From cultural heritage to platformized craft: Visual participation and cultural governance in China's jade-carving art

Introduction: craft, visibility, and institutional mediation

Jade carving holds a long-standing place in Chinese cultural imagination. For centuries, jade objects have carried moral, symbolic, and familial meaning, serving as markers of status and expressions of virtue. Classic studies of Chinese jade note how its value has been shaped not only by material quality but also by ritual use and aesthetic interpretation (Allan, 1991). This close relationship between craft knowledge and cultural symbolism later informed China's designation of jade carving as part of its ‘intangible cultural heritage’ (ICH). Today, exhibitions, museum narratives, and cultural campaigns continue to reinforce jade carving as an emblem of national tradition. Yet this heritage now circulates within rapidly changing infrastructures of digital visibility, where platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu increasingly mediate how craft is encountered.

This shift in visibility aligns with broader transformations in governance. This institutional framing of jade carving as national heritage has been widely documented in studies of China's ICH governance (Oakes, 2019; Li et al., 2025; Zhou et al., 2019).

Under these conditions, heritage increasingly moves through intertwined regimes of digital visibility and cultural governance, in which platforms and policy frameworks jointly shape how craft is encountered, evaluated, and supported. Although research on platforms and creative labor has grown, important gaps remain. Recent contributions in the International Journal of Cultural Studies have examined platform economies, digital labor, and cultural governance in creative fields, highlighting how visibility, participation, and institutional mediation shape cultural production under platform capitalism. The notion of “platformized craft,” developed by Close and Wang (2020), has drawn attention to how handmade practices are reshaped by digital circulation. Recent work on platformized creative labor has conceptualized “neo-craft” as a hybrid form shaped by digital infrastructures and cultural production (Gandini and Gerosa, 2025). More recently, Gandini et al. have expanded this discussion through their concept of “neo-craft,” emphasizing how creative production is influenced by networks of intermediaries and digital infrastructures. Yet much of this work centers on Euro-American contexts, where state involvement in craft is relatively limited. This article addresses this gap by examining platformized craft within China's governance-rich cultural context, where platform logics and policy frameworks operate in close conjunction.

This study responds to these gaps by asking three questions. First, how does platform logic—its pace, metrics, and aesthetics—reshape the meaning and value of jade carving for artisans and audiences? Second, how do state and local policies intervene in redefining craft, both as heritage and as a creative industry? Third, how do artisans and intermediaries negotiate these pressures in their daily practice?

Craft, platforms, and policy: building the analytical

Analytical framework

Drawing on these bodies of literature, this study develops an analytical framework built around three dimensions: visual participation, craft intermediaries, and institutional mediation (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Analytical framework of platformized craft. This framework illustrates the study's three analytical dimensions—visual participation, craft intermediation, and institutional mediation—and their methodological grounding in fieldwork, visual ethnography, and document review.

First, visual participation emphasizes how craft today is encountered as much through images and performances as through physical objects. On platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu, jade carvings are staged through lighting, narration, and affective cues designed to elicit engagement. Following Mirzoeff (2023) and Rose (2022), visibility is treated not merely as optical display but as a cultural practice that organizes meaning, emotion, and belonging. Value becomes performative, produced through metrics, sentiment, and institutional recognition.

Second, craft intermediaries highlight the expanding roles of actors who translate handmade work for public audiences. Livestream hosts, curators, design mentors, and policy officers shape how craft is interpreted and valued. Their work reframes heritage, influences aesthetic expectations, and often determines which styles or narratives gain prominence. This shifts the analysis beyond the artisan to the broader ecosystem involved in making craft visible.

Third, institutional mediation underscores the role of cultural policy and governance. Policies and regulations define what counts as heritage, how it should be displayed, and what forms of creativity are deemed legitimate. By situating platformized craft within China's policy landscape, this study foregrounds the interaction between digital infrastructures and institutional frameworks.

Together, these three dimensions trace how craft is reshaped through layered processes of mediation. This framework acknowledges artisans as active agents while positioning their work within broader systems of power, visibility, and cultural governance that shape contemporary craft life.

