Protecting the Weak

Protection of cultural heritage in Japan and China

Looking into the question of the protection of cultural heritage as part of efforts to protect the weak is particularly fruitful as it addresses many of the core issues of our project. Historically, the conceptualization of heritage as a valuable social good worthy of protection emerged as a result of modernization efforts in the context of a Social Darwinist agenda. It implies the idea that there is a threat that something will be lost unless a conscious effort to preserve it is made. Preservation thus becomes necessary when normal institutions and cultural practices no longer guarantee the survival of a site or practice (Svensson 2006).

Interestingly, the same logic of modernization from quite early on provided both the rationale and the instruments for protection. When, shortly after the Meiji-Reform, Japan strove to protect its “cultural heritage”, which, at this stage, was still conceptionalized as a “national treasure”, it explicitly reacted to foreign examples, which served as a blueprint for institutionalization (Failla 2004). Moreover, in contemporary Japan, the protection of cultural heritage is regarded as a symbol of a modern identity (Mizoguchi 2000). The situation has been more dramatic in China, when after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and with even more iconoclastic vigour during the Cultural Revolution, grandiose monuments, such as the city wall of Beijing, were razed – not only because they constituted remnants of a then despised past but even more because they hindered modernization (Barmé 2009).

Over the past three decades, however, the integration into global circulations and the spread of global tourism, have provided new opportunities to protect “authentic” buildings, objects and traditions thereby forming the cultural heritage (Breidenbach and Nyiri 2007, Timothy et al. 2009). In particular, the United  Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) world cultural heritage framework has offered multiple incentives andstrengthened the existing approaches for East Asian countries to have their own national cultural heritage sites and “masterpieces” of traditional culture listed (Cang 2007, Fiskesjö 2010).

Since 2003, when UNESCO, then headed by Japanese Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Vecco 2010), more than twenty Japanese and over thirty Chinese items have been added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Together with the Republic of Korea, East Asian countries thus top the ranks of nations participating in the global competition for having items listed in the UNESCO list, a fact which highlights the political, economic and social implications – as well as the symbolic resources made available for national, local, ethnic, religious etc., “identifictions” – of receiving official status as “weak” goods protected by international and domestic regulations. Comparing the processes of framing of (intangible) cultural heritage in Japan and China, mobilization among networks of the transnational, national and local actors involved, and institutionalization effects such as the 2011 promulgation of an Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of the People’s Republic, promises fruitful empirical results.