Cultural heritage preservation in regional China: tourism, culture and the Shaxi Model

When the Chinese government embarked on a new period of 'opening up and reform' in the late 1970s, few people could have imagined the country's phenomenal rise in just a few decades to a contesting world power. The national project of comprehensive modernization, including industrialization, urbanization, and economic development that accompanied these reforms brought both unforeseen material prosperity and destruction. In recent decades, a re-orientation to the country's rich but vanishing cultural heritage engendered a new period of re-construction and 'making the old new'. This thesis explores these immense changes at the nexus of rural cultural revival and modernization.