Who Decides? The Authenticity of Traditional Rural Settlement Heritagization Practices

Urbanisation has risen in China since the late 1990s. To pursue brighter employment prospects, a growing number of the rural population migrated to cities. To cope with urbanisation problems and the long-term migration of the rural populations, the Chinese government has issued a series of documents and policies that focus on protecting traditional culture and the rural environment. These have attracted a considerable amount of attention in both scholarly and popular circles. With the protection and development of traditional villages garnering more significant attention in recent years, people consider villages' economic and cultural values alongside their rich histories. Meanwhile, the debate on authenticity between the West and China attracts the attention of critical heritage studies. The heritage practices in China are influenced by western authorised heritage discourse (AHD), especially its authenticity criterion. In the context of heritagization practices in rural Chinese settings, it should be noted that the notion of authenticity has been rarely discussed for processes of reuse of rural settlements as heritage resources. Therefore, this paper's main research questions are how various stakeholders construct authenticity in traditional villages in heritage practice, and how local communities negotiate and compromise with the authorities. This research is based on a case study of Zhangbi village, China, and adopts as its methodology textual analysis, observation and semi-structured interviewing. This paper argues that implementing the Western AHD's authenticity criteria has influenced Zhangbi village heritage practice in a negotiated way, in which rural settlements' heritage practices dominated by the expert understandings of the Western cultural heritage's authenticity criteria has developed. Residents' demand for authenticity is expressed by emphasising their emotional attachment to their ancestral dwelling and their attention to daily habits. Although they were disadvantaged in the process of tourism development and relocated to a new village nearby, their voices were heard and respected by tourism developers, not only to satisfy their own needs for authenticity but also to provide the corresponding ‘experiences' that enabled the authenticity of Zhangbi village to be subsumed into a commercial business model. Cooperation between the tourism developer and the local government has led the village committee to gradually lose the management and development rights of Zhangbi village over the last decade.

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