eritage – heritage that should be alive in people’s daily life.
So far I have been giving you my views about change and heritage. I should also say something about what changes in the government’s approach. Initially, our government was doing exactly as with UNESCO’s World Heritage approach of preserving or mainly preserving heritage in itself. But more recently the government realized that heritage is also a productive business. So they now refer not just to heritage preservation but to productive preservation.
We cannot stay the same forever. We cannot never change. But how to change, how to create, is the question. And maybe creation is more interesting if you base it on tradition. The government has launched a programme to get craftsmen to teach students their handcraft techniques – to teach them how to make traditional handcrafts and allow them to create by themselves. It is actually a two-way process. The craftsmen teach the students and the students learn from them. But the craftsmen also learn from students, learn from their idea and their designs. So they actually learn from each other, influence each other.
SM Do you see similar developments elsewhere?
LF Jingdezhen is not unique in China today. The same change has happened in lots of areas. Recently, I applied for a new study project about the handicraftsmen’s role in social transformation. All our colleagues in our research centre joined the study project, and also invited several other scholars from other organisations. We picked 12 traditional handicrafts areas to study. For example, we studied Suzhou, which is very famous for its silk embroidery, with 80,000 women doing handmade embroidery. In Yixing, which is famous for pottery, they have 100,000 potters; in Fujian, Putian, they have 130,000 carpenters making wooden furniture. And in Shandong, Weifang, there are lots of people making handmade kites also. So in all these areas, they are all experiencing very similar changes to those in Jingdezhen.
LF One part of the development is what we call the ‘second generation phenomenon’. Parents earn a lot of money through handcraft, for example, by making pottery. They use this to send their children to study abroad. These kids then find that they do not earn as much money as their parents – even if they are quite successful. So they come back to their family, to their hometown, to pursue their parents’ job – and to maybe adapt the processes and bring new possibilities with them. For example, we found a son who had studied in chemistry, and he used this new technique to improve the material of the embroidery silk. It’s water-resistant material or something like that. And some students came back having majored in finance to become business assistants for their parents. Or the IT guys might use their computer skills to help their parents. This phenomenon is very common nowadays in several different areas of China. S