Helen Rees (UCLA) will deliver a lecture titled 'Intangible Culturel Heritage Preservation in China Today: Theory, State Policy, and Practice', sponsored by the Asian Studies Center and the Music Department.

This presentation begins by addressing the reasons underlying China's rather sudden enthusiasm for Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), together with the top-down policies implemented to encourage preservation and development in socially desirable ways. It then moves on to three fieldwork-based case-studies that document what is actually happening on the ground. The most renowned and elite tradition among the three is that of the seven-string zither qin (guqin), long the instrument of the literati, which has seen a spectacular flowering of interest since its naming in 2003 as a UNESCO 'Masterpiece.' The other two case-studies, of Han village and small-town ritual music, and of performance traditions among the Naxi ethnic minority in Yunnan Province, lie further outside the cultural mainstream and have a more complex relationship with official ICH initiatives. I conclude by considering where China's very young ICH movement is headed in the next decade, and how it may be compared and contrasted with the more mature situations in South Korea and Japan.