Versioned Governance as Cultural Buffer: How Lineage Villages in Huizhou, China, Negotiate Authenticity Under Heritage Marketisation and Digital Acceleration

Rural heritage villages in China face compounding pressures from heritagisation policies, tourism marketisation, and digital platform logics, which together threaten the cultural integrity of lineage-based communities. While existing scholarship has shifted from treating authenticity as a fixed property to viewing it as a negotiated construct, a critical gap persists: the literature does not explain how local actors operationally manage the simultaneous demands of external governance compliance and internal cultural continuity. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted across ritual spaces, tourism settings, and digital platforms in Huizhou lineage villages (March–August 2025)—including over 30 h of in-depth interviews with 18 cultural practitioners and two years of online community ethnography (2023–2025) within Huizhou traditional village cultural liaison groups—this study examines the micro-level strategies through which communities respond to Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD). The study introduces the concept of Versioned Governance: a community-enacted mechanism through which cultural authenticity is strategically differentiated into ritual, performative, and pedagogical versions. Through spatial partitioning, temporal staggering, and linguistic encoding, lineage groups create cultural buffer zones that mediate between sacred practice and public display without compromising ethical coherence. This framework reframes authenticity not as an essential property nor as mere negotiated perception, but as a processual and political achievement—continuously produced through the interplay of structural discipline and local agency. The findings contribute to critical heritage studies and offer practical implications for cultural land-use and heritage governance policy in non-Western rural contexts.