The policies of economic reform and openness initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 drew China into the global economy, and with economic expansion came the need to reposition China in the world diplomatically, politically, and culturally. One result of this was a significant shift in how the Party and state viewed (and instrumentalised) the past. By the 1980s, the Communist Party had dramatically shifted its perspective on heritage, realising that ‘complete demolition of traditional fabric is a reckless way to drive the country forward’ (Chen & Thwaites 2013: 49). This shift in thinking and policy represented a significant turning point for heritage conservation and management in China, the unifying theme of this book. Beginning with the Introduction, we historicise this turning point, showing not only how ideas about heritage evolved in the context of a modernising China, pre- and post-revolutionary, but also how conceptions of heritage were part of the political and cultural fabric of premodern China. In addition to setting the methodological stage for the disciplinary lens of anthropology, Chapter 1 places its subject in the context of evolving discourses of traditional folk culture beginning in the early twentieth century. Chapters 2 and 3 trace the development of historic sites of Confucian cultural heritage as they began to be viewed as political resources and economic assets well before the heritage turn, contextualised in the unfolding political history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter 4 both historicises and globalises the Great Wall as a cultural heritage site, tracing visual and textual representations and usages of the Wall by foreigners as well as Chinese, past and present. Exploring the uses of history and nostalgia, Chapter 8 brings out the colonial past as an element used in the creation of contemporary cultural heritage in urban settings. Focusing on an entirely different topic of intangible heritage among non-Han minority peoples, Chapter 10 makes use of pre-twentieth century textual records to provide context for recent discourses on Yi culture and heritage.

In contrast to most recent work on heritage conservation and management in China, two chapters offer comparative perspectives that frame China's (re)invention, dissemination, and consumption of heritage in a global context.