By Zhang Jiaqi
China has kept enhancing public cultural services across the country over the past decade, benefiting the people with more diverse, convenient, and popular cultural products and services, officials said at a press conference held on Thursday.
On Aug. 18, 2022, the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China holds a press conference in Beijing about the publicity and cultural work in the new era. [Photo by Liu Jian/China SCIO]
According to Vice Minister of Culture and Tourism Lu Yingchuan, China increased the number of libraries and cultural centers from approximately 6,300 a decade ago to 95,000 in 2021 by setting up branches, and offered 3,844 terabytes of digital resources including e-books and videos over the past decade.
In addition, China has promulgated laws on public cultural service guarantee, public libraries, and museums, and issued standards for basic public cultural services, local implementation standards, and corresponding guidance catalogs over the past 10 years.
According to Sun Yeli, deputy director of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, at the end of 2021, China had 2,542 radio and television stations, 3,215 public libraries, 3,316 cultural centers, 6,183 museums, over 40,000 cultural stations in towns, townships, and sub-districts, 570,000 village-level comprehensive cultural service centers, and 580,000 rural libraries.
All public libraries, cultural centers, art galleries, comprehensive cultural stations, and most museums are open to the general public for free, Sun said.
In 2021, public libraries across the country registered 103 million readers, and public cultural institutions served over 800 million people, according to Sun. Museums nationwide held 36,000 exhibitions and 320,000 educational activities, receiving nearly 800 million visitors and logging 4.1 billion visits on relevant websites.
Furthermore, according to Meng Dong, vice minister of the National Radio and Television Administration of China, radio and television networks had gone from connecting every village to linking up every rural household in 10 years' time. By the end of 2021, radio and television programs were accessible to 99.48% and 99.66% of the population, respectively, and radio and television public services are becoming higher-quality and more diverse.
