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Since Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, China has increasingly engaged in UNESCO's Silk Roads project. China's emphasis on its western routes signals its strategic interest in the reconstruction of its historical connections that matches China's global networking in Eurasia, the Middle East, and Europe. However, whether China will successfully reformulate the international visions of the past, present, and future for its benefit remains an open question. This article focuses on the responses from Japan and South Korea, both of which hold critical positions as the owners of eastern Silk Roads heritage and the funders of UNESCO's Silk Roads heritage studies and World Heritage nomination assistance. Extending the conceptual framework of memory infrastructure to the study of heritage politics and diplomacy highlights the competitive aspect of a transnational heritage project in shaping and reshaping historical and contemporary geographical landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNESCO's ‘Memory of the World’ Programme promotes the preservation, universal access and public awareness of the world's significant documents as the common heritage of all humankind. The inscription of the ‘Documents of Nanjing Massacre’ into the ‘Memory of the World’ Register in 2015 reflects an increasingly globalised concern in the post-Cold War era over the remembrance of war and atrocity. Yet it has reignited the tension between Japan and China, resulting in strong pressure on UNESCO to reform its selection process for contested heritage. This paper addresses the limitations encountered by UNESCO in pursuing the promotion of global documentary heritage from an English School perspective. The 2015 controversy is relevant and indicative to an important question of International Relations on an inherent tension between the solidarist forces of promoting a normative agenda on human rights and common heritage and the pluralist pull of maintaining sovereignty and bringing heritage back to the hands of states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heritage has entered the center stage of public diplomacy in East Asia. Competition to claim and interpret memories of World War II in East Asia has driven campaigns to list heritage items with UNESCO. State and non-state actors aim to use heritage listings to present a particular view of the war and related history to domestic and international audiences. This paper highlights the role of heritage soft power in East Asia's "memory contests" by examining the promotion of dissonant modern heritage in UNESCO's heritage programs. It conceptualizes heritage designation as a soft power resource in East Asia and presents a conceptual framework for understanding the hegemonic competition over the "memory regime" that emerged from the structural change in East Asia's regional order. It then uses this framework to analyze the processes by which state and non-state actors promote and/or object to UNESCO recognition of their sites and documents as heritage of outstanding universal value or world significance. The elements of this process are illustrated with case studies of two very different pieces of heritage, Japan's "Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution" and China's "Documents of Nanjing Massacre," which were enshrined as significant world heritage in 2015. While state and non-state actors in East Asia are increasingly recognizing the utility of heritage as a soft power resource for advancing specific historical narratives to an international audience, a backlash movement from civil society groups and governments in other countries prevents a purely unilateral interpretation. As a result, the utility of heritage soft power in this context must be significantly qualified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]