This edited volume focuses on heritage discourse and practice in China today as it has evolved from the ‘heritage turn’ that can be dated to the 1990s (Madsen 2014; Denton 2014). Using a variety of disciplinary approaches to a broad range of case studies, the contributors to this volume show how particular versions of the past are selected, (re)invented, disseminated and consumed for contemporary purposes. These studies explore how the Chinese state utilises heritage not only for tourism, entertainment, educational and commercial purposes, but also as part of broader political strategies on both the national and international stage. Together, they argue that the Chinese state employs modes of heritage governance to construct new modernities/identities in support of both its political legitimacy and its claim to status as an international superpower.

Both before and after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, views of cultural heritage changed dramatically, from preservation to targeted destruction to reconstruction. Although the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is well-known for violent attacks on people, places, and things associated with the ‘feudal’ past, in fact much earlier in the twentieth century, especially during the May Fourth Movement (1919), aspects of China's cultural heritage were critiqued and rejected as a source of political weakness in the modern era (Ip, Hon & Lee 2003). During the first 30 years of the People's Republic, while the pre-revolutionary past was for the most part vilified, revolutionary events, people, and places were celebrated with the building of the Yan’an Museum of Revolution in 1950, for example, although ‘Red Tourism’ to sites of revolutionary history did not become a phenomenon until the 1990s (Wang 2012; Denton 2014: 214-242). The prerevolutionary past, however, drew positive attention from policymakers in the 1980s, when they began to see China's cultural heritage primarily as an asset to be managed and utilised in the interests of the nation. State support and regulation of cultural heritage consequently became a prominent aspect of governance. Since the 1990s, however, in tandem with efforts to practice heritage conservation, both urban development and massive public works projects such as the Three Gorges Dam have frequently derailed the protection of cultural heritage sites (Demattè 2012).