Mr. LI Xinfeng
Executive Deputy Director-General, China National Center for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage
China has made a series of creative explorations and practices, and I will be glad to share with you our experience in the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage.
Firstly, we have established, according to China’s realities, a series of effective mechanisms for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. These creative practices in institutional building are systematic and manifold, which mainly include an inter-ministerial joint meeting mechanism; an expert committee; an investigation mechanism and a 4-level inventory system for representative items, namely, at state, province, prefecture-city and county levels. Most importantly we have established an evaluation and management mechanism for the national representative inventory of intangible cultural heritage.
These have provided the most basic and powerful institutional guarantee for China’s Intangible cultural heritage protection efforts.
Secondly, we have focused on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage from a holistic approach, vigorously promoting the construction of cultural ecology reserves. We have established twelve national cultural ecology experimental reserves.
Thirdly, we have given high priority to strengthening the rule of law on the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. The Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of the People's Republic of China, the most important law in the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage was enacted and came into force in 2011, which provides a fundamental guarantee for intangible cultural heritage protection under the rule of law.
Fourthly, we have actively explored and put into practice other approaches that have proved to be effective, such as salvage-prioritized, production-oriented and digitized methods as well as tax cut or exemption for some intangible cultural heritage products with a view to engaging various sectors, especially those well-established and culturally-influential enterprises in the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage.
Fifthly, we have paid close attention to the research on the basic theories of intangible cultural heritage and the discipline construction in this field.