The Chinese Eastern Railway as Infrastructural Heritage: Harbin, Urban Formation, and the Limits of Railway Heritage Evaluation
Abstract：This study argues that the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) represents a theoretically distinct heritage type insufficiently recognized within existing World Heritage evaluation frameworks: infrastructural heritage, in which the primary heritage significance resides not in technical achievements or aesthetic qualities but in the cosmopolitan urban societies, cultural formations, and social institutions that the infrastructure generated through its construction and operation. Through close analysis of the CER’ s historical development and its role in generating Harbin’ s distinctive urban character, the study identifies Outstanding Universal Value under UNESCO Criteria (ii), (iv), and (vi), and proposes a serial nomination strategy addressing the challenges of cross-border governance, partial physical integrity, and the interpretation of a colonial heritage with morally contested dimensions. The study further argues that a successful CER nomination would require a conceptual revision of how railway heritage is evaluated globally—shifting from a paradigm centered on engineering innovation to one capable of recognizing infrastructure as a primary agent of cultural-landscape formation and of cosmopolitan social production—and that enacting such a revision is itself part of the nomination’ s contribution: an ‘infrastructural heritage’ framework. This framework has applications well beyond the CER itself.
