When Sacred Space becomes a Heritage Place: Pilgrimage, Worship, and Tourism in Contemporary China

xiaokang shehui
), based on material and spiritual 
civilisation (
jingshen
wenming
). That is to say, while 
he radically transformed the economic basis of Chinese 
society by embracing (limited) private market action, 
he did not intend to allow market forces to shape social 
and moral behaviour. Deng thus, was as much a 
heretical Marxist as was Mao. While Mao had 
attempted to use the superstructure to transform the 
base, Deng sought to prevent the base from 
transforming the superstructure.
Importantly, 
‘
spiritual
’ 
as used in Chinese does not 
connote the supernatural, paranormal, or Godly. It 
instead signifies ethical and moral attributes that 
characterise right
-
thinking and right
-
acting citizens and 
state perspective, increased tourism is desirable, since 
this 
will further 
a 
national 
campaign 
of 
‘
civilisation
’ (
wenming
) and educate visitors. Local 
and provincial authorities support increased tourism 
which will spur development and generate revenues. 
Both perspectives are quite different from that of 
UNESCO and related institutions such as the 
International Committee on Monuments and Sites 
(ICOMOS), which consider sites such as Wutai Shan 
to be parts of a collective 
world
heritage that require 
protection from, broadly speaking, modernisation. In 
this particular case state development policies that have 
sought to expand the domestic tourism industry for not 
just political and economic reasons but also what is 
termed in Chinese as 
‘
spiritual
’ (
jingshen
) concerns. 
Heritage, be this religious or otherwise, is part and 
parcel of a broader state
-
directed campaign to cultivate 
and boost the spiritual
[1]
basis of development, thereby 
balancing out material (
wuzhi
) development and 
increasing the civilisational level of the Chinese Nation 
(Shepherd, 2012).