Yujie Zhu

• PhD
• Associate Professor at Australian National University

The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantations and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed the whole way by tourists, who have bought tickets for the privilege. The traditional wedding ceremonies are performed for the ethnic tourism industry...

As one of the world's fastest growing industries, heritage tourism is surrounded by political and ethical issues. This research explores the social and political effects and implications of heritage tourism through several pertinent topics. It examines the hegemonic power of heritage tourism and its consequences, the spectre of nationalism and colo...

Heritage and Religion in East Asia examines how religious heritage, in a mobile way, plays across national boundaries in East Asia and, in doing so, the book provides new theoretical insights into the articulation of heritage and religion. Drawing on primary, comparative research carried out in four East Asian countries, much of which was undertak...

Heritage and sites of memory play a fundamental part in the way national narratives are formed and articulated, both internally for the citizens of a state and for the people and their governments in other states. This special issue focuses on the latter, extra-territorial role of heritage and sites of memory, using examples from the East Asian reg...

Cultural institutions are increasingly recognised as key actors in global memory politics, particularly in efforts to address historical injustice through education, commemoration, and care. This paper examines how a war history museum in China – the Chinese ‘Comfort Women’ History Museum at Shanghai Normal University – curates histories of militar...

The global rise of heritage tourism has intensified struggles over the ownership, meaning, and spatial governance of religious sites, yet the contested interplay of ideology, power, and sacred space remains understudied. This article addresses this gap through a longitudinal analysis of China’s Famen Temple, where two decades of state‑led tourism d...

Since the 1970s, heritage discourse has increasingly embraced cultural diversity, culminating in frameworks like UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). Promoted as a shift toward community-based and democratic heritage practices, ICH recognition often masks deeper tensions. Despite good intentions, such fra...

Although claims to sacredness are often linked to the power of a distant past, the work of making places sacred is creative, novel, renewable, and reversible. This Element highlights how sacred space is newly made. It is often associated with blood, death, and geographic anomalies, yet no single feature determines sacred associations. People make s...

This research underscores the critical role of museums in interpreting difficult heritage and fostering public reflection. By examining visitor comment books at the Chinese Comfort Women Historical Museum in Shanghai, this study analyses visitor perceptions and responses to the difficult history associated with war and historical atrocities. While...

This paper explores the emergence of digital nationalism in China by examining the mini-series "Escape from the British Museum" and its cultural significance. The series reflects a growing interest, especially among Chinese youth, in cultural heritage as part of a larger nationalistic movement. This movement is fueled by state-endorsed heritage pro...

This paper explores the intricate interactions between heritage and religion in modern China, as well as the broader social and political implications of these interactions in relation to national heritage policies and local developmental practices. By conducting a longitudinal analysis of the social history of Baosheng Temple, this research traces...

Mapping the future trajectory of critical heritage studies, this paper provides a non-Anglophone perspective on the concept of 'critical' within the contemporary framework of critical heritage studies in China. It emphasises that scholarship from non-Anglophone regions should not be marginalised as a mere footnote, stereotypically portrayed as 'the...

This book employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary China, it explores the role of practices and material forms of the past in shaping social transformation through knowledge production and transmission. The art of collecting, reproducing, and reinterpreting the past has been an endu...

This paper examines "locality" as a research method in heritage studies. It challenges the notion of locality as a fixed and comfortable space, presenting it instead as a dynamic scale shaped by processes of localisation and relocalisation.

In memory studies, museums and memorials have been actively employed in constructing and reinterpreting the social memories of nation-states and subgroups within national populations. As such, scholarly debates have often focused on the roles of social and political elites in creating national remembrance. This article provides an alternative theor...

"Advancing Critical Heritage Studies: the Next 10 Years" focuses on the evolution of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) since 2012, as well as the broader development and challenges within critical heritage studies. This collection of short articles diverges from typical academic discourse by providing insights into the discussions...

This article explores the rise of honeymoon tourism in China, a modern phenomenon inspired by Western influences that amalgamates wedding celebrations and tourism. By examining the sociocultural changes associated with honeymoon tourism across the past four decades, this study explores the motivations behind this tourism and its implications for Ch...

Digital technology alone cannot replace the role of human interaction in fostering critical thinking and facilitating dialogue. While digital platforms can provide access to vast amounts of information and immersive experiences, it is through active engagement and participation that future generations can fully develop the capacity for independent...

Performance has been debated extensively in the humanities and social sciences, especially since the 1940s and 1950s when it was associated with the early use of the concept of “play” (Huizinga 1955). In the following decades, performance has become an extremely popular term used to indicate a number of very different activities, including linguist...