Methodology

This study uses a multi-method qualitative design to explore how jade carving in Guangzhou is reshaped through artisanal practice, digital mediation, and institutional governance. Earlier scholarship has emphasized the importance of mixed qualitative approaches for understanding cultural production across physical and digital spaces (Hine, 2017). Following these insights, the research combines ethnographic fieldwork, digital and visual analysis, and policy review. This approach reflects the hybrid life of jade carving today—an object that is carved in workshops, narrated through images on mobile platforms, and governed through heritage and creative industry policies.

Research design

The research follows a triangulated structure grounded in three empirical domains:

Craft sites—workshops and carving studios in Guangzhou, where artisans work, train apprentices, and interact with clients.

Digital platforms—Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Taobao, where jade objects circulate as images, performances, and commercial content.

Policy environments—national and municipal documents related to ICH, digital empowerment, and cultural industry development.

This multi-sited structure is informed by Marcus's approach to multi-sited ethnography, which emphasizes tracing cultural objects across different settings rather than limiting analysis to a single location (Figure 2). Treating jade carving as a mobile cultural form allowed the research to follow the craft as it traveled across production, circulation, and governance.

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Figure 2.

Fieldwork sites and data collection design. This diagram outlines the study's three empirical domains—platform, policy, and craft—and their corresponding sites (Douyin/Xiaohongshu, Guangzhou, and jade-carving studios). Data collection combined interviews, platform analysis, and field observation to capture the interactions between digital, institutional, and artisanal systems.

Visual participation and the image-object of jade carving

Increasingly, jade carving is encountered as a visual artifact—an image designed for digital consumption. What once required physical interaction—holding a pendant, wearing a bracelet, or admiring its intricacy—now circulates primarily through images, videos, and social media posts. These visual representations are not neutral; they are carefully curated performances meant to evoke emotion and resonance with viewers. Analytically, this exemplifies visual participation, in which meaning and value are co-produced through images, captions, and audience interaction rather than residing solely in the material object. In practice, jade carving is increasingly encountered as an affective image rather than as a finished object. As Mirzoeff (2023) argues, visibility itself is a cultural practice—how objects are framed, captured, and shared shapes the meanings they convey and the audiences they reach. Traditional jade carvings were often showcased in family settings or museums, where their material presence carried weight. But the digital age has brought a shift from tactile encounters to digital visibility, where the image itself becomes the primary carrier of meaning (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Visual typologies of jade-carving posts on Xiaohongshu. Examples illustrating how jade carving is visually narrated on social media: (A) pendants framed as tokens of affection and intergenerational ties (“for my mom and me”); (B) amulet-style carvings associated with moral or spiritual protection; (C) gendered reinterpretations of Buddhist imagery tied to aspiration and self-empowerment. Source: Author's field documentation, Xiaohongshu (2024).

A second dimension of this visual turn is that artisans themselves are acutely aware of this transition. In interviews, younger jade carvers spoke about how photography and digital presentation have become as integral to their craft as the act of carving itself. One artisan remarked, “The stone is important, yes, but online, people care more about how you show it. If the photo is flat, no one stops to look.” Another carver noted, “I bought a small ring light after seeing how other sellers get more likes—it's not just carving anymore; it's presentation.”

These reflections align with Close and Wang's (2020) notion of platformized craft, further extended by Gandini et al. to describe how digital infrastructures reorganize both visibility metrics and the conditions of craft production. On platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin, visibility becomes not just about material quality but also about emotional and narrative cues attached to images. Captions such as “for peace,” “a gift for my child,” or “good fortune at work” are not mere descriptions but deliberate emotional framing aimed at connecting with viewers.

Yet, the rapid digital engagement is not universally welcomed. One senior artisan expressed skepticism, saying, “People scroll fast—they like what's shiny, not what's skillful.” This tension reveals that, while visibility amplifies the reach of jade carving, it also raises questions about the value of the craft. As much as platform visibility can elevate the craft, it can also dilute its artisanal value, a point made evident by Gandini et al., who discuss the tension between authenticity and commerciality in the context of digital platforms.

