Communicating the outstanding universal value of World Heritage in China? The tour guides’ perspective

This study explores how heritage value would be constructed against Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) in the Chinese World Heritage tourism context. It does so from the tour guides’ perspective based on a case study of Kaiping Diaolou and Villages, a World Cultural Heritage Site. Data were mainly collected via participant observations and semi-structured interviews. The findings show that while the identified OUV underlines the materiality of the heritage site with a Eurocentric view, the guides tend to go beyond the built heritage to emphasize the people and activities related to it, transmitting a sense of “Chineseness” and place. Such culturally specific heritage value construction is a co-constructive and dynamic process involving multiple stakeholders: The national state promotes nation-building via (world) heritage system, whereas local government, supported by local experts, underpins the World Heritage with locality, by which the heritage place is differentiated so as to make it attractive; trained with normative templates embedded in state heritage discourse, guides seem to have established a sense of heritage identity and place; for domestic tourists, the expression of “Chineseness” is culturally appropriate and acceptable, while their regional difference allows a comparison that highlights the locality of the heritage place.