Introduction

This chapter is influenced by the work of critical heritage scholars who pay particular attention to issues of power and agency in heritage work and understand heritage as a ‘process’ rather than a particular object, place or practice, or, differently put, understand heritage as a verb and as something that both discursively and materially transforms places and practices (e.g., Harrison 2013; Harvey 2001; Smith 2006). The heritagisation process almost inevitably puts heritage on display and draws our attention to issues of performance, mediatisation, and entertainment/spectacle (Haldrup & Bærenholdt 2015). The chapter will illustrate the complex and changing rural heritagescape in China through a case study of Xinye village in Zhejiang province, which the author has regularly visited since 2003. The focus is on how the heritagisation process has involved and given rise to multiple stakeholders and actors with different social and cultural capital in and outside the village, and the different ways they engage with and make sense of heritage. The chapter addresses both top-down and bottom-up processes and interactions as well as changes over time. It pays particular attention to how the heritage is mediated and visualised on film, analysing a range of different TV productions, and how performance and entertainment has come to constitute an essential aspect of the heritagisation process.