While not entirely new, the current visual turn is distinguished by the speed and scale of digital circulation. Historically, jade objects were presented through exhibitions, catalogs, and public displays—contexts where the craft's symbolic and aesthetic value was mediated for public consumption. However, what distinguishes the current digital age is the speed and scale of circulation. As Helmond (2015) and van Dijck et al. (2018) argue, platform governance actively structures participation and visibility. These platforms push artisans to adapt their work to algorithmic systems, requiring quick, attention-grabbing visual content that aligns with the rhythm of digital circulation.

The result is a temporal shift: jade carving enters public life not only as a finished object but as an image almost instantly after its creation. Unlike traditional heirlooms, which may take years to pass from one generation to the next, jade carvings today can gain recognition and value before they are even sold or worn.

This shift reframes jade carving from an heirloom object to a visual object—one that is portable, performable, and deeply entangled with digital temporality. In the Guangzhou case, visibility operates as a shared arena where artisans, platforms, and audiences collectively negotiate meaning. As such, jade carving is reconfigured in a system that blurs the boundaries between object and image, making the object as much about its visual representation as its material form.

As jade carving enters platform-based visual circuits, its representation follows an aesthetic logic shaped by algorithmic legibility rather than symbolic depth alone. Traditional displays—whether in family collections, temple offerings, or museum vitrines—emphasized symbolic motifs, narrative depth, and compositional balance. Today, however, images are crafted for immediacy: they must be suitable for scrolling, capturing attention quickly, and gaining recognition at a glance.

Instead of replacing traditional aesthetics, this shift extends earlier exhibition practices into the metric-driven environment of platforms. Jade carving continues to tell stories, but these stories are now conveyed through visual cues optimized for speed, legibility, and emotional engagement.

Symmetry and centered framing have become central conventions. On platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin, pendants and figurines are often shot frontally, with hands posed like display stands. As one artisan explained: “If the pendant is not clear in the center, people just swipe past—it's not about the stone, it's about the photo.” This is not just an aesthetic choice but a platform-driven necessity, as Helmond (2015) and van Dijck et al. (2018) point out, platforms reward clarity, legibility, and immediate visual impact.

Close-up imagery further intensifies affective engagement by translating tactile qualities into visual intimacy. The lighting is calibrated to highlight texture and translucency, while shadows are minimized. These techniques encourage intimate engagement with details that viewers cannot physically touch. One seller on Douyin mentioned, “People want to see the veins in the jade—they zoom in, they comment, they believe it's real.” These strategies highlight how artisans are using platform metrics to fine-tune their presentations.

Importantly, these images are not just aesthetic surfaces but temporal devices. Unlike earlier craft encounters, where objects were seen only after production, here images circulate in advance, generating recognition and emotional attachment before the physical object is even sold. As Gandini et al. discuss, platforms not only alter the meaning of handmade objects but also reshape the temporality of their production and circulation.

Intermediating craft: actors, infrastructure, and value production

The relationship between artisan and object remains central to jade carving, but in the contemporary context, the meaning and value of jade carving are increasingly produced through a network of intermediaries. Exhibitions, museums, and commercial showcases now curate jade not only as a material practice but as a symbol of cultural heritage and national identity (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Institutional, platform, and infrastructural mediation in contemporary jade-carving practice. (A) Institutional training setting where master artisans guide younger carvers using digitally equipped workstations, illustrating the integration of traditional skill transmission and technological infrastructure. (B) Livestream commerce scene in a jade retail space, showing how platforms mediate visibility and value through real-time performance, audience interaction, and algorithmic circulation. (C) Collective workshop environment characterized by standardized workstations and coordinated labor, highlighting the shift from individual mastery toward organized, institutionally embedded production. Source: Author's fieldwork documentation, Guangzhou, 2024.

