Success or Failure?: Competing Concepts of Heritage Value in Lijiang Old Town

It has now been six years since the Old Town of Lijiang, in Yunnan Province, UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site since 1997, received a negative review from the World Heritage Committee's reactive monitoring team, citing the overuse of tourism and the exodus of members of the local Naxi ethnic group as having seriously detracted from the value of the Old Town as a World Heritage Site. Since that time, in heritage circles Lijiang has become a case example of World Heritage management gone wrong. However, within China both officially and popularly, Lijiang is considered one of Southwest China's greatest successes in bringing development to an impoverished minority area in the far reaches of China's borderlands. In this paper, I will review the different discourses present in the Old Town of Lijiang regarding the value of cultural heritage to demonstrate why UNESCO's failure has likewise been Yunnan Province's success. This includes elaborating the value of cultural heritage from the viewpoints of the World Heritage Committee, the Chinese State, and the tourism industry itself. Finally, I will describe what all this has meant to the Naxi people of Lijiang, and how the intersection of these varying values have come to be interpreted by and affect how Lijiang Naxi understand themselves and their relations with others.