If we view heritage as “the contemporary use of the past,” then – almost by definition – heritage is a political concept. In that sense, almost any book dealing with heritage should also be dealing with heritage politics. And indeed, the scholarship on heritage politics is already large and growing rapidly. In China, heritage development has been booming for over a decade, and while there has been considerable work already on the politics of heritage in China, we still await a comprehensive treatment of the most significant political issues raised by heritage development in China. Simply by gathering a broad array of case studies and conceptual discussions of China's heritage politics, this volume goes some way in addressing this need. Cultural Heritage Politics in China takes as its point of departure the dominance of UNESCO's World Heritage listing in China's heritage development strategies, and the fact that this dominance has been underwritten by the Chinese leadership's enthusiastic embrace of heritage for both patriotic and economic development purposes. That this embrace has emerged after a revolutionary period of cultural and historical iconoclasm, followed by several decades of perhaps even more destructive modernization and urbanization, makes the story of China's heritage politics that much more compelling. This volume offers a snapshot of the current and diverse state of cultural heritage scholarship in China. While the case studies presented illustrate the expansive nature of this field, they also barely scratch the surface of this vast and burgeoning industry in contemporary China.

Cultural Heritage Politics in China is divided into five parts and an afterword. Its contributors are mostly anthropologists (excepting one geographer and one architect) based in the US, and various social scientists based in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia and Germany. They represent a range of experience, from doctoral candidates to well-established scholars. While the interdisciplinary and international nature of the contributors makes for considerable unevenness in the style and quality of chapters, it also presents a collective case for the need to understand China's heritage politics from a variety of analytical and theoretical approaches. This need for diverse approaches is also suggested by the editors' introduction, which provides an overview of the range of issues raised in the volume's case studies: the rise of China's UNESCO-inspired cultural heritage bureaucracy, the interweaving of heritage with development and modernization among ethnic minority groups, the rapid growth and varied regional and social effects of heritage tourism, and the booming heritage museum industry. The introduction is followed by Tang Zijun's essay on the contradictions inherent in China's property rights regime and the implications of these contradictions for heritage preservation. Tang's essay is brief and merely suggestive of the complex problems for heritage associated with the Chinese state's dual and conflicting roles as preservation regulator and property developer. While its placement in the volume suggests a framing role for the case studies that follow, I wish there had been more explicit connections drawn between Tang's essay and the rest of the volume. These connections are there for readers to deduce, but most of the chapters raise issues anticipated by Tang's essay, and these might have been explored more explicitly by each of the authors in turn.

Part two of the volume offers a series of reports reflecting on the political tensions associated with the rise of “World Heritage” in China. Margaret Swain explores the tensions between two different versions of cosmopolitanism in China (the Confucian “all under heaven” (tianxia) version and so-called “worldism” (shijie zhuyi)), and asks how this tension gets played out in Chinese attitudes toward heritage, and indeed, how different heritage sites themselves display these different cosmopolitanisms. Swain finds these differences to result from deliberate Chinese strategies of engagement with the world. Zhu Yujie and Li Na examine the decentralization of heritage regulation and development at Emei Mountain and find that this decentralization allows the local state to deploy heritage resources and ideals for the purely instrumental purposes of revenue generation. Wei Zhao offers a detailed critique of a similar case of local government's mismanagement of heritage resources in Zhejiang. Su Xiaobo discusses the conflicts over property ownership and enterprise between migrant newcomers and locals in Lijiang, Yunnan, and Heather Peters offers a round-up of her long-term experience as a UNESCO consultant in Lijiang, presenting an up-close account of the political challenges encountered in UNESCO's and China's efforts to manage the explosion of heritage tourism there since the late 1990s.

Part three focuses on heritage sites that have not (yet) been designated as World Heritage, including Jenny Chio's account of the competition among locals at Longji Terraced Fields in Guangxi, and Liu Tzu-kai's chapter on contrived constructions of “primitiveness” among Wa minority villages in Yunnan. Part four – focusing on museums – includes Curtis Ashton's fascinating chapter on the “fragmented authoritarianism” of China's museum industry, illustrated by the Beijing Folk Arts Museum's efforts to develop “Olympic” displays to please local district leaders during the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, and William Nitsky's detailed chapter on contested community engagement in Guizhou's “ecomuseums.” Part five, titled “Routes as Heritage,” contains chapters on the branding of the Tea Horse Road and pu'er tea (Gary Sigley), Tengchong's efforts to “box out” its rivals in its bid to become the gateway to the reopened Stilwell Road to Burma and India (Zhou Yongming), and the rise of maritime heritage in the context of China's “Zheng He” fever as well as efforts to assert sovereignty over the South China Sea (Jeff Adams). Finally, Stevan Harrell provides a thoughtful Afterword contextualizing China's heritage fever within broader processes of cultural change and modernization, while also considering the broader conundrum of heritage as preservation vs. heritage as development.

Overall, this is an extremely rich collection of varied and detailed case studies illustrating the often mind-boggling range of political issues raised by China's heritage boom. The volume is a rewarding read, despite the evident lack of attention to copy-editing displayed by Springer. Typos and minor mistakes abound, and there's a general lack of consistency in style from chapter to chapter. These are minor annoyances, however, that do not detract from the volume's strength in providing a useful set of case studies in China's heritage politics.