As Adamson (2013) notes, curation reframes craft for audiences unfamiliar with its making. One master carver in Guangzhou reflected on this shift: “Once my work entered the museum case, it no longer spoke only for me—it became part of a national story.” This comment underscores how curation elevates jade carving from a personal artistic endeavor to a cultural symbol embedded in national narratives. Beyond curation, training programs have become another critical mediator of the evolution of jade carving. Supported by cultural agencies, these short-term workshops teach branding, digital skills, and design awareness alongside traditional carving techniques. Ingold's (2013) concept of the “education of attention” helps explain this shift. While traditional apprenticeship emphasized slow, patient learning focused on craftsmanship, these programs prioritize adaptability, teaching apprentices how to thrive in the modern creative economy. As one young apprentice put it, “We learned how to carve, but we also learned how to make short videos—it's part of the same skill now.” This redefinition of craft highlights the growing importance of visibility and digital literacy in contemporary jade-carving practice. Livestreaming extends the mediation of jade carving even further. On platforms like Douyin, artisans are transformed into performers, balancing the technical demands of carving with camera work, lighting, and audience engagement. As Poell et al. (2022) argue, this form of cultural production fuses labor with visibility, as artisans must actively manage how their work is presented in real time. One seller jokingly said, “My phone is my workshop and my stage—it decides if people see my jade or not.” Policy actors also play a significant role in mediating the value of jade carving. Through heritage lists, funding criteria, and promotional campaigns, they set the standards for what counts as authentic and worthy of support. Studies on Chinese ICH policy show how state institutions shape the cultural landscape by defining what is considered legitimate and deserving of preservation. For many artisans, these criteria are double-edged: they bring vital resources but also impose limits on creative freedom. As one artisan noted, “They told us we have to upload at least one training video every month to keep the subsidy active. It's good support, but it also means we spend more time making videos than carving.” Taken together, these examples illustrate that jade carving today is no longer solely sustained by the hands of artisans. Instead, it is co-produced through a network of curators, educators, platforms, and policy actors, each of whom plays a role in framing its value in contemporary China. These actors—curators, livestream hosts, policymakers, and educators—serve as translators, converting artisanal practice into visibility and legitimacy. As Luckman and Andrew (2020) argues, intermediaries actively shape visibility and value. Curators, for example, select objects for exhibitions and craft narratives that frame jade as heritage, luxury, or national symbolism. Their choices influence public interpretation, often privileging certain motifs—such as purity and spiritual protection—while downplaying others. Training programs, backed by cultural agencies, introduce another layer of mediation by teaching young makers how to combine traditional carving skills with modern branding, digital literacy, and market awareness. These programs emphasize adaptability over the long apprenticeship model, reframing jade carving as a flexible skill set for creative industries. Livestreaming has become one of the most powerful forms of mediation in this context. Sellers and artisans perform their work live, blending technical demonstration with affective storytelling. As one carver explained, “If the host chooses to feature my piece, it sells immediately. If not, it might as well not exist.” This illustrates how craft intermediaries operate not simply as facilitators of exchange but as evaluative gatekeepers who actively shape visibility, legitimacy, and economic outcome. These accounts highlight the crucial role of platform visibility and intermediary choices, which structure outcomes in ways artisans cannot fully control. Policy actors also shape recognition through heritage lists, funding guidelines, and digital campaigns. By setting criteria for authenticity or legitimacy, they decide which practices are rewarded and which remain marginal. One artisan who participated in a municipal incubator remarked, “Sometimes policy feels like another platform—we must perform progress to stay visible.” Such statements emphasize how artisans internalize institutional expectations while trying to maintain their craft identity.

