally and in gendered terms through the relationships and dependencies with which they interact. The living have an obligation not to forget the dead, and fulfillment of this obligation is the condition of granting retrospective justice as well as protecting the moral well-being of the living, now and in the future. Here, remembering and forgetting are not Freudian, in the sense that they concern the notion of repressed memory of trauma as a source of disorder and insecurity. Rather, they invoke a sense of moral responsibility to the past to protect present and future. One last comment concerns the interactions between official, entrepreneurial and local civil interests. The ‘private’ character of our case studies involves a fluidity of negotiation and investment between diverse state, political, economic, social and cultural/ethnic interests. The key individuals involved all draw on powerful political as well as entrepreneurial connections to support their ventures. Their existence depends in significant measure on official authorization; their sustainability depends in large part on their capacity to generate income through commercial tourism. Fan Jianchuan’s museum cluster in particular exemplifies an accommodation of state and private entrepreneurial interests to the advantage and, sometimes, disadvantage of both. The provincial government’s financial and political support of the museum is far from stable and is vulnerable to political demands from the central level. The museum has, from time to time, been vilified as the mouthpiece of the China’s Nationalist Party (Guomindang), which retreated to Taiwan after being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party during China’s 1949 civil war, and, until very recently, was roundly excoriated in mainland historiography of twentieth-century China.14 The museum was denied authorization to use ‘Cultural Revolution’ as the title for its ‘Red Era’ exhibition halls, and, as we noted above, Fan’s plans to open an exhibition on the Great Famine appears to have been thwarted by government opposition. At the same time, the museum is home to the local government’s own earthquake museum, and the provincial government continues to support it through the Jianchuan Company, motivated, according to Nancy Xiong, the Sichuan Daily’s key representative in the company, by its fundamental sympathy with Fan Jianchuan’s historical narrative. The museum thus emerges as the vulnerable mouthpiece of a provincial government constrained by the center. While this may suggest that the future
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of the museum depends in part at least on the presence of an enlightened local government, it also erodes the commonly held notion of an opposition of interests between the local and private (subversive and transgressive) on the one hand and the official party-state on the other. By the same token, it contests the binary terms frequently used in international reporting on China’s heritage industry as the aggressive commodification of the past by a state unconcerned with the cultural and historical sensibilities of local populations. Our preliminary research into ‘alternative’ heritage initiatives in China’s southwest has only scratched the surface of the politics of entrepreneurial and governmental involvement in ‘private’ projects, but this is enough to indicate a considerable flexibility of interaction between different official and unofficial stakeholders. Seen as projects that in their different ways contest dominant narratives of heritage and history, our cases offer important insights into how the local state apparatus is involved in fusing a new relationship between collective memory, history and transmission in contestation of its own claims. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS Heritage policy and practice in China are overwhelmingly driven by developmental and political considerations, and new museums are becoming a major symbol of metropolitan status. China’s interpretation of UNESCO heritage policy has led to the widespread implementation of heritage projects as key components of local strategies of development, changing the social and economic life of local communities. At the same time, the tensions and conflicts such projects have given rise to have also spawned alternative initiatives oriented to preserving cultural pasts in forms that sustain locally embedded knowledge. The arguments and interpretations we have put forward here suggest a conceptualization of heritage not first and foremost as part of a modernizing vision to legitimize national authority through a bowdlerization of an authentic past. Seen from the bottom up, our case studies make no claims to the universal, atemporal value of their objects and sites. Rather, they permit an apprehension of heritage as a materialized ontology in which object, place and practice make a direct appeal to their audiences as the metaphorical voices of individual and collective memories and histories. As ethical projects inspired by individuals’ commitments to community, they look to the past as the foundation of their communities’ futures. The temporal correspondence between the emergence of these projects and the national emphasis linking heritage tourism to development is not coincidental. They are, in this sense, a product of the relative economic and cultural fluidity of China’s market era. However, as we have tried to demonstrate, the driving force behind these projects lies in emotional and ethical commitments to family and community, the materialized expression of which has been facilitated by—but not created by—market opportunity. The dependence of these projects on the market may well determine their
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Reconceptualizing Heritage in China 291 fate, but in the meantime they are testimony to powerful and creative interests in recuperating marginalized memories and histories for the well-being of future generations. These brief accounts of recent ‘private’ heritage initiatives in China’s southwest reveal a radically different museology than that typified in international ‘heritage for development’ initiatives. As China’s prominence as a major force in international development and infrastructure projects, not least in sub-Saharan Africa, significantly destabilizes many assumptions that underpin contemporary development practice and historical relations between ‘donors’ and ‘recipients’, so does its domestic application of heritage policy suggest departures from dominant Western-centered principles linking heritage and development. If the Chinese government’s support for UNESCO betrays certain ambiguities, as we have argued above, these play out with diverse effects in different local heritage and museum initiatives. Central and regional policy may be dominated by developmental concerns, but these are mediated by principles of conservation that derive from historical practice and long-embedded notions of civilizational authority. Obliged to negotiate with state agencies in their local projects, private heritage concerns are similarly engaged in pursuing their own distinctive approaches to combining heritage and development commitments.
