China to establish withdrawal mechanism for cultural heritage

Edited and Translated by Han Shasha, People's Daily Online

According to the Ministry of Culture, China will establish a warning and withdrawal mechanism to manage intangible cultural heritage protection and preservation.

The notice clearly says that China will establish a warning and withdrawal mechanism. Once the state-level representative items are found destroyed or severely damaged due to inappropriate and insufficient protection, the Ministry of Culture will give a warning and ask the applicants to change the situation at a given time. If the applicants do not take effective measure to improve the protection and preservation, the applicants will be disqualified.

According to the Ministry of Culture, relevant departments should build up a regular self-examination and report mechanism. They should report the overall protection work and the protection evaluation of each representative item to the Ministry of Culture before March 31 every year. The Ministry of Culture will also organize some experts to inspect the protection of the representative items.

At the end of May, the State Council of the People's Republic of China announced 191 items and 164 expansion projects for the third list of state-level intangible cultural heritage. China has approved 1,219 state-level intangible cultural heritage items, including those on the previous two lists. To better protect the representative items of the state-level intangible cultural heritage, the Ministry of Culture shows that China will tighten up the dynamic management over the representative items.