From Output to Co-creation: The Localized Innovation, Intangible Cultural Heritage Value Reconstruction, and Tourism Integration Pathways of Chinese Tea Culture in ASEAN

Against the backdrop of the deepened development of the "Belt and Road" Initiative and the implementation of RCEP, the external dissemination of Chinese tea culture is undergoing a paradigm shift from one-way output to twoway co-creation.Grounded at the theoretical intersection of cross-cultural communication and the living inheritance of intangible cultural heritage, and incorporating the disciplinary perspective of tourism management, this paper explores the localized evolution, value sublimation, and integration pathways with the tourism industry that Chinese tea culture has undergone upon entering ASEAN societies.The research posits that various sectors in ASEAN are not passive recipients; rather, through the creative transformation of tea drinking forms, social functions, cultural meanings, and tourism experiences, they have achieved deep interaction with Chinese tea culture.This process of localized innovation and integration not only enriches the expressive forms of Chinese tea-related intangible cultural heritage, promoting its value connotation to evolve from a national heritage to a regionally shared resource, but also provides a concrete cultural bond and industrial interface for developing China-ASEAN tea culture tourism thematic routes and deepening the construction of a people-to-people community.