Page 114 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

Restrictions on incremental financial investment in

the construction of modern public cultural service
system: Based on investigations of county public

libraries〇a
①

1
2〇b *
FU Caiwu & YUE Nan 〇
1 National Institute of Cultural Development, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
2 The Center of Traditional Chinese Cultural Studies, Wuhan 430072, China

Abstract
The establishment of the goal of building a national public cultural service system in 2015 has set
up a clear goal that the state public financial investment should maintain a steady growth. However,
through continuous observation of public libraries at the county-level, it was found that the traditional
management mode of “increase output by increasing public investment” is losing its strength due to the
dual constraints of growing institutional costs and the transformation of residents’ cultural consumption
patterns. On the whole, the cultural industry has entered an overlapping period of “soft contraction” and
structural transformation. The rising disparity between eastern, central, western China and northeastern
China in the 21st century combined with different variables such as financial subsidies, employees,
population base and GDP affects the performance of public resources in county libraries, leading to
ineffectiveness of the format management mode formed under the planning system to varying degrees
and “L-type” performance mode in county-level public library. To raise the performance of grass-
roots public cultural institutions, it is no longer merely a technical issue of “increasing staff and adding
money”, but mainly the issue of deepening the reform of the structural management in the industrial
system. At the macro level, it is necessary to go beyond the traditional ideas of largely increasing public
input to motivate business development and performance improvement, and establish the policy design
principles on the premise of “increasing public investment” and “innovation management system”. At
the middle level, the grass-roots units of culture should explore the establishment of independent status,
improve the corporate governance structure, and transform from “input-driven mode” to “management
innovation-driven mode”. At the practical level, the government should further improve the system of
purchasing public cultural services by social forces, explore the establishment of a voting mechanism
for residents’ consumption of public cultural products, and enlarge the leverage function of the incentive
policy which guides the consumer-side to supply-side reform.

Keywords
Library, Public cultural service system, Cultural management system, Performance evaluation, Policy
design

① This article is an outcome of the major project “Study on the Financial Guarantee Standard and Safeguard Method in the
Construction and Operation of Public Cultural Service System” (No.13ZD04) supported by National Social Science Foundation of
China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to YUE Nan, Email: yuenan123@sina.cn,ORCID: 0000-0001-6234-1167