Page 133 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

132 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

than the period prior to 2008, between 0.6 and 1.0. Similar to county level libraries, performance
of public libraries nationwide also began to decline and then remained between 0.6 and 1.0 after
registering a peak value over the period of 2003-2004. This shows that ever-increasing incremental
investment did not enable a rise in the performance of the library sector; but instead, it remains
in a bottleneck and can hardly make a breakthrough. Even the cultural industry sector generally
favored by the society has encountered a turning point. From 2016 to 2017, the expectation of rise
in the cultural industry sector despite of overall slowdown was replaced by the reality of “stalling
growth”. In 2009, added value of the cultural industry and related industries grew by 22.6%; the
figure reached 25.8% in 2010. But from 2013, the growth rate slowed down to 11%. The growth
trend of the cultural industry, cultivated as a pillar industry of national economy, is not satisfactory
(Wei, 2017).
“System idle” existing in grassroots cultural institutions that the research team of Wuhan
University and several scholars have observed is an outcome of combined effect of the long-lasting
supply-side expansionary fiscal policy, relatively lagging institutional reform and transformation
in culture and technology. On the one hand, development of digital information technology has
facilitated change in modes of knowledge production and information consumption; importance of
libraries has generally declined. On the other hand, in the context that residents do not recognize
public cultural products and services, grassroots cultural institutions are still receiving input of
fiscal and other public resources from the sector to sustain its self operation and self recycling,
which has gradually given rise to an introverted management mode. This mode does not match
with demand of socio-economic development and pace of change in cultural consumption and
“system idle” would be inevitable. Performance bottleneck and soft contraction emerging in
grassroots cultural institutions has given rise to a legitimate issue that the mode of supply-side
fiscal investment based on the sector is facing “fiscal investment performance” which serves
as the basis of public policies. The issue of performance has been intertwined with the overall
social context of “soft contraction”, which gave rise to an extremely complex situation facing the
construction of the modern public cultural service system. But one thing is certain, that is, the
trend of “soft contraction” in conventional cultural sectors can hardly sustain the conventional
policy model of incremental investment that features “increasing the number of staff members,
appropriating more funds and providing more business”.

3.2 Reason analysis

In implementing public cultural policies, objectives of policy implementation are either library
readers or libraries in themselves. On the one hand, the performance of county level libraries is
affected and restrained by the subjective initiative of readers (for example, illiterates would not
go to libraries). On the other hand, libraries in themselves are affected by incentive mechanism
of state policies (systems). Therefore, the authors discuss in-depth reasons from the subjective