In contemporary China, the state functions not only as a guardian of tradition but also as an active intermediary that shapes how craft is framed, circulated, and reimagined. Over the past decade, national and local programs have repositioned jade carving from a static symbol of heritage to a dynamic cultural resource linked to innovation, tourism, and economic growth. This dual ambition—to preserve heritage while aligning with development agendas—illustrates what Oakes (2019) describes as the cultural governance of heritage, where state-led initiatives manage visibility as much as preservation. A prominent strategy has been the creation of ICH incubation platforms, often housed in cultural parks, universities, or industry clusters. These initiatives provide training in design adaptation, storytelling, and digital marketing, while encouraging artisans to tailor their work for younger audiences. Such programs exemplify Logue's concept of “institutional templates,” where support is coupled with subtle forms of direction and evaluation. The result is not coercive control, but what might be called soft regulation, where individual creativity is aligned with collective narratives and economic goals. State-sponsored exhibitions and cultural performances further reinforce this framing. Whether at national expos or regional heritage festivals, jade carving is displayed less as a workshop practice and more as a symbol of harmony, continuity, and modernity. As Oakes (2019) notes, exhibitions often serve dual purposes: honoring tradition while projecting curated images of national modernity. Artisans are presented as representatives of heritage, visible yet mediated by institutional aesthetics. Creative competitions provide another mechanism of intervention. These contests invite artisans, students, and designers to reimagine jade for contemporary lifestyles—jewelry, décor, or even wearable tech. While promoted as platforms for innovation, winning designs often echo familiar symbolic norms, privileging motifs such as filial piety or patriotic themes. As Kong (2014) observes in the context of Asian cultural policy, creativity is encouraged, but within sanctioned boundaries that align with national identity. Importantly, these mechanisms do not replace older forms of mediation. Patronage, exhibitions, and state recognition have long shaped the social life of craft. Today's programs extend this trajectory, embedding jade carving within what Gandini et al. term “neo-craft,” where cultural policy, digital platforms, and heritage industries intersect to produce new forms of value.

Craft as social innovation: participatory practices and policy experiments

The transformation of jade carving in contemporary China cannot be understood solely through its growing presence on digital platforms. What appears online as polished images, livestream performances, or branded narratives is rooted in deeper changes within workshops, training systems, and institutional arrangements. These changes point to a broader reinvention of craft as both a social practice and a policy-relevant activity. Inside carving studios, modes of work are shifting away from the solitary model of mastery traditionally associated with artisanal excellence. Fieldwork shows that many studios now operate as small teams, combining carving, design, photography, and online communication. In some cases, artisans collaborate with curators, livestream hosts, or platform specialists who manage visibility and audience interaction. Production schedules have also changed. Rather than following long, open-ended cycles of refinement, many studios align output with online shopping festivals, livestream events, or policy-sponsored exhibitions. Artisans are acutely aware of the tension this creates. As one middle-aged carver explained, “They want us to produce faster for the season, but jade does not follow the calendar. The stone has its own rhythm.” Another added, “During livestream campaigns everything has to be quick—design, polish, upload—but carving cannot follow the clock of the app.” A younger livestreamer summarized the dilemma more bluntly: “I carve slower than the algorithm wants, but faster than my teacher allows.” These accounts reveal how digital demand reshapes time, value, and authority within the workshop, producing friction between inherited standards of quality and platform-driven expectations. Institutions reinforce these pressures by reframing craft as a tool for entrepreneurship, cultural branding, and employment. State-backed incubators, e-commerce training camps, and creative industry grants encourage artisans to package their work for scale, circulation, and narrative appeal. Rather than operating through direct control, these initiatives function as forms of soft regulation, guiding practice through incentives and evaluation criteria. From the perspective of institutional mediation, policy does not merely support craft but actively reorganizes its temporal rhythms, evaluative standards, and modes of participation (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Institutional and curatorial mediation of jade carving in public settings. (A) Guided viewing and explanation of jade objects in an exhibition setting, illustrating how craft is interpreted and narrated for public audiences. (B) Curatorial-led presentation within a museum or gallery space, where jade carving is framed as cultural heritage through institutional storytelling. (C) Educational workshop associated with an exhibition program, showing participatory engagement that translates craft knowledge through guided making and learning. Together, these scenes highlight how exhibitions and related programs operate as sites of mediation, where curators, educators, and institutional actors actively shape the meanings, values, and legitimacy of jade carving beyond the workshop. Source: Author's fieldwork documentation, Guangzhou, 2024.

