Short Video Platforms: Safeguarding Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage through Marketization

With the rapid progress of mass urbanization, globalization, and technology, traditional intangible cultures are facing challenges, such as skill transmission and sustainable development (Lu et al., 2019). In the 2003 biennial meeting of the General Conference of UNESCO, around 120 countries voted for and passed the multilateral treaty of the International Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. China now has registered 43 ICH elements in the UNESCO ICH list, ranking top among all countries in the world. The emergence of new media, as a branch of the creative industry, has provided convenience for the dissemination, inheritance, and preservation of ICH. Digital platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, and WeChat, are profoundly reshaping cultural production worldwide. Short video platforms, among all these types of new media platforms, have offered an innovative and efficient instrument for promoting ICH and other creative productions online. In China, the Short Video Platform has become one of the most influential communication channels. Therefore, this study addresses the question: to what extent can Short Video Platforms provide an additional way of facilitating ICH safeguarding in China? The aim of this research is trying to find out whether Short Video Platforms can play a supporting role in facilitating ICH safeguarding in China, and how ICH practitioners could practice with it. Two qualitative research approaches, content analysis and semi-structured interviews, were adopted in order to answer the research question. Three industrial reports about Chinese ICH practices were analyzed in order to gain a holistic picture of the Chinese ICH market. Meanwhile, 10 semi-structured interviews were conducted with two interview groups: The “ICH inheritor” group, and the “MCN agency” group. Following the inductive thematic analysis, using ATLAS.ti, four themes are formed from 114 codes: “Current Community Practices in China”, “Value Interpretation: Understandings and Perceptions”, “Short Video Platforms for Safeguarding ICH”, and “Other findings containing some contradictive phenomena”.