Diaspora tourism has become a significant form of transnational mobility that underlies many issues in the field of tourism and migration studies. Despite a considerable body of research that focuses on tourism motivations of home return and its social functions in collective identities and meaning-making, the political roles of diaspora tourism in...

This article explores the use of the UNESCO Memory of the World programme in claims for recognition of atrocities, focusing on two recent nominations: Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’. We argue that amid domestic and international contestation of memories and historical accounts, cultural programmes, such as the Memor...

This chapter offers a novel contribution to the discussion on how heritage interpretation can contribute to public education. It examines hegemonic heritage interpretation and its consequences, the various goals of heritage interpretation and the opportunities to develop it as a form of public education. I address a range of approaches with the fra...

Since the beginning of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed everyday life around the globe into a ‘new normal’, with lockdowns, travel restrictions and the cancellation of mass gatherings. Stay-at-home orders have dramatically changed the way people live and work, with a particularly significant impact on cultural practitioners and folk arti...

This is a call for papers for a new edited volume examining the relationships between heritage and peace-making.

Despite a considerable body of research focusing on the preservation and promotion of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), the actual impact of ICH on shaping the cultural life of local communities needs further acknowledgement. Since 2004, China has rapidly engaged with ICH and the associated practices stipulated by UNESCO. Based on a critical anal...

This paper examines the processes of difficult heritage interpretation at the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre to explore its political implications over the past 30 years. Housing over 200,000 artefacts relating to the Nanjing Massacre, the Memorial Hall has become a key site for patriotic education in China. The changing interpretation of th...

This paper explores the impacts of heritage-led urban redevelopment on local communities and the associated consequences of gentrification. The instrumental role of cultural heritage in urban governance presents an underdeveloped research field on gentrification. Especially in fast-developing countries like China, redevelopment is often associated...

What is heritage ? This is the most fundamental but difficult question to be answered in heritage studies. It has been addressed many times, but singular definitions always seem to come up short. This book contributes to understandings of heritage as a multifarious construct. It sees it not as something defined by material objects, but as a cultura...

Based on a critical analysis of the ethnic-religious practices at two Chinese minority areas that have been severely affected by earthquakes, this chapter examines the cultural, social and political impacts of intangible cultural heritage on post-disaster recovery of ethnic communities and their religious practices. The integration of language deri...

This paper explores the challenges of heritage and tourism studies in China. Current scholarship is often conceived from Western sociological and anthropological concepts that might lead to a generalization or misrecognition of the complexities involved within Chinese historical, social and political context. The question of how to mitigate these g...

This book investigates the interactions between heritage and religion from different East Asian countries. Specifically, we examine not only the issues involved in the heritagisation of religion, but also the effects and consequences of ‘religionisation’ of heritage. In detail, we ask the following questions: what role does heritage and religion pl...

The recent development of heritage industries and national heritage promotions in non-Western countries opens a new space for international cooperation and competition in ways that directly link to the power-political relations between states. What motivates these countries to accelerate their efforts to promote their cultural heritage internationa...

Since the early twentieth century, heritage, museums and memorials have played active roles in constructing and reinterpreting the social memories of nation-states and sub-groups within the national population. In this paper, I examine how modern China remembers its remote and recent past through official heritage/memory devices. What follows is a...

This chapter offers a close look at the influence of cultural heritage on religion and religious practices. What is actually being revived and what is being invented? How does this development affect religious spaces and the perception of religion in the public realm? Does heritage serve as a new tool for the state to control and regulate religious...

In Chapter Five, the local government's strategy to raise awareness and foster ICH safeguarding, in contrast, has resulted in the establishment of ICH museum exhibitions and stalls for the progressive transmission and display of living heritage. Here, heritage values have been used to legitimize the protection of traditional cultural practices, as...

Analysing the redevelopment of several heritage sites in Xi’an, this chapter illustrates how the heritage-led urban renewal has impacted the daily life of local communities and how different social groups assert their meaning and sense of place as a response to the rapid change of urban landscape and official regulations. This chapter argues that l...

This Chapter demonstrates how ethnic heritage, in its tangible and intangible forms, has been used to legitimize the governance of ethnic minority groups. The heritage-making process has paved the way to transforming Lijiang into a beautiful and exotic imaginary for tourism consumption. Although heritage governance in Lijiang – as elsewhere in Chin...

Chapter Two discusses how the Chinese understanding and treatment of the past has changed over time, depicting the development from imperial times to Mao-era China. In doing so, the chapter pays particular attention to the cultural history of “heritage” over the last century. It finds that Chinese treatment of the past has been and continues to be...

Chapter Three adds political and social context by demonstrating the role of discourses and institutions within heritage-making processes, mainly focusing on the Reform and Opening Period (post-1978). As discourses shape and are disseminated by institutions, we pay attention to the interaction between institutional and discursive developments. In t...

