Navigating Dialogue and Diplomacy

Navigating Dialogue and Diplomacy: China's Heritage in Global Perspective brings together contributions from a highly qualified and diverse team of international scholars to examine how cultural heritage operates as a field of global engagement at the intersection of diplomacy, dialogue, and mediated cultural practice. It advances a conceptual shift from heritage as a state instrument of soft power to heritage as a relational and mobile process that travels across borders and is continually reworked through institutions, publics, and platforms. Within this framework, dialogue is approached not as a normative outcome but as a contingent and situationally produced form of engagement shaped by power, mediation, and context. Taking China's evolving heritage practices as a particularly revealing vantage point, the volume explores how heritage is mobilized, interpreted, and contested amid intensifying geopolitical tensions and resurgent cultural nationalism, while illuminating dynamics that extend beyond the Chinese case. The contributors draw on interdisciplinary perspectives spanning heritage studies, international relations, media and communication, architecture, cultural studies, and China studies, drawing on qualitative methods including ethnography, critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, and comparative case studies. This methodological breadth enables the volume to move across scales, ranging from international governance and diplomatic initiatives to urban spaces, digital platforms, and everyday intercultural encounters. The volume thus repositions heritage as a dynamic site of negotiation, mediation, and meaning-making, offering critical insights into the role of heritage in shaping global narratives, cultural identities, and the possibilities and limitations of international dialogue in a changing world.

Xiaoling Zhang co-leads the Heritage and Communication cluster at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, where she also heads the Department of Media and Communication. She has co-edited several influential volumes, including China's External Communication and Relationship Building (Zhang & Schultz, 2022, Routledge); China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation and Communication (Bachelor & Zhang, 2017, Routledge); China's Soft Power in Africa: Promotion and Perceptions (Zhang, Wasserman & Mano, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan); and China's Information and Communications Technology Revolution: Social Changes and State Responses (Zhang & Zheng, 2009, Routledge). She also co-edits the Routledge Book Series Communicating China: Past, Present and Future. Xin Liu is the Director of the Research Centre for China's Heritage Studies and a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Lancashire. Her research area covers public diplomacy, cultural studies, media and communication, and China's relations with the West. Her major publications include multiple research papers in top-rated journals such as Journal of Contemporary China and Asia Studies Review, and two monographs: China's Cultural Diplomacy: A Great Leap Outward? (Routledge) and Anglo-Chinese Encounters Before the Opium War: A Tale of Two Empires Over Two Centuries (Routledge), whose Chinese version is due to be published in 2026.