Cultural heritage and identity building in current China: Stateholder creativity and administrative legacy

The rhetoric on creativity tends to give the term itself a inherently positive connotation: creative is ‘good’, whatever the content and context it is associated to. On the other hand, nothing could appear more distant from creativity than the notion of heritage – something associated to history and past ‘facts’, according to a simplistic (positivist) view. The case of heritage discourse in China provides interesting elements in this regard, where the term creative is likely to lose some of its irresistible appeal, calling for a more problematic view. Indeed, China presents a unique case study for examining the relationship between creativity and heritage, particularly through the lens of government-driven ‘creation of the past’. While scholars like Hobsbawm et al. (1983) have explored the "invention of tradition" in general terms, and Duara (1965) has specifically addressed this concept in China, this chapter focuses on the deliberate discursive strategies adopted in China to shape heritage for constructing national identity. This is the definition of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ that has been put into the narrative to represent a long history, explicitly positioned as the longest in the world and seen as a continuous whole. That is, we seek to examine the emphasis on the Chinese civilization in the discourse about heritage and identity (von Falkenhausen, 1993; Bagley 1999; Yan, 2018). As part of the process of globalization and the use of an international lens (especially in terms of the role played by Unesco since 1972), the typical global language of heritage studies includes an emphasis on stakeholders (e.g., Taruvinga, 2023). However, China is different, despite the use of a similar vocabulary as if the world was changing in homogeneous ways (isomorphism, in institutional theory jargon: e.g., Di Maggio and Powell, 1983): more than stakeholders, what matters here is an issue of Stateholders (though the autocorrect of my word processor refuses to recognize such a neologism). The State plays a central role in defining identities and processes to deal with them (e.g., Shepherd, 2009; Tythacott, 2015). However, more than a dialectic between different articulations of the State and civil society – as it often occurs elsewhere (Beliakova, 2019; Kent, 2019) – here, in the specific, it is a negotiation between different levels of the State administration (the central administration versus provinces and towns). However, that the central State tries to play this role in policy formulation is one thing. To what extent policies get realized as intended is another issue: unanticipated consequences (Merton, 1936) could and do emerge (in China as anywhere). To some extent, this weakens the imposition of this (or any) top-down view, and not necessarily in relation to specific forms of political resistance during its “implementation”. Simply put, even with national identity-building policies, there is an issue of managing, of ‘getting things done’: and this is far from a linear process in China (as anywhere).