Research on Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage: Current Status, Hotspots, Challenges, and Future Prospects

As an important carrier of Chinese civilization, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) bears thousands of years of historical memory and cultural genes. A systematic review of Chinese ICH research from 2020 to 2025 comprehensively maps the academic landscape, revealing the paradigm shift from "salvage protection" to "living inheritance" and then to "systematic protection", identifying core research hotspots such as digital protection and integration of culture and tourism, analyzing current structural challenges, and proposing possible paths for future development.

Chinese ICH protection research has gone through three stages: the early "salvage recording" stage, which focused on document collation and audio-visual recording of endangered projects, with achievements including the establishment of ICH lists and archive accumulation; the shift to "living inheritance" in the second decade of the 21st century, which which focused on the continuation of ICH's vitality in contemporary society, with research perspectives shifting from preservation and recording to inheritance mechanisms and social functions; the latest trend is "systematic protection", which places ICH in the framework of cultural ecosystems and examines its interactive relationships with communities, economy, education, and other fields.

The six hotspots of ICH research in the past five years:

1. Digital protection and inheritance: Using technologies such as 3D scanning, VR, and AI to explore the balance between technological application and the authenticity of ICH;
2. Integration of culture and tourism and industrialization: Focusing on ICH as a cultural and tourism attraction, balancing commercial development and cultural protection;
3. Educational inheritance and youth communication: Exploring the integration of ICH into the national education system to cultivate cultural identity among the younger generation;
4. Intellectual property rights and legal protection: Involving interdisciplinary issues such as the ownership of traditional intellectual property rights and geographical indication protection;
5. Community participation and inheritor training: Emphasizing the main role of communities and addressing the aging problem of inheritors;
6. Cross-cultural exchange and international communication: Promoting ICH as a bridge for cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.

Current challenges:

1. Immature disciplinary system: Interdisciplinary but no independent paradigm formed, making it difficult to integrate results from different disciplines;
2. Disconnection between theory and practice: Academic research has limited guidance for actual protection, and frontline issues are hard to enter the core agenda;
3. Unbalanced regional development: Active research in the eastern region, weak strength in the central and western regions and ethnic minority areas, which contrasts with the distribution of ICH resources;
4. Digital transformation dilemmas: Ununified technical standards, uneven data quality, and ethical issues to be standardized.

Future directions:

1. Theoretical construction: Building a theoretical system of ICH research with Chinese characteristics, combining international achievements and Chinese practices;
2. Methodological innovation: Interdisciplinary cooperation and introduction of digital humanities methods;
3. Practice orientation: Promoting action research and participating in protection practices;
4. International exchanges: Voicing in international organizations and sharing Chinese experiences.

ICH is a living tradition that needs to balance traditional connotations and contemporary creative transformation. This review provides academic references for protection workers, policy makers, etc. Safeguarding cultural roots requires academic support and the participation of the whole society; protecting ICH means protecting our common spiritual home.