Legal systems which triage protection to cultural relics based on a relic grading system have been adopted by several countries. This article examines the implementation of such a relic grading framework by the People's Republic of China. The current state of the law is summarized, and a recent criminal trial is described to illustrate the role the grading system plays within the law. The factors involved in defining the grades of cultural relics are then discussed in context of a cultural relic structural framework, with emphasis to both the state values that they serve and their ability to promote the objective of cultural property protection. The analysis highlights the problems and general considerations with the use of relic grading systems as a means to protect a large number of relics with finite resources.

This article builds on recent discussions on intangible heritage following the adoption of the relevant convention by UNESCO in 2003. The emergence of intangible heritage in the international heritage scene is tied up with fears of cultural homogenization and the need to protect the world's diversity. For a number of critics, however, UNESCO's normative framework raises questions around the institutionalization of culture as a set of endangered and disappearing ways of life. The article reviews these institutional approaches to cultural preservation in relation to the politics of erasure, the creative interplay of heritage destruction and renewal. This is then further examined against the backdrop of indigenous identity politics played out in two contested public arenas: the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

Maritime cultural heritage is made up of finite and nonrenewable cultural resources including coastal or submerged prehistoric and indigenous archaeological sites and landscapes, historic waterfront structures, the remnants of seagoing vessels, and the maritime traditions and lifeways of the past and present. To date, evaluative tools used to assess the social and economic “value” of this heritage are extremely limited, the lack of which often results in the loss of maritime cultural resources and unrealized socioeconomic opportunities. Market and nonmarket valuations, derived from ecological economics and ecosystem assessments, are viable techniques that may be integrated into existing U.S. environmental and historic preservation regulatory procedures to support resource significance determinations. In doing so, decision-making regarding maritime cultural heritage can include assessments of the short- and long-term trade-offs of human actions, and can examine the socioeconomic costs and benefits of heritage conservation projects.

Large-scale resource extraction projects often create obstacles for the protection, maintenance, and inheritance of indigenous cultural heritage. In this article we detail some of the challenges and opportunities arising from our collaborative partnership with the community of the Lihir Islands in Papua New Guinea, which is seeking to establish, inform, and resource a formal cultural heritage management program in the context of a large-scale gold-mining operation. The general approach to this collaborative venture involves the application of a specific development tool, the Stepping Stones for Cultural Heritage program. This consultative process is innovative in both Melanesia and the context of resource extraction, but also more generally within the field of cultural heritage. We describe the outcomes of this process and some of the initial pilot projects, one of which was based on the recording of traditional Lihirian songs. We also argue that while the mine places greater pressure upon Lihirian cultural heritage, it also presents Lihirians with the opportunity to realize a vision of their cultural future that is beyond the reach of many other indigenous communities.

The struggle for indigenous rights to pre-Hispanic cultural heritage parallels the struggle for indigenous land rights in Belize. By Belizean law, material objects and sites of activity older than 100 years in age are the property of the state. Similarly, land inhabited by indigenous communities in southern Belize is held in trust by the government. In 2007 the community of Santa Cruz in southern Belize won customary land tenure over their lands for the first time from the Belizean government. This change in land ownership presents new challenges to the definition of ownership of ancient places in Maya territory. In particular, the transfer of land rights to the community has potential implications for the ownership and management of the local pre-Hispanic site of Uxbenká that may ultimately serve as a paradigm for the future relationship between Maya peoples and ancestral remains throughout the nation.

China's increased interaction with the global community has led to significant changes in art and artistic expression. The China art market is expanding by leaps and bounds, and artists are subject to an increasingly broad range of influences. Not least of these are the discourses of artistic criticism, with targets that range from international financial institutions to domestic policies. Art in China has for millennia been used as a vehicle for political criticism. Among early examples are the bamboo and landscape paintings of the Yuan dynasty that conveyed a sense of whimsical alienation from the affairs of formal society—implicitly a critique of Mongol rule. During the revolutionary period prior to 1949, the Communist insurgency encouraged painters like Shi Lu to enliven popular resistance to Japanese imperialism and against China's Goumindang rulers.

The International Journal of Cultural Property is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes papers and other materials representing a broad set of perspectives on problems relating to cultural property, cultural heritage, and related issues. Contributions are welcome from the wide variety of fields implicated in the debates—law, anthropology, public policy, archaeology, art history, preservation, museum-, tourism-, and heritage studies—and from a variety of perspectives and interests—indigenous, Western, and non-Western; academic, professional and amateur; consumers and producers—to promote meaningful discussion of the complexities, competing values, and other concerns that form the environment within which these disputes exist.