Chinese power in the World Heritage Committee: From learning the game to shaping the rules

Abstract

Despite growing interest in China's use of heritage in its domestic and foreign policies, little is known about how its evolving power affects the multilateral core of the heritage regime. To tackle this gap, we apply Barnett and Duvall's four-power framework to China's role in the World Heritage Committee (WHC) and heritage issues in UNESCO since the early 2000s. To parse power shifts across the four ideal types of compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive power, we analyse the domestic and international developments that shaped China's relationship with the regime and highlight two episodes of Chinese power at work: the WHC's Suzhou (2004) and Fuzhou (2021) sessions. We argue that China's power potential rose across all four power types and that its potential for exercising structural and productive power is buoyed by the Belt and Road Initiative and the integration of heritage into its foreign policy. We note that China's exercise of power rarely transgresses organisational norms and that it has followed, rather than spurred, the shift to a culture of thinly veiled power politics in the WHC. Nevertheless, we argue that, as an ambitious power in heritage, China shares the responsibility for this outcome and the future of the heritage regime.