NOTES 1. The descriptions of the projects supported by the World Bank in this report suggest that the overwhelming emphasis is to maximize the economic benefits of heritage by harnessing ‘traditional knowledge for smart growth and energy conservation’ and to strengthen the integration of cultural heritage conservation, tourism development and the creative industries. 2. In China this includes Kunqu opera and Guqin music, Uiyghur and Mongolian musical traditions, printing techniques and ethnic rituals (see www. unesco.org/culture/ich). 3. Reported in the China Daily, July 7, 2011. 4. Reported in the China Daily, July 7, 2011. An interview conducted by the authors in June 2012 with Liu Zhaohui, a Zhejiang University–based anthropologist and specialist on heritage in China and who has been actively involved in provincial-level applications for UNESCO intangible cultural heritage recognition, put this figure at 1.4 million. 5. Personal communication in an interview with Liu Zhaohui. Professor Liu made this comment with particular reference to a fishing village in Ningbo, where the government returned control over local festive activities to locals in 2010 following local antipathy to the inefficacy of government management of local ritual. Liu also pointed out, however, that such ‘withdrawal’ of direct supervision refers to activities that pose no perceived threat to official authority. 6. One indication of this from the early years of China’s ‘opening up’ policy was the Dengist government’s ‘rehabilitation’ of missionary contributions to archaeology and museum building in Sichuan (see Kyong-McClain 2009: 213–214). 7. In 2005, the Ministry of Land and Resources recorded 87,000 protests related to land grabs (Hsing 2012: 17). The Tsinghua sociology professor Sun Liping estimated 180,000 instances of mass protest in 2010 (quoted in Freeman 2010).
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8. A less spectacular example is of a Buddhist shrine in a small Laotian village, where villagers have actively resisted professional efforts at restoration of the original and have preferred a more spiritual form of renewal through adding new adornments (Karlstrom 2009). 9. Our initial research in the three sites took place in 2010 as part of an international network on Cultural Heritage in China: Changing Trajectories, Changing Tasks, funded by the EU-China Co-reach program. A subsequent three-year ethnographically based research project focusing on the same three sites began in September 2013, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. We gratefully acknowledge the EU-China Co-reach program and the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support. 10. Personal interview with Fan Jianchuan, July 2010. 11. For an analysis of the personal history of the founder-curator and the economic and political processes of the birth of the Jianchuan museum, see Xiong (2004). 12. Personal interview with Fan Jianchuan, July 2010. 13. Personal interview with Fan Jianchuan, July 2010. 14. One of the museum’s installations, the Group Sculpture of Heroes of China Square, features larger-than-life-size bronze sculptures of communist heroes standing shoulder to shoulder with nationalist and ‘bandit’ heroes on a giant map of the areas where they fought during the anti-Japanese war (1931–1945).
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