National Initiatives: The Case of China

China started preparing for ICH safeguarding legislation early in the 1990s and ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004. It has adopted a top-down approach of “dominant government leadership with social participation” for ICH safeguarding (Yi et al., 2021).

ICH safeguarding in China is led by the Department of Intangible Cultural Heritage under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism with the support from the China National Center for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage established under the Chinese National Academy of Arts. The Department of Intangible Cultural Heritage is responsible for setting policies and drafting laws and regulations for ICH safeguarding, as well as assessing and approving national representative ICH items and coordinating their safeguarding. The China National Center for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage is responsible the concrete works of safeguarding ICH, such as organising national ICH census, guiding the implementation of safeguarding plans, conducting research, as well as holding exchange, training, and promotional events. ICH offices and centres have been successively established at the provincial, municipal and county levels (Yang & Yang, 2020).

2011 marks a major milestone in China’s ICH safeguarding as the Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of the People’s Republic of China came into effect. The Law reaffirms the leadership role of the government in ICH safeguarding and sets out legal obligations for local governments to safeguard ICH. It stipulates a listing system of representative ICH items at the national, provincial, municipal and county levels, lays down the ICH bearers accrediting and disaccrediting mechanism, and specifies the kinds of supports that have to be provided to the bearers (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2011). There are now more than 1500 ICH items inscribed on the national representative list and the number of bearers of the national representative ICH items have reached over 3000. 34 ICH items from China have been inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (China Art Research Institute, 2022).

China has embraced a production-based approach for ICH-safeguarding, which encourages the integration of ICH safeguarding in the production, marketing, and sales of profitable cultural commodities (Xu, 2022). There are now 100 national model bases of production-based ICH-safeguarding, and they belong to three major types: traditional handicrafts bases, fine arts bases, and medicine bases. Seven National Cultural Ecosystem Conservation Areas have been designated to holistically protect ICH items together with the environment that they exist in.

 

 

Apart from actively promoting ICH during traditional festivals, China has established the "Cultural and Natural Heritage Day" (the second Saturday of June every year) to raise public awareness on ICH safeguarding through ICH events held in different parts of China. China is also actively promoting ICH in school curriculum. Funding allocated the safeguarding of ICH increases annually at the national, provincial, municipal and county levels (Yang & Yang, 2020).

 

 

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