International shift to systematic protection

Editor's note: The 2026 Beijing Culture Forum was held in the Chinese capital on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the theme "Cultural Heritage and Mutual Learning Among Civilizations". China Daily reporters attended the forum to share some of the insights and perspectives discussed.

The protection of cultural heritage is increasingly moving from individual efforts toward a comprehensive and systematic endeavor, professionals said on Wednesday at a parallel event of the 2026 Beijing Culture Forum.

Themed "Systematic Protection of Cultural Heritage", the discussion gathered more than 120 conservators, cultural heritage experts and scholars from 23 countries and regions to discuss how to better protect cultural heritage and bring it back to life.

Yang Baojun, president of the Urban Planning Society of China, pointed out that it's a trend that China's protective efforts are changing from focusing on individual cultural heritage sites to the overall protection of the entire urban and rural areas.

In 1961, the first batch of key cultural relics under national protection was issued, highlighting the conservation of single heritage sites. In 1982, the system to recognize famous historical and cultural cities was established, bringing ancient cities, neighborhoods, towns and villages under the scope of protection. In 2021, the central government officially proposed building a preservation and inheritance system for urban and rural historical and cultural heritage, extending the spatial scale of preservation to the entire urban and rural area, Yang said.

This holistic approach also extends to intangible cultural heritage, noted Bamo Qubumo, chair of the expert committee at the Intangible Cultural Heritage Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

She cited the protection of the "Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of the Jingmai Mountain in Pu'er" in Yunnan province, which was listed as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site in 2023, as a good example of holistic conservation of both tangible and intangible items.

Over the years, the area has explored a protective strategy of enabling local people to continue living there, planting tea trees and passing on tea culture, making them the main agents and beneficiaries of the protection, instead of freezing the heritage site as a relic to be "enshrined", she said.

"The practice has not only protected the ancient tea forest and village from a tangible perspective but also safeguarded the beliefs and traditional tea-making techniques passed down through generations of the Blang and Dai ethnic groups, perfectly embodying the harmonious coexistence between natural ecosystems and human cultural practices," she added.

Such systematic protection, however, rests on a solid institutional foundation. Wang Yunxia, a law professor at Renmin University of China, analyzed the protection of cultural heritage from a legal perspective.

"The most fundamental way to protect these non-renewable cultural resources is to strengthen the rule of law," said Wang.

From the promulgation and implementation of the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics in 1982 to its comprehensive revision in 2024, and from the enactment of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Law in 2011 to the inclusion of its draft amendment in the preparatory review plan of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress this year, the rule-of-law development of China's cultural heritage has traveled a path from establishment to improvement, from fragmentation to integration, and from policy-driven efforts to law-based governance, she said.

Under the new trend, progress has been made in this field. According to Rao Quan, director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration, over the past five years nearly 2,000 key cultural relic protection and restoration projects have been steadily advanced, and more than 1,200 conservation projects for museum collections have been effectively implemented.

A number of important cave temple conservation and utilization projects, including those at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu province, achieved positive results, and the three-year action plan for the protection of covered bridges has strengthened the connection between 2,193 of the structures, memories and people's livelihoods, Rao said.

Systematic protection is a global pursuit. Pietro Giovanni Trincanato, who chairs the urban planning and heritage committee of Verona's city council in Italy, introduced the subject of the protection and utilization of Verona's ancient city walls, which date back to 49 BC and were subsequently expanded and renovated over various periods.

He said that the walls vary greatly in conservation state, yet they are all managed through the same handful of approaches, applied differently from case to case.

Such approaches include civic associations adopting and caring for individual sites entirely as volunteers, historical structures being given entirely new functions, restoration following strict national conservation protocols, and many sites being recovered and made accessible again after years of neglect.

"This is what I mean by 'systematic': not one single solution applied everywhere, but a consistent method, adapted every time to what a specific place actually needs," he said.