This dynamic resonates with Close and Wang's (2020) concept of platformized craft, where heritage becomes entangled with visibility metrics, and with Gandini et al.'s account of neo-craft, which emphasizes how creative labor is reorganized through institutional and infrastructural systems. Figure 4 visualizes how policy programs, platform infrastructures, and intermediary labor converge at the level of everyday practice rather than operating as separate forces. As Poell et al. (2022) remind us, visibility under platform governance is never neutral; it is shaped by algorithmic priorities and policy objectives that structure participation. Analytically, this illustrates the role of craft intermediaries as evaluative gatekeepers, whose curatorial, performative, and narrative decisions actively shape which forms of jade carving become visible, legitimate, and economically viable. Responses among artisans are uneven. Younger practitioners often embrace hybrid roles as makers, storytellers, and educators, while senior masters tend to participate selectively, weighing institutional benefits against the risk of diluting long-held standards. Innovation and resistance thus coexist, not as opposing forces, but as intertwined strategies through which artisans navigate shifting expectations. Taken together, these observations suggest that the transformation of jade carving is not limited to its digital surface. It reflects a reorganization of labor, authority, and meaning, in which artisans, platforms, and institutions collectively redefine what counts as legitimate craft practice today. Jade carving has increasingly become a site where heritage and social innovation intersect. Beyond technical mastery, the field is shaped by new participatory arrangements that alter how craft is taught, shared, and valued. One prominent form of social innovation is platform-driven youth engagement. On Douyin and Xiaohongshu, artisans and sellers present jade carving through short performances that blend making, explanation, and affective storytelling. Many participants are under forty and experiment with how jade can function as both personal expression and cultural asset. As one artisan noted, “People ask about the meaning of each pendant in the comments. I carve, but I also have to explain, respond, and keep them watching.” This illustrates how production and circulation merge under platform conditions, making interaction itself a form of labor. Close and Wang's (2020) notion of platformized craft helps explain this shift, where visibility becomes inseparable from value creation. A second form of social innovation lies in state-supported craft incubation. Local governments and cultural agencies offer residencies, workshops, and training programs that integrate design thinking, branding, and digital skills into craft practice. These initiatives provide resources and networks, but they also embed expectations about accessibility, scalability, and symbolic alignment with policy goals. In this sense, the state operates not only as a protector of tradition but as a co-producer of innovation, shaping how craft is imagined and performed. A third, less institutionalized form emerges through community-based networks. Collector circles, online forums, and grassroots workshops create alternative spaces for participation beyond official frameworks. In Buddhist jade communities, feminist design groups, or small-scale collector networks, value is often defined through belief, affect, or identity rather than market metrics. These micro-publics demonstrate that craft circulates across different temporal stages—from making to sharing to remembering—complicating simple binaries of traditional versus digital or commercial versus authentic. It is a dynamic field in which artisans, platforms, policies, and communities continuously renegotiate meaning. Platform governance structures participation, but actors on the ground adapt, reinterpret, and sometimes resist these structures in practice. Together, these practices show how social innovation in jade carving unfolds through negotiated participation within policy programs, platform infrastructures, and community networks. This article therefore demonstrates how institutional mediation reorganizes craft practice without eliminating artisanal agency.

