Redeeming the Chinese modernity? Zen Buddhism, culture-led development and local governance in Xinxing County, China

Abstract

This article explores culture-led urban development in Xinxing County, Guangdong Province. Arguing for the relevance of cultural governance to the study of culture-led development in China, it heeds to the specific cultural knowledge and discourses that frame policy, and thinks critically on the creation of a unitary, all-encompassing idea of culture, which many culture-led development projects fall prey to. Empirically, this article presents a study of the Ecological Tourism Industrial Park of the Sixth Patriarch’s Hometown, a high-end leisure and recreation complex. It first sketches the ways in which Zen is re-packaged as a redeeming force that cures the alienating effects of modernisation. It moves to an analysis of the production of culturally encoded consumption spaces envisioned by the Plan of the Ecological Tourism Industrial Park of the Sixth Patriarch’s Hometown. Finally, this article reflects on how the Ecological Tourism Industrial Park of the Sixth Patriarch’s Hometown imposes a dominant, unitary conception of local culture, excluding pre-established practices and routines that connect local people and Zen in lived and habitual ways, yet are devalued by the notion of Zen as high-end symbolic goods.