Introduction

Cultural Heritage is not a simple concept as it is based on the idea of culture which neither is simple to define and understand properly. Indeed, the concept of culture of a nation embraces its general knowledge about its history, its belief, its art, its idea of moral, its law and regulations, its customs, etc…It is so broad it is very difficult to see the limits of the concept. The UNESCO defines the Cultural Heritage as the “entire corpus of material signs […] handed on by the past to each culture and, therefore, to the whole humankind […]”. Here lies the idea of universality. The heritage is the legacy of a specific country but concerns anyone as it represents an enrichment of cultural identities to all the humankind.

In that sense, the period of Chinese history from 1949, and the birth of the PRC, to the death of Mao in 1976, which we will call either the “Mao’s era/period” or the “communist period”, has left behind a huge legacy to today’s China and to the humankind. We will focus on this legacy in terms of art as Cultural heritage often expresses itself through art.

We know it may be too early to envisage Chinese revolutionary art as part of Chinese cultural heritage but we feel like this period has to be studied in the perspective of cultural heritage as is the Ming dynasty or any other time in Chinese history. Indeed, during this class about Chinese cultural heritage, we learnt a lot about traditional China but we did not get onto Communist China, which is for many what we picture when talking about China in general.

This objective in mind, we will first try to define Chinese revolutionary art and give some examples (I) and then try to figure out what is the place of Chinese revolutionary art in today’s China cultural heritage (II).