The interaction between state and society in urban Chinese heritage practices can be usefully examined through the insights of post-political scholarship, which draws attention to the lack of dissent between the state and civil society in Europe and America. With the shift to an Asian context, however, the concept of civil society warrants further...

This chapter examines in detail the case of China to illustrate how politics of scale contribute to heritage studies as a critical approach. Examining the production, governance, practice and consumption of cultural heritage in China, I will address the following perspectives of scalar effects on cultural heritage: 1) how scale is used by cultural...

Critical Heritage Studies is a new and fast-growing interdisciplinary field of study seeking to explore power relations involved in the production and meaning-making of cultural heritage. Politics of Scale offers a global, multi-and interdisciplinary point of view to the scaled nature of heritage, and provides a theoretical discussion on scale as a...

This article examines new practices of mobility that are situated in-between tourism and domestic migration. The modern consumer society allows urban middle class in China to move around the country in search of alternative lifestyles and employment. Illustrating the step-by-step transformation where initial tourism leads to relocation, dwelling an...

The nexus between heritage and religion has been experienced in many similar ways in the different systems and societies in Mainland China. For instance, both categories, "heritage" and "religion" originally emerged from Europe and were popularised in Japan before moving through to China. Both were professionally translated and formed a discursive...

This article examines new practices of mobility that are situated in-between tourism and domestic migration. The modern consumer society allows urban middle class in China to move around the country in search of alternative lifestyles and employment. Illustrating the step-by-step transformation where initial tourism leads to relocation, dwelling an...

Anthropology in China, like in other countries, such as Brazil and India, has been strongly influenced by the hegemonic power of the knowledge system driven by the domination of English and the world institutional hierarchy. Over the last few decades, scholars from many countries (especially “Third World” countries, such as Brazil and some countrie...

The recent urban development in Xi’an illustrates how local authorities are rebuilding an imagined and ancient capital of China which is tied to the remote Tang dynasty, a symbol of the glorious Chinese civilization. Based on instrumental uses of the past, the municipal government has implemented heritage plans to create an aesthetically pleasing a...

Since the UNESCO World Heritage Convention was ratified by China in 1985, the country has had forty-seven of its national sites inscribed as World Heritage. The ratification of the World Heritage Convention expresses the country’s efforts to build up its national identity and pursue economic development through the revitalization of cultural tradit...

Some argue that the globalization of heritage through tourism has led to a greater respect for (both material and living) culture than previously existed. However, the transformation of heritage properties into destinations and cultural expressions into performances is seldom straightforward. The interface between heritage and tourism is extremely...

In this study, I analyse how the Chinese Government imposes the concept of authenticity on local heritage practices in the process of heritage nomination, conservation and management. Rather than discussing authenticity as an objective criterion, I approach authentication as a social process in the heritage discourse that impacts on local cultural...

The research is focused on the changing roles of wedding rituals from early modern China to the contemporary modern world. What is the meaning of wedding ritual when it is transformed into the nature of other people, feudal superstition, cultural resources, the object of tourist' gaze and the heritage product? What is the role of wedding ritual in...

The development of heritage tourism in historical cities of China is regarded as a vital ingredient of urban regeneration by state and local governments. In Xi'an, the imperial capital of thirteen dynasties of Chinese history, the construction of a modern landscape catapulted the city from an isolated entity to the globalized world system. Guided b...

The examination of the value of authenticity, value, its interpretation, and consequences for heritage conservation practices in China have followed a trend that is both global and local. The existence of two translations of authenticity, “yuanzhenxing 原真性” and “zhenshixing 真實性,” has documented two understandings of what heritage conservation in Ch...

As one of the most popular tourism destinations of China, the World Heritage Site Old Town of Lijiang has attracted millions of tourists from around the world. The commoditization of local culture and its manifestation in the indigenous religion have emerged to satisfy the demand of its booming mass tourism. Taking three cultural performances as ca...

This paper explores how the dongba as the ritual practitioner perceives his authenticity during the marriage ceremony in the Naxi Wedding Courtyard in Lijiang, China. Through the dongba’s life story, the paper indicates that, the power of his making judgment is not entirely related to the toured objects, socially constructed reality or the existent...

The World Heritage Site, old town of Lijiang, is one of the most popular inbound tourism destinations of China, and has attracted millions of tourists in the context of a direct encounter with Chinese ethnic cultures. To satisfy demands of both the inbound and domestic tourism, the commoditization of local cultures and its manifestation in the indi...

Heritage governance plays an essential role in conservation, planning, as well as inscribing World Heritage. In China, the government maintains its regulatory legitimacy of heritage resources while pursuing the goals of national integration and economic growth. By examining the development of UNESCO World Heritage Site Mt. Emei, this chapter aims t...