Page 152 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

CHEN Geng & BAI Haohui / Inspection and reflection on the free open policy of public cultural venues in China: Centered on the public libraries 151

years, the central government has all the funds in place, but the local apportionment has not been
fully implemented. In the first year of the implementation of the free admission policy, Li (2011)
proposed the phenomenon that some districts have the problem of “only sharing the central
financial subsidy funds, but not taking the local financial support funds”, which appeared in the
funding apportionment mechanism. After several years of policy implementation, this situation
is even more common. Expressed as: the guarantee situations are poor in some regions that
the municipal finance apportions the funding but the provincial finance doesn’t. For instance,
according to the data of five public libraries surveyed in Guizhou Province, only one county-level
public library was fulfilled; the local funds of five research libraries in Ningxia Hui Autonomous
Region were not implemented. Corresponding to this situation is that the guarantee situations in
the regions where the provincial finance apportions the responsibility are better. Taking Hainan
Province as an example, due to the establishment of the apportionment mechanism of the province,
cities and counties, as well as the provincial finance responses the main part, the free admission
funds are all in place. In 2015, the local supporting funds for Sanya City Library was paid 125,000
Yuan by the province and the city respectively. The 100,000 Yuan fund undertook by the local
finance of Ding’an County and Changjiang Li Autonomous County Library was all implemented
〇a ①
by the provincial finance .
3) Policy outcomes: The subsidy standard based on the hierarchical differences is difficult to
fulfill the needs of public libraries that have differences in scale.
Unlike the policy implementation which focuses on the specific action measures of government
output, when we try to establish policy outcomes, we are more concerned with changes in the
environment or political system caused by policy actions (X.M. Wang, 2009). That is to say, the
discussion and analysis of the policy outcomes is not limited to the total number of funds invested
by the state finances in the free admission project, but rather to fully understand its role and
influence on the entire public cultural venue and its regional culture.
China’s vast territory and cultural development are extremely unbalanced. Public libraries at
different levels or in different regions of the same level have large differences in infrastructure,
staff scale, service content and number of service people. This means that different venues will
face different implementation costs when implementing the standardized national policy of free
admission. However, the current 500,000 Yuan and 200,000 Yuan subsidy standards implemented
by all municipal and county-level venues only consider the factors of different scales, service
scope and number of people caused by the difference between the “upper and lower level” of
public libraries. While the “horizontal scale” difference between different venues in the same level
hasn’t been considered, the free admission of large-scale and well-developed public libraries in the
same level cannot achieve effective “compensation” of funds. This may form a potential inhibition
on the enthusiasm of some well-developed public libraries.

① Data Source: The “Culture Frontline” survey of National Institute of Cultural Development in Wuhan University in July-August
2016.