A project by the International Research Center for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation (IRC/CCHC) entitled “Guidelines for Chinese Industrial Heritage Value Evaluation & Reflections on the Framework of Industrial Heritage Value” was selected as a “2019 CTTI （China Think Tank Index）Outstanding Achievement.”

The evaluation was jointly initiated by Think Tank Research and Release Center of Guangming Daily and China Think Tank Research and Evaluation Center of Nanjing University. Among research results achieved in national governance on various fields of specific issues, twenty excellent achievements and twenty outstanding achievements were awarded in total.

The Chinese government attaches great importance to the conservation of cultural heritages. “As history and culture are the soul of a city, we must cherish urban cultural heritages as much as we value our lives.” President Xi Jinping has emphasized many times how indispensable it is to protect cultural heritages.

With the support of Tianjin University, the IRC/CCHC was founded by Distinguished Professor Dr. AOKI Nobuo and Prof. Xu Subin in 2006. It was upgraded to a key scientific research base in Tianjin in 2010 and became one of the first batch of think tanks in Tianjin in 2016.

In 2012, the IRC/CCHC undertook the major program of the National Social Science Foundation of China titled “Conservation System Research of Modern Industrial Heritages in China” which conducted research on the transformation and upgrade of Chinese industries as well as issues related to the urbanization process, expecting to promote modern heritage conservation in China and urban sustainable development. The award-winning achievement is a substantial part of the major program.

With the rapid development of Chinese cultural heritage conservation in recent years, it has been increasingly urgent to establish secondary standards at the national level for different types of heritages under the Law of the People's Republic of China on Protection of Cultural Relics. Starting with the protection of Peiyang Fleet Dagu Dock, the IRC/CCHC carried out a general survey of industrial heritages in Tianjin, and further expanded into the whole country. As a study on the assessment of industrial heritage value, the achievement referred to diverse regulations at home and abroad as well as relevant research results, then put forward a general assessment framework on culture and economy, based on which the “Guidelines for Chinese Industrial Heritage Value Evaluation” was formulated. This is the first attempt in China to set up guidelines for industrial heritage value evaluation and has won the support of China Cultural Relics Academy, Architectural Society of China, and Chinese Historical and Cultural City Committee.

People's Daily, Guangming Daily, China Daily, Global People, Talents Seeking, Tianjin Television and other media have reported on the work of the major program and relevant researchers. The research achievement has been supported by National Publication Foundation and will be published in the near future.