Productive Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage Based on the Theory of Involvement: A Case Study on the Farmers’ Paintings of XinJi County, Hebei Province, China

The productive protection of intangible cultural heritages, always in the form of tourism development under the present context, is put forward by Chinese scholars, which are beneficial to both the protection of the heritage and the economy development of the locals. While not all intangible cultural heritages can be understood and accepted by tourists due to the reasons that the living circumstances and contexts of these heritages are changing and disappearing that it’s hard for tourists to understand, neither do they desire to pay for it. Therefore, how to make tourists even including some craftsmen understand and accept the heritage means a lot to the protection and inheritance of these heritages. The paper argues that the Involvement Theory can be referred to analyze settle the problems. A case study of the farmers’ painting in Xinji County, Hebei Province was carried out as the example, which is one of the most representative intangible cultural heritage of folk art in Hebei Province, China, with a long history of development, rich cultural connotation and high artistic value. A field investigation and deep-interview was carried out to gather the information of its status quo, problems of its inheriting and developing were analyzed, the paper found that with the development of the times and society, farmers’ painting is losing its survival environment, the income of farmers’ painting is not proportional to their putting-in and cost, the value of farmers painting can not be reflected, and the productive protection is seriously hindered. Therefore, based on the perspective of involvement theory, this study analyzed the bottleneck of productive protection of Xinji Farmers’ Painting, suggested how to stimulate the involvement of tourists into the understanding and producing and creation of the paintings in order to promote the inheritance of the heritage.