The growing visibility of jade carving also reveals how craft is mobilized simultaneously as a policy tool and as a mechanism of institutional reproduction. On one level, jade carving is incorporated into national strategies related to cultural diplomacy, creative industry development, and youth employment. This aligns with arguments by Close and Wang (2020) that platformized craft increasingly serves broader economic and symbolic agendas. On another level, heritage lists, curated exhibitions, and award systems function as filters that consolidate specific forms of legitimacy. Field evidence shows how these dynamics shape everyday decision-making. As one artisan explained, “If you want government funding, your style has to fit what they recognize as heritage. Otherwise, it is seen as design, not tradition.” Such comments reveal how institutional criteria influence not only visibility but also creative choice. What is labeled as innovation often reflects unspoken norms about acceptable tradition rather than open experimentation. This dual use of craft produces both opportunity and constraint. Institutional support offers resources, training, and public recognition, but it can also narrow stylistic diversity by privileging familiar motifs and narratives. This uneven response highlights how social innovation unfolds through selective engagement rather than uniform adoption. Some use exhibitions and competitions strategically, introducing subtle variations within sanctioned frameworks. Others practice selective compliance, producing one set of works for institutional contexts and another for digital platforms or private clients. These strategies suggest that jade carving today cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between preservation and innovation. Its temporality unfolds across stages of recognition, production, and circulation, shaped by policy directives, institutional norms, and artisanal agency. In this respect, craft operates as a site of governance through visibility, where platforms and policies intersect to manage cultural participation (Poell et al., 2022). The broader implication of this study extends beyond jade carving alone. It demonstrates how traditional crafts in governance-rich contexts are not merely preserved or commercialized, but actively reformulated through layered forms of mediation. By tracing how artisans negotiate institutional authority, platform logic, and inherited practice, the article contributes to wider debates on craft, social innovation, and cultural governance. It suggests that the future of craft lies not in choosing between tradition and change, but in understanding how both are continuously co-produced through participation, policy, and practice.

Conclusion

This study has examined how jade carving in Guangzhou is being reconfigured through the intertwined forces of artisanal practice, digital platforms, and state-led cultural governance. Rather than treating digital visibility as a surface phenomenon or institutional policy as an external backdrop, the analysis has shown how these elements operate together to reshape the conditions under which craft is made, circulated, and recognized. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, visual analysis, and policy documents, the study approached jade carving not as a static heritage form but as a dynamic cultural practice embedded in evolving infrastructures of visibility.

At its core, the study has not asked whether jade carving can survive modernization, but how survival itself is being redefined. In Guangzhou, craft continuity no longer rests solely on material transmission or technical mastery. Instead, it depends on how objects move across workshops, screens, exhibitions, and policy frameworks. Jade carving today exists simultaneously as a tactile artifact and a visual performance, as manual labor and mediated content. This dual existence complicates conventional distinctions between heritage and commodity, tradition and innovation, or authenticity and commercialization.

The findings suggest that jade carving occupies an in-between space shaped by negotiation rather than rupture. Close and Wang's (2020) concept of “platformized craft” is useful here, as it captures how value becomes entangled with metrics of attention, engagement, and visibility. However, the Guangzhou case extends this framework by demonstrating that platformization does not operate in isolation. While Close and Wang (2020) foreground platform metrics and visibility labor, and Gandini et al. emphasize intermediary networks and infrastructural reorganization, the Guangzhou case shows how these dynamics are reconfigured under conditions of active cultural governance, where state institutions operate not as external regulators but as infrastructural actors embedded within the platform ecosystem. This convergence of platform logic and policy intervention complicates existing craft theory by showing that visibility, legitimacy, and innovation are co-produced through governance structures, rather than emerging solely from market-oriented entrepreneurship or creative autonomy.

In this context, platforms and policies converge, producing a hybrid environment in which artisans must navigate both algorithmic and institutional forms of recognition. Gandini et al.'s discussion of “neo-craft” further illuminates this process by emphasizing how creative labor is reorganized through new intermediaries and infrastructures. Yet the empirical material presented here adds an important temporal dimension to this debate. Jade carving unfolds across a life cycle that includes making, digital circulation, and curated display, with each stage reshaping how value is assigned. Visibility often precedes exchange, as images circulate online before objects are sold or worn. Institutional recognition may arrive later, through exhibitions, competitions, or heritage listings that reframe the same objects within different symbolic registers. Craft value, in this sense, is not fixed at the moment of production but continually reconstituted across stages of circulation and governance.

