Heritage Arts and Governance: Hong Kong’s Cultural Policies of Cantonese Opera 1995-2023

Heritage conservation policies and programmes for creative industries are increasingly governed by the government.It is argued that this institutional process for heritagization is rooted in a cultural realm that forms our recognition of what makes heritage valuable, and it is argued that heritage performing art is developed in specific government interventions to resolve Baumol's cost discourse.This paper examines the recent developments in Hong Kong regarding how this institutional process of heritagization deployed in Cantonese Opera to react to the UNESCO paradigm, a global agency in heritage management.The "big money" taming strategies of public subsidy are investigated, and it is argued that the ongoing discourses in open spaces by virtue of religion, myth, and regional customs are sterilized in a mechanism, where the interchange of human value is uncoordinated for sustainable development.The paper concludes with a concern about the inadequacy of civil resistance, and infertility to comprehend the contemporary evolution of creative industries.