Representation, Audience, and Authority in the Digital Communication of Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Policy-Design Analysis Grounded in an Immersive Heritage Prototype in Ethnic-Minority China

The digital communication of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in ethnic-minority China is frequently framed as a problem of technological capability. This article argues the reverse: digital ICH communication is a problem of representation, audience, and authority before it is a problem of technology, and the policy architecture currently governing it addresses the technological dimension far more fully than the other three. The argument is developed through an instrumental case constructed by design-based research — an Unreal-Engine-5 immersive prototype of four Yao rituals (wedding, Yellow Mud Drum, Dujie initiation, and the Panwang Festival) built and tested within the policy context of the Jinxiu Yao Autonomous County in Guangxi. The policy corpus and the prototype-development experience are read through Stuart Hall’s representation and encoding/decoding theory, Laurajane Smith’s Authorized Heritage Discourse, and Salah’s reflexive-authenticity framework. On that basis the study identifies five recurring challenges: technology–culture asymmetry, an audience-differentiation deficit, an authority–authenticity tension, ambiguity over AIGC and community rights, and the sustainability of small-population transmission. It then proposes four policy responses calibrated for embedding within the existing Chinese institutional architecture. The framework is offered as a diagnostic baseline intended to structure, not to substitute for, the primary community-voice and audience-reception research that subsequent empirical work must supply.