50 years World Heritage Convention: shared responsibility – conflict & reconciliation

project management because most government-led projects in China currently do not take into account the advice of professionals. However, the privileged status of the professional, as Yan (2015, 65) argues in his study of Chinese heritage discourse, ‘empowers government by ignoring local residents’ capability’ within project management, which, in the long run, helps to obscure local interpretations of vernacular culture and traditional customs. This outcome is, unfortunately, the opposite of the author’s original intention of laying out these guidelines – giving a voice to local people. All in all, this book will be helpful for students and researchers working in many fields, including critical heritage studies, cultural landscape and residential environment studies, rural sociology, architecture and spatial planning, and local history. It is a clear and comprehensive book that merits careful reading. Compared with other books on the transformation of Chinese villages in the English-speaking world, such as the influential Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 2009), this book has its own important features focusing on the changing meaning of home and the local resistance to top-down heritagisation.