Heritage as Improvement

This article explores the display of cultural heritage as a contested project of governance and social ordering in rural China. It argues that heritage preservation and display are viewed by many Chinese scholars, officials, and villagers themselves as powerful tools of modernization and development; that cultural display implies a project of “improvement” and of building “quality” among the “backward” rural population; and that this view of heritage preservation emerges amid a complex and often contradictory mixture of global perspectives on heritage preservation, state traditions of cultural regulation, and local yearnings for modernity and improved standards of living. The article proposes an interpretation of heritage as an ongoing project of improvement, generating its own unforeseen political dynamics as it churns along. In short, cultural heritage display is treated here as a field of government and social regulation.