Page 16 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

RAO Quan / The experience and transformation of Chinese librarianship 015

and more traditional jobs will be replaced (Zhang, 2018). At the same time, more new knowledge-
intensive and intelligence-intensive posts will be created. The Oxford University has predicted that
in the future, 99% of office staff and 65% of professional librarians will be replaced by computers.
As more librarians are liberated from traditional work, libraries have also gained new opportunities
to concentrate on human resources and improve the level of knowledge services. In particular, the
constant development of technologies such as big data, cloud computing and knowledge graphs,
serves as a basis for smart services of libraries.

2.4 Comprehensive implementation of cultural development strategy

China boasts an ancient civilization of 5,000 years and profound cultural heritage. Today,
promoting the prosperity and progress of Chinese culture is an inevitable choice for China as a
large developing country in its drive for speeding up modernization.
The past 40 years of Reform and Opening-up has witnessed fruitful results of China’s cultural
development. However, it is still relatively lagging behind economic growth, and it is urgent to
complement the deficiencies. In recent years, China has made a series of strategic deployments
to promote the building of a socialist cultural power. For domestic cultural policy, China calls
on “holding high the banner of socialist direction, enhancing the basis for cultural development,
and fostering the appeal of Chinese culture”. While on the international arena, China promotes
exchanges and mutual learning of civilizations, and the building of a community with a shared
future for mankind. Cultural development has become an important part of five-sphere integrated
approach to building socialism with Chinese characteristics. Cultural self-confidence is regarded as
the more basic, broader, and deeper one in China’s “four self-confidences”. Enhancing the leading
role of cultural development is undoubtedly a favorable policy for libraries, whose core mission
lies in cultural protection and inheritance. This means that the library sector can enjoy a better
development environment in the context of cultural prosperity.
The building of a public cultural service system has become an important direction of national
cultural policy. Since 2005, governments of all levels have taken steps in building a public cultural
service system, promoting the inheritance and development of excellent Chinese traditional
culture, calling on the free access to public cultural institutions, and fostering the development
of public digital culture. Libraries constitute an important part of national public cultural service
system, which indicates new and higher requirements for libraries’ capacity-building in order to
better serve China’s cultural development.
With the economic development and the improvement of residents’ income level, the Engel
coefficient of urban and rural residents in China is in decline. In 2018, the Engel coefficient of
the national residents was 28.4%, which was a half drop from 1978. The consumption structure of
residents has changed significantly. From 1992 to 2017, the average growth rate of urban residents’
cultural consumption (14%) was much higher than the GDP growth rate (9.7%) during the same