Date: May 29, 2023

Source: People's Daily

Author: DAI Lin, LI Weimiao

Translator: YIN Wenqian, YANG Jie

For the first time, Jinan University is hosting the UNESCO Chair on World Traditional Handicrafts: Inheritance and Innovation, promoting the implementation of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. JNU has taken up the important mission of telling China's stories well, spreading Chinese culture abroad and demonstrating China's wisdom. 

This is the 30th UNESCO Chair Program in China. It will actively respond to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and UNESCO's cultural conventions; promote the inheritance and innovation of traditional crafts around the world; and improve the employment and entrepreneurship of craftsmen.

To achieve the goal, the UNESCO Chair will conduct special training courses for traditional craftsmen, especially young people and women, so they can understand the modernization and transformation of traditional crafts. It will also improve their skills in making a living by combining inheritance and innovation of traditional crafts with modern design and creative ideas.

The Chair has appointed renowned scholars and master craftsmen as consultants and members of the expert committee, showing the Chair's diversified cooperation ability and inclusiveness. Experts from the Chinese National Academy of Arts, Peking University, Fudan University, Sun Yat-sen University and Chinese University of Hong Kong were appointed to the committee, and four inheritors of national intangible cultural heritage were invited to be tutors in the Chair's master studio.

The UNESCO Chairs Program was created in 1992. As of February, 945 Chairs had been established in more than 120 countries and regions, an important network for international academic exchange. JNU's Chair is the only one to study the mechanism of protection, inheritance and innovation of traditional crafts.