The Role of Heritage in Rural Regeneration: The Challenge and Potential for Rural Heritage Tourism Development in the Countryside around Suzhou, China

Abstract

Rural areas have served as a vast reservoir of cultural heritage as rich as that in urban areas. Man-made structures in the countryside, together with their adjacent cultivated land and natural surroundings, have been the long-lasting receptacle of agricultural practice that chronicles the history of mankind. Similarly, heritage tourism has long been associated with urban heritage. Beyond urban areas, however, rural heritage can also be a main source of cultural tourism and bring added socio-economic values to local communities. Particularly, in the last two decades, rural tourism has been seen as a remedy for rural communities to combat the declining agrarian economy and diversify the multi-functional roles of agricultural land. In this trend toward agri-tourism, places of historical interests begin to take an increasingly prominent role in rural regeneration. This paper aims to identify the issues of rural heritage management in China and explore its potential for rural heritage tourism development. Due to the country’s relentless pursuit of economic growth, rural heritage in China is under threat of incremental destruction and gradual dilapidation. The perceived threats toward rural heritage are mainly posed by peri-urbanization expansion, the decline of population and, above all perhaps, the government’s recent initiative on rural development, ‘Building a New Countryside’, due to which traditional countryside houses are either demolished or modernized at the cost of original morphological and architectural character. This research takes a form of a case study on the countryside around Suzhou City in Jiangsu Province. While the city has often been dubbed ‘Venice of the East’, its rural areas are also characterized by canal-scape and feature clusters of vernacular buildings and agricultural structures. The paper examines how rapid urbanization and the government’s initiative encroach on arable farming land and threaten the continued existence of rural heritage. Drawn from empirical materials from field survey and interviews, it further illustrates the desertion of tangible heritage assets in the countryside. The paper argues that the truly rural ‘heritage’ is the everyday life setting in the countryside that provides local communities with a stage to development eco-tourism in the countryside.