63-year-old Jing Tingxiao, a local inheritor of shadow play, is manipulating puppet figures behind the scene in Huan County of Gansu Province which is home to Daoqing shadow play.

Recently, Gansu Province approved a regulation on intangible cultural heritage that abolished the life tenure of inheritors of intangible cultural heritage.

Some experts believe it’s a move by Gansu to strengthen the protection of intangible cultural heritage through local legislation.
 

China enjoys an abundance of intangible cultural heritage, many of which have become lost and more are disappearing. Because many items are known by few inheritors, they will vanish when inheritors pass away. The shadow play of Taihu Lake became lost after its inheritor Tang Shengxi died at the end of 2011.
 

Drawing upon the experience of Japan and South Korea, China announced the Interim Procedures on Recognizing and Administrating Representative Inheritors of State-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008 and nominated a total of 1,488 representative inheritors in three batches from 2007 to 2009. In 2011, it approved the Intangible Cultural Heritage Law that explicitly laid out the qualifications, subsidy and obligations for representative inheritors.
 

However, this has failed to completely solve the inheritance problem. Some inheritors haven’t lived up to their responsibilities. As a result, more and more places have moved to annul the life tenure. It has already been abolished in Hebei Province and Suzhou of Jiangsu Province, which are rich in intangible cultural heritage. Gansu is following suit and stresses in the legislation that cultural administrative authorities shall disqualify inheritors who do not fulfill their obligations unless they have a legitimate excuse.
 

The recognition of inheritors is not enough, and some experts suggest we should ensure that inheritors are interested and capable of passing down intangible cultural heritage.

Zhu Yi is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.