Field evidence underscores how these dynamics are experienced in everyday practice. Artisans repeatedly described a tension between the slow rhythms of carving and the accelerated demands of platforms and programs. Statements such as “the stone has its own rhythm” or “I carve slower than the algorithm wants” reveal how time itself becomes a site of negotiation. What Poell et al. (2022) conceptualize as platform governance is not abstract in this setting. It is felt in the adjustment of production schedules, the adoption of lighting and filming techniques, and the rewriting of narratives to align with platform norms or policy expectations. Governance operates through visibility, shaping participation not through direct coercion but through incentives, metrics, and curated opportunities.

At the same time, the study complicates assumptions commonly found in global craft literature. Much Western scholarship has emphasized artisanal autonomy, resistance to markets, or the preservation of small-scale authenticity. However, they do not fully capture the dynamics observed in Guangzhou. Here, artisans rarely position themselves outside institutions or platforms. Instead, they work within them, selectively aligning with policies, exhibitions, or digital trends while retaining elements of inherited practice. Platforms and policies function not only as constraints but also as resources that provide access to audiences, funding, and legitimacy.

This does not imply a harmonious integration of tradition and innovation. Rather, creativity emerges through ongoing negotiation. Some artisans embrace hybrid roles as makers, storytellers, educators, and performers, while others participate selectively, maintaining parallel practices for different contexts. Institutional programs promote innovation, but often within implicit boundaries that privilege familiar motifs or narratives. Platform visibility amplifies certain forms of expression while marginalizing others. The result is a field characterized by uneven participation, strategic compliance, and subtle forms of adaptation.

Importantly, this study does not claim to represent jade carving in China as a whole. The findings are grounded in a specific urban context, shaped by Guangzhou's craft history, market environment, and policy landscape. What the case offers is not a universal model but an analytically rich example of how traditional crafts are being reconfigured in governance-intensive and platform-saturated settings. By foregrounding this specificity, the study avoids sweeping generalizations while contributing insights that resonate beyond the immediate case.

The broader contribution lies in reframing craft as a co-produced field rather than an isolated practice. This study makes three contributions to debates on craft and cultural governance. First, it extends theories of platformized craft by situating them within a governance-rich context, showing how state institutions operate as infrastructural actors embedded within platform ecosystems rather than external regulators. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how craft value is produced across stages of making, digital circulation, and institutional recognition, highlighting temporality as a key analytical dimension. Third, it reframes social innovation in craft as a negotiated process that unfolds through participation, mediation, and policy alignment rather than entrepreneurial autonomy alone. Jade carving in Guangzhou is shaped by artisans, but also by curators, livestream hosts, policy officers, algorithms, and audiences who participate in meaning-making through likes, comments, and shares. Heritage here is sustained through transformation, as tradition is reformulated through mediated participation rather than preserved through stasis.

This perspective has implications for how craft futures may be understood in governance-rich and platform-saturated contexts. In governance-rich contexts such as contemporary urban China, craft operates as both a cultural resource and a policy instrument. It is mobilized for economic development, cultural branding, and social cohesion, while also serving as a site where values of skill, authenticity, and continuity are debated. The concept of “state-platform craft” proposed through this analysis captures this dual positioning, highlighting how creativity unfolds through alignment, negotiation, and selective adaptation rather than outright resistance or autonomy.

It provides a lens through which to examine how tradition itself is redefined in an era where cultural life is inseparable from platforms and policy. The Guangzhou case suggests that craft survives not by remaining unchanged, but by moving across infrastructures that reshape how it is seen, valued, and remembered. As one senior artisan reflected, “I carve with my hands, but people see stories on the screen.” This observation encapsulates the central argument of the study: in governance-rich contexts such as contemporary urban China, heritage appears to endure through transformation rather than preservation alone.

By engaging with ongoing International Journal of Cultural Studies debates on platform economies, cultural labor, and social governance, this study contributes a governance-centered perspective on craft that complements existing discussions of digital creativity and participation. By situating jade carving within debates on platform economy, cultural governance, and social innovation, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary craft. The Guangzhou case suggests that the future of craft in governance-intensive settings lies not in choosing between tradition and change, but in tracing how both are continuously co-produced through practice, mediation, and policy.