About Cultural Heritage

Cultural Heritage

Cultural Heritage (Chinese title: 文化遗产, Wenhua Yichan) is a Chinese-language bimonthly journal of cultural heritage studies published in Guangzhou by Sun Yat-sen University, where it is edited with the university's research base for intangible cultural heritage. It covers cultural heritage protection, intangible cultural heritage, folklore and heritage policy, and is a CSSCI source journal. Based at a university whose scholars helped to define Chinese intangible cultural heritage research — including work published from 2006 that became among the most cited in the field — the journal serves as a national forum for the study of how China identifies, protects and lives with its heritage.

Sun Yat-sen University and intangible heritage research

Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou is one of China's principal centres for folklore and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) studies. Bibliometric analyses of Chinese ICH research between 2003 and 2020 identify Sun Yat-sen University scholars among the field's core authors: Song Junhua, of the university's Chinese Academy of Intangible Cultural Heritage, is noted for distinctive insight into the productive protection and digitalisation of ICH, and his team's 2006 paper 'On the Characteristics of Intangible Cultural Heritage' achieved the highest citation count in that analysis, with 229 citations; Gao Xiaokang, also of Sun Yat-sen University, is likewise ranked among the field's leading authors for work on ICH history and aesthetics. The journal is edited with the university's research base for intangible cultural heritage, giving it direct access to this scholarly community. A journal housed in such a base is not merely about heritage studies; it is one of the instruments through which a leading research centre organises its field — setting agendas, publishing its own researchers alongside national contributors, and training scholarly attention on the questions its base was created to answer.

The field the journal serves

The journal's field was transformed by international and national policy in the 2000s. UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, and its ratification triggered a worldwide expansion of discussion about the nature and value of intangible heritage; China, which holds more UNESCO-listed intangible heritage elements than any other country, built an extensive national safeguarding system in response, with inventories at national, provincial, municipal and county levels and a legal framework crowned by the Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of 2011. In Chinese scholarship the concept of wenhua yichan (cultural heritage) itself has a history: scholars trace its negotiation with the older paradigm of wenwu (cultural relics) across the pre- and post-2000 periods, as Chinese heritage practice broadened from objects and sites to living practices, performances, crafts and rituals. Cultural Heritage publishes within this expanded field: its subject is not only monuments and artefacts but festivals, oral traditions, performing arts, craftsmanship and the communities that carry them.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal covers cultural heritage protection, intangible cultural heritage, folklore and heritage policy. Its articles address, among other topics: the theory of cultural heritage and its Chinese conceptual history; the identification, documentation and inventorying of intangible heritage; safeguarding practice, including the system of recognised inheritors; productive protection and the digitalisation of heritage — themes associated with its home research base; heritage and tourism, a heavily researched area in which the journal's field debates authenticity, commercialisation and sustainable development; folklore studies, including festival customs, oral history and village traditions; urban heritage, including the fate of historic neighbourhoods and 'urban villages' under rapid urbanisation — a theme visible in the journal's own published articles on Guangzhou; and heritage law and policy at national and local levels. Guangzhou and the Lingnan region provide a natural case-study base — Cantonese festivals, crafts and customs recur in its pages — but the journal's remit is national, and its contributors work on heritage across China.

Folklore and the study of living tradition

Folklore is one of the journal's named fields, and it links the journal to an older scholarly tradition at Sun Yat-sen University, where modern Chinese folklore studies has deep roots. The journal's folklore coverage treats living tradition as heritage in action: festival cycles such as the Qiqiao (Seven Sisters) festival in Guangzhou villages, cat-worship customs recorded by fieldworkers in Zhucun village, temple fairs, lineage customs and urban folk culture have all featured in research published in or associated with the journal's scholarly community. This fieldwork tradition matters methodologically. Heritage studies can become a discourse about lists, laws and management plans; the journal's folklore strand keeps attention on practitioners and communities — on what people actually do, sing, cook, build and celebrate, and on how those practices change under urbanisation and tourism. The presence of oral history and field investigation in its pages gives the journal a documentary function: it records traditions, some of them fragile, in scholarly form.

Heritage policy and protection practice

Heritage policy is the journal's third named field. China operates one of the world's largest heritage protection systems: a national register of intangible heritage items in successive batches, representative-inheritor recognition, cultural ecology protection zones, and heritage provisions in tourism, urban planning and rural development policy. The journal publishes analysis of how this system works in practice — how items are nominated and evaluated, how inheritors are supported, how protection funding is used, and where the system strains, as when commercial performance displaces community practice or when listing itself transforms what it lists. It also covers tangible heritage protection and the management of historic sites, and the relationship between heritage and law. Because its home university advises and evaluates heritage work in Guangdong and beyond, the journal's policy coverage is informed by direct professional experience, and its readership includes the officials and experts who administer the system it studies.

Standing as a CSSCI source journal

Cultural Heritage is a CSSCI source journal. Selection as a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index — the Nanjing University index, established in 2000, that covers roughly five hundred leading Chinese humanities and social sciences titles — marks it as a recognised leading journal in its subject area, and CSSCI status is a standard reference point in Chinese academic evaluation. For a specialist field like heritage studies, which sits across folklore, anthropology, history, law and management, a dedicated CSSCI title is significant: it gives scholars a high-standing outlet whose editors and reviewers share their subject, rather than requiring them to frame heritage research for generalist journals. The journal's standing is reinforced by its institutional base — a national-level research base for intangible cultural heritage at a major comprehensive university — and by the citation record of the scholarly community around it, which bibliometric studies place at the centre of Chinese ICH research.

Readership and authors

The journal is read by researchers in folklore, anthropology, heritage studies, history, tourism studies and cultural policy; by heritage administrators and museum and cultural-bureau professionals; and by postgraduate students entering the field. Its authors include Sun Yat-sen University scholars and contributors from universities, academies and heritage institutions across China. Case-study authors — fieldworkers documenting a festival, a craft or a historic district — publish alongside theorists and policy analysts, giving the journal a mixed scholarly and professional readership similar to that of heritage journals internationally. For readers outside China, the journal is encountered through citations in the growing English-language literature on Chinese heritage, where its articles serve as sources on Chinese concepts, policies and cases that are otherwise available only in Chinese.

Publication pattern

The journal is published bimonthly — six issues a year — in Chinese, in Guangzhou, by Sun Yat-sen University. Issues are distributed through China's academic journal channels and databases, where its articles are indexed and cited within the Chinese scholarly system, and are held by university and research libraries. Bimonthly frequency suits a field driven by both scholarship and policy: special themes can be assembled around new heritage lists, laws or debates, while regular issues carry field reports and case studies from across the country. The journal's run, read together with the wider Sun Yat-sen folklore and heritage literature, forms a substantial record of how Chinese heritage studies developed from a folklore-centred discipline into a policy-engaged field.

Significance

Cultural Heritage occupies a clear position in Chinese scholarly publishing: it is the specialist CSSCI journal for cultural heritage studies published from one of the field's leading research bases. Its combination of heritage protection, intangible cultural heritage, folklore and heritage policy mirrors the way the field itself is constituted in China — scholarly and administrative, documentary and theoretical at once. Published bimonthly from Guangzhou by Sun Yat-sen University and edited with the university's intangible cultural heritage research base, it gives Chinese heritage studies a dedicated national forum. WorldNM lists it as the key Chinese-language journal for researchers of China's heritage system, its folklore traditions and its safeguarding policies.