The Missing Intangible Cultural Heritage in Shanghai Cultural and Creative Industries

Chinese opera, a sing-song storytelling art form predominantly associated with rural and urban migrant communities, currently has over 300 regional styles. This paper investigates the intertwined development of a regional Chinese opera Shanghai All-female Yueju and its main audience, the Shanghai female textile workers and their omission in Shanghai Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) making. Utilising theories of ‘selective memory’ and ‘strategic forgetting’, this paper argues that the official construction of Shanghai semi-colonial heritage as Shanghai’s post-industrial identity and the omission of textile Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is not only an attempt to establish a global cosmopolitan image, but also a strategy to deal with the post-industrial trauma of compulsory female workers’ redundancy and painful community dissemination. It suggests that, until Shanghai fully acknowledges its ‘dark heritage’, the discourse of CCI lacks context and Shanghai local community continues to experience alienation and their opera form struggles for expression. The paper highlights the urgency for China, as well as globally, to safeguard and implement UNESCO’s vision in promoting ICH as a key vehicle for social inclusion and sustainable development.