Contenu du sommaire : Cultural Values in the Making: Governing through Intangible Heritage

Can traditional cultural practices thrive if they are commercialised? Or should the state protect them from “the market”? This study investigates these questions by studying the marketisation of traditional handicrafts in the tourism sector of Nanjing municipality (Jiangsu Province, China). Building on Boltanski and Esquerre's (2020) work on the “enrichment economy,” I find that state-led marketisation efforts have simultaneously raised and distorted the value of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) commodities in China. Many ICH inheritors are stuck in the middle: although they benefit from enhanced recognition and valorisation of ICH products, they face difficulties in competing with “fake” and luxury ICH commodities. ICH commodities are thus characterised by an “in-between” status – between the enriched and the mass economy.

Oboo cairns are sacred monuments worshipped by minority peoples in Inner Mongolia. The inclusion of oboo worship on China's national list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006 has caused negotiations and innovations in different social and ritual strata of local societies. Going from provincial decision-making to the local interpretation of heritage classification, this article examines how the indigenous intelligentsia and ordinary people appropriate oboo to make them valuable and powerful sacred monuments.

Authenticity is a concept that is not seen in UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) discourse but is emphasised in Chinese ICH official discourse. An analysis of the origins, discourses, and practices of the notion of authenticity of ICH, as well as the difficulties generated from this concept, illustrates the creation of ICH in China, which mediates between local and international ideologies. This paper adopts historical and critical heritage discourse perspectives to examine cases in Yunnan Province, China, including the understandings, discourses, and practices of the idea of “authenticity” and related original ecology in regard to experts, officials, and ICH practitioners. Through the lens of authenticity, the paper illustrates the history of the complicated relationships between authenticity and ICH in the last 20 years, revealing the dynamism and difficulties in the integration of authenticity and ICH as an official discourse, and the possibilities and restrictions of reconceptualising authenticity in the current contexts of integrating culture and tourism, as well as the reform of cultural governance, in contemporary China.

From medieval times to the present, calligraphy has been theorised as a product of “spirit” rather than of the hand, and has b­een situated atop the Chinese aesthetic hierarchy. Recognising calligraphy as a key aspect of national identification, the People's Republic of China applied for its recognition to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Through the process of constructing calligraphy as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), a simplified calligraphic canon emerged, which epitomises the “correct spirit of tradition.” Building on art historical and anthropological questions of transmission and authentication of the classical tradition of calligraphy, this paper challenges this idealised conceptualisation by investigating how a contemporary Chinese ICH regime has worked to “entextualise” calligraphy into present social and political circumstances.

Xinfang, as a major participation channel in China, sets social stability as its most important objective. The way it seeks to balance the participation-institutionalisation dynamic is thus key to understanding its function. Drawing on detailed interviews and archival sources, this study clarifies the practice and rationale of the new and important online xinfang channel which has not, to date, been amply examined. By integrating offline communication methods with the new online format, it achieves a subtler form of participation through field diversion, standardised settlement, and balanced evaluation, and thus partly corrects the offline xinfang channel's heavy reliance on non-institutionalised tactics to maintain stability. However, as long as xinfang still operates at the intersection of law and politics, the question of how to balance citizens' desire for participation and an appropriate level of institutionalisation remains a noteworthy issue, since stability is only achieved when these two elements are in equilibrium.

This study examines the recent emergence of political consumerism in Hong Kong. Given its potential implications, we document the origin and maturation of this development and theoretically explain political consumerism from three perspectives: as a response to China's economic intervention, as a form of identity politics, and as a new form of political participation. Drawing on original data collected from a representative survey of the local population, supplemented by interviews with stakeholders from the pro-democracy economic circle, we found that people who opposed China-Hong Kong economic integration and expressed a strong local (as opposed to national) identity tended to support boycotting. People who engaged in political consumerism were active in both legal and radical protests, pointing to the complementary nature of these different forms of activism. Further, by adopting a mediation analysis, we find that support towards the Anti-extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement only partially mediate the effect of the factors on political consumerism, suggesting that they are distinct development despite their shared origins. This article provides a novel perspective on the political polarisation in Hong Kong among consumer markets.