Internationalizing heritage: UNESCO and China’s Longmen Grottoes

Abstract

As a new but influential international and local institution, UNESCO’s World Heritage List constitutes an important sector of the continued internationalization in China, which has yet to be factored in by scholars researching China’s reopening and integration into the global community. The notion of deregulation or “bringing down institutional barriers” in trade, politics, society, and education— disproportionately emphasized in most of the literature—is insufficient to understand important elements of internationalization such as national heritage. The ongoing internationalization of China’s key heritage sites originated primarily in international appreciation of their significance— and expeditions to explore them—as well as in the historical rediscovery of their own cultural treasures by Chinese at various periods in the past. Both globalization and internationalization result in a strengthened state on multilevels under certain circumstances. The synergistic process of collaboration, resistance, confrontation, and compromise that produces internationalization, as evidenced by UNESCO’s Longmen Grottoes, is not a simple zero-sum situation for the state party, community, ordinary citizens, and international actors involved. In the case of Luoyang, the tensions between universal internationalism, particular nationalism, and diverse localism were reconciled through developments managed by the state and its subordinate governments.