New Progress Achieved in Jiaxing in Improving Public Cultural Services
Culture is the soul of a nation. Ensuring that the public enjoy healthy and rich spiritual and cultural lives is essential for building a high-quality demonstration zone of common prosperity. According to reports, China’s first local regulation on promoting balanced development of public cultural services, “Regulations on Promoting Balanced Development of Public Cultural Services” (hereinafter referred to as the Regulations) — has been recently approved at the 13th Conference of the Standing Committee of the 14th Provincial People’s Congress of Zhejiang and will take effect on January 1, 2025. How will the Regulations achieve and enhance Jiaxing’s balanced and high-quality development of public cultural services?
With the balanced development as the theme, Jiaxing will work hard to remove the last bottleneck against the improvement of public cultural services.
The Regulations was designated as a Class II legislative project in 2023 and was upgraded to the Class I legislative one in February 2024 by the Standing Committee of Municipal People’s Congress of Jiaxing, symbolizing Jiaxing is attaching increasing importance to standardizing and balancing urban-rural public cultural services.
During the drafting process of the Regulations, Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism of Jiaxing and Bureau of Justice of Jiaxing conducted field visits, held symposiums for deep insights into the challenges of balanced public cultural service development, and organized functional departments and expert panels to make multiple thematic researches on how to address key issues in this field. On October 30, 2024, the Regulations was reviewed and passed by the 24th Conference of the Standing Committee of the 9th Municipal People’s Congress of Jiaxing and was subsequently approved by the 13th Conference of the Standing Committee of the 14th Provincial People’s Congress of Zhejiang on November 27, 2024.
The enactment of this Regulations marks an innovative breakthrough for improving Jiaxing’s public cultural services and a significant advancement of the legal system in China’s public culture.
Comprising 25 articles, the Regulations outlines governments and departments’ responsibilities, service facilities and supplies, social participation and incentive mechanisms. It centers on the theme of “balanced development”, so it is of significantly visionary legislative.
Balanced development is the foremost requirement for high-quality public cultural services, according to Zhou Jing, secretary of the Party Committee and also director of Bureau of Culture and Tourism of Jiaxing. Jiaxing has long been a national and provincial leader in this field, and has ranked first in Zhejiang’s grassroots public cultural service assessments for ten consecutive years and topped the East China region in the construction of demonstration zones of the second round of national public cultural service systems. It has pioneered models in constructing integrated urban-rural cultural systems. “However, disparities still exist between groups of people and urban and rural regions. The Regulations aims to rid the last bottleneck of service delivery to achieve sustainable high-quality public cultural services,” said Zhou.
The Regulations highlights six key points:
It takes balanced public cultural services as an important measure to promote common prosperity and include them into local laws and regulations, clarifies the responsibilities of all levels of governments, takes the establishment of “quality cultural life circles within people’s 10-minute walks” as the benchmarks of public cultural services, institutionalizes Jiaxing’s best practices in public cultural services, creates favorable conditions for the future high-quality development and for residents to enjoy richer public cultural products and services, encourages social forces to provide public cultural services.
New public cultural service ecosystems have been established jointly to benefit all.
It is necessary for rural areas and schools, the vital hubs for public cultural services, to make innovation, integrate resources, and forge government-led public cultural service systems invested by various organizations.
The Regulations stipulates that public cultural space and facilities shall be provided in new residential and rural communities, and encourages and supports the construction of “artistic villages” to promote the popularity of rural arts.
How has Jiaxing promoted the balanced development of public cultural services? Jiaxing has attached importance to improving public cultural service “hardware” and “software” in implementing “Zhejiang’s Green Rural Revival Program”, according to Pei Haoran, deputy director of Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of Jiaxing. In the future, Jiaxing will continue to construct public cultural service facilities and endeavor to take the lead in constructing the future-oriented villages, expand cultural spaces by leveraging local artistic and heritage resources, and enhance rural cultural life and “quality cultural life circles within people’s 10-minute walks”.
The Regulations stipulates education authorities shall instruct schools to integrate public cultural facilities into education, and other related departments shall provide strong supports to maximize educational roles; governments at all levels shall work harder to improve public reading infrastructure, create good reading environment and cultivate residents’ reading habits.
“We will continue to encourage the young to read more, foster socialist core values, issue systematic reading action programs for students to keep reading regular. We will cooperate with Library of Jiaxing to establish book-sharing stations at schools and inspire students to share their reading experience through the platform “National Smart Education Reading”; we will develop various quality study-tour programs to extend learning beyond schools to further enhance the fame of our education brand ‘Enjoying Excellent Education in Jiaxing’”, said Gu Jianzhong, deputy director of Bureau of Education of Jiaxing.
