By 2024, China has inscribed 59 World Heritage sites, the second-highest number globally, and 59 more on its Tentative List. Why has the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which in its early days advocated “anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism” and “smashing the old world” changed its tune and become eager to have China’s cultural relics and nature listed as World Heritage Sites?

In 1972, UNESCO adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage and established the World Heritage Committee. China acceded to the Convention in 1985, signalling its openness to the outside world, and began to apply for World Heritage status. From 1991 to 2021, China served several terms on the World Heritage Committee, becoming one of its longest-serving members. After the United States withdrew from UNESCO in 2017, China became the largest contributor of membership fees and also one of the largest recipients of support from the World Heritage Committee.

Since 2000, and particularly with the 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans for Cultural and Natural Heritage, the CCP has used economics, diplomacy and lobbying to influence the World Heritage Evaluation Committee. This strategy has led to a surge in China’s World Heritage nominations, surpassing countries such as Spain, Greece, Germany and France. The CCP has used these nominations to further its political goals by shaping the narrative of its history and promoting nationalism. The sites symbolise not only China’s ‘glorious past’, but also the power of the Chinese state today. Working with countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and Iran, the CCP competes for influence with North America and the European Union. It has worked with North Korea on joint bids for cultural sites such as the Goguryeo royal tombs and Routes Network of Chang’an-Tiashan Corridor of the Silk Road, further asserting China’s role in the history of the Silk Road. which the UNECOSOC and UNESCO have repeatedly endorsed in the Belt and Road Initiative. This is in line with the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative, which supports its ambition to expand its economic and strategic interests into Central Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe.

A significant number of cultural and natural properties around the world, including Taiwan and Kosovo, which are not currently members of the United Nations, are not inscribed on the World Heritage List even if they are considered to be of “outstanding universal value” according to the definition of World Heritage. Of the 196 states parties to the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 28 have no World Heritage properties listed.

“Outstanding Universal Value” may appear to be the same standard for all geographical areas. However, through economics and diplomacy, the CCP has included other interpretations of cultural and/or natural sites of outstanding universal value. The Jinggang Mountains and the northern part of the Wuyi Mountains, including the Luoxiao Mountains, are on China’s list of proposed World Heritage Sites, and since the early 1960s the CCP has listed many of the mountains in the region as national cultural relics, describing them as ‘patriotic education bases’ for its armed takeover from 1927 to 1934.  These cultural relics and sites are used to symbolise the party’s “correct” historical role and its “right” to rule, establish a cult of personality around Mao, censor its history of purging dissidents and overthrowing the Republic of China. At the same time, China’s application and listing of the sites on the World Heritage List has attracted large investments, and the CCP’s ideology has subtly influenced tourists, integrating tourism with the party state’s education and giving full play to the role of red tourism in the party history indoctrination.

Beijing’s current status as the city with the highest number of World Heritage Sites allows one to observe how the CCP claims legitimacy and authority over China.  The Zhoukoudian Peking Man site, a World Heritage Site, is also listed as one of the country’s first 100 “Patriotic Education Bases”. The CCP uses this to place the site within the framework of its interpretation that ‘Chinese civilisation has a long history and continuity’. In fact, the discovery and study of the Zhoukoudian Peking Man site was not patriotism, but scientific exploration that transcended nationalist ideology. Moreover, whether or not Peking Man is the ancestor of today’s Chinese people is still a controversial issue that needs further research. Take the Beijing Central Axis as another example. By pushing back the founding of Beijing to the Yuan Dynasty, the CCP’s history textbooks equate the Yuan Dynasty with the legitimacy of the Mongol Empire, linking the Ming and Qing imperial palaces, imperial gardens into a seemingly unbroken and continuous narrative. The CCP occupies the imperial city, including Zhongnanhai, and holds the cultural relics and sites so that the heritage supports its rule and dominates the historical narrative by claiming to protect the cultural relics; it dresses up the monuments with modern technological updates and gradually develops a monopoly on the interpretation of world heritage sites, highlighting and empowering the audience to feel the glorious past, forgetting the tyranny and man-made disasters, and erasing the memories related to the public interest. World Heritage becomes a political tool centred on the ancient reputation of imperial history, housed in museums and cultural and natural sites, transmitting the narrative of history and cultural continuity in terms of dynasties and empires, providing an ideology of hierarchy and subordination to the present, and disseminating and supporting the ideology of the party-state. Moreover, the CCP uses cultural relics to legitimize its rule by directly linking itself to China’s imperial past, promoting a narrative of political continuity. Through selective interpretation, the party highlights the grandeur of past dynasties while erasing controversial events such as the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen crackdown. These historical sites serve as tools for ideological control and reinforce authoritarian power, national unity, and the Stalinist idea that the CCP’s rule is part of a “historically inevitable progression”, hence creating the narrative of the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

The CCP’s interpretation of cultural heritage undermines the Convention for the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage’s goal of genuine protection of cultural objects and by controlling its definition of heritage, it attempts to expand economic and political hegemony and assert its legitimacy and power over the country.