The field of heritage studies has long been dominated by cases from Europe and, somewhat less so, North America and parts of the Middle East. Over the past couple of decades, however, there has been a significant shift in the heritage industry's field of gravity, as East Asia has emerged as a key region of heritage activity, development and debate. In particular, China has become a significant player in the World Heritage game on a global scale, while domestically the idea of heritage, and its economic power, has come to shape local development, tourism and cultural change in fundamental ways. While the heritage studies field was for some time slow to respond to the growing importance of China, a number of monographs and edited collections have recently been published, bringing some overdue geographical balance to the field.

In Chinese Heritage in the Making, editors Christina Maags and Marina Svensson seek to focus on two ways in which the study of heritage in China helps us reconsider some key issues in heritage studies. In doing so, they also help demonstrate the importance of heritage as an analytical and empirical lens through which to understand contemporary Chinese society, culture and politics. First, the editors seek to provide a corrective to the “authorized heritage discourse” (AHD), a key concept in the field which has been criticized for missing the nation-state as a key actor in shaping heritage discourse. The AHD, they argue, is shaped not so much by global institutions as by countries with their own specific heritage discourse and agenda. East Asian states (China, Japan, South Korea) have been instrumental in the emergence of a somewhat “non-Western” AHD based on “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH). Understanding heritage in China (and in particular understanding how heritage is deployed not only as a revenue-generating strategy but as a tool for governing) requires, then, analytically foregrounding the Chinese AHD and appreciating its departures from global heritage discourse.

Second, Maags and Svensson seek to demonstrate, through the case studies offered in this collection, that individuals and local communities negotiate with, appropriate and challenge the Chinese AHD. Much of the work to date on heritage in China, not surprisingly, has focused on heritage as a resource in the reproduction of state power at various scales. The editors of this volume argue instead that the heritage turn (or “heritage fever”) in China has opened up spaces for contests and negotiations over national and local history, that new actors have become involved, and that there's a significant amount of “heritage from below” going on in China.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, on contested histories, focuses on the rehabilitation of sites previously neglected, ignored or marked as politically incorrect by the Chinese Party-state. Case studies include: Susette Cooke's chapter on the Xining residence of anti-communist Hui warlord Ma Bufeng as a space that challenges the state's narrative of multi-national unity; Hong Jiang's chapter on the revival of Tianjin's Italian concession, in which a space of past humiliation is turned into a branded “exotic” culture zone for leisure/tourist consumption; and Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan's chapter on the restoration of Beijing's drum tower neighbourhood, exploring the tensions between the needs of local inhabitants, the local government's need for revenue, and the preservationist need to maintain the historical integrity of the neighborhood despite the wishes of the other two groups.

The second section focuses on new stakeholders and actors who are appropriating the Chinese AHD, and the new conflicts that emerge as a result. Case studies include: Maags's chapter on the impacts of ICH transmitter designations among local communities of cultural producers; Selina Chan's chapter on the Hong Kong Hungry Ghosts Festival as a resource for local identity construction; Tami Blumenfield's study of Moso weavers in Yunnan, where the designation of ICH transmitters has created new social stratifications even as ICH has become a meaningful local discourse spurring a new heritage mindset; and Sonja Laukkanen's study of heritage and authenticity in north-western Yunnan, exploring how authenticity is part of the Chinese AHD, and how it is negotiated and contested by locals.

The third section explores new debates over heritage in China, focusing in particular on new arenas for debate that have opened up on (social) media platforms such as Weixin / WeChat. Chapters include: Jinze Cui's study of Datong's heritagization under Geng Yanbo and how it was debated in traditional and new media platforms; Lui Tam's chapter on the debate over Zhizhu Temple's commercialization and privatization in Beijing; and Svensson's chapter on affective online engagement with heritage in the case of Taishun's covered bridges network.

On the whole, the case studies remain focused on the theme of local appropriation of AHD, “bottom-up” heritage, and the political ramifications of these aspects of heritage development in China. They effectively demonstrate how paying attention to heritage offers a valuable perspective on political contests and social tensions at the local scale in China. The editors have done a good job keeping the arguments on track and cross referencing the chapters, so that the book holds together well when read cover to cover (even though this is rarely how we read edited collections anymore). The contributors consist of social science and area studies specialists, along with heritage practitioners from Europe, China, Australia and the US. They also range from PhD candidates to established professors; it's a nice mix of disciplines, geographies and generations.

If there's a complaint to be made, it is simply that I was not entirely persuaded by the argument that heritage has opened up a new space for bottom-up agency in China, even though I appreciate the editors’ project of recovering local agency in the Chinese AHD. But the local spaces of contestation opened up by China's heritage turn are not new by any means; local agency has always been there, and China's narratives of national history (or national identity, to put it more broadly) have always had to compete with local heterodoxies that claim to be orthodoxies. If anything, the Chinese AHD has simply given the state more tools for constraining those local heterodoxies than it had before heritage was a discourse in China at all. Heritage is, then, just the latest in a long line of official discourses that locals have had to negotiate, contest and fit themselves into. It is perhaps not so much that heritage has created a new space for bottom-up debates over national identity, but rather that heritage is now the dominant discourse through which these bottom-up debates are being articulated, replacing previous discourses such as class conflict, modernization or anti-imperialism. Still, I enjoyed having this critical dialogue with the material as I read the case studies, and that itself is the sure sign of a successful collection.