Page 138 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

FU Caiwu & YUE Nan / Restrictions on incremental financial investment in the construction of 137
modern public cultural service system: Based on investigations of county public libraries

4 Policy recommendations

4.1 The policy design principle featuring “increasing public investment” and “innovating
management system” as each other’s precondition

The experience of the past four decades since the adoption of the reform and opening up shows that
the process of reforming cultural system has been closely associated with the process of building
political civilization. There is still certain space for cultural policy innovation if examined with
the principle of keeping minimal consistency with the reform of the state’s political and economic
systems. Observations of county level libraries show that “high institutional cost” still remains an
important factor hampering the improvement of the performance of fiscal investment in culture.
Improvement of the performance of the construction of the public cultural service system must be
made through reforming the management system and reducing institutional cost.
Two misleading “incomplete approaches” should be avoided in designing national cultural
policies. One is the intention to improve the level and efficiency of public service through
reforming the system, in the absence of basic public investment guarantee. The other is the
intention to improve the level and efficiency of public service through increasing public
investment, in the absence of institutional guarantee. The curve on the performance of county level
library investment from 2001 to 2015 (see Figure 2) shows that public investment performance
kept in a downward spiral after reaching a performance peak value over the period of 2003-2004;
unless there is significant institutional innovation, the trend of diminishing marginal efficiency of
public investment would be hardly reversed. In the ten years to come, performance management of
the library sector in the country will embrace a new stage featuring “increasing fiscal investment”
and “innovating management system” as each other’s precondition. To achieve the objective of
optimal or suboptimal performance, the above two factors must be synthesized: increasing public
investment must take management system reform and institutional innovation as the prerequisite;
innovating management system must be based on fiscal investment increase. Thus, top-level
design is required. The conventional approach of “increasing library staff and funds” should not be
relied; but instead, systematic design to innovate the management system should be carried out at
the macro level.

4.2 Innovating policy measures

4.2.1 Deepening the cultural system reform to establish grassroots cultural institutions as
independent entities and introducing the investment-driven mode on the basis of the management
innovation-driven mode
Observations of county level libraries show that improvement of public investment performance
is an outcome of combination of multiple factors and comprehensive effect of management and