Page 107 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

106 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

audience do not participate in rural cultural projects (fake participation or symbolic participation),
and some respondents do not care about the quality of these projects.
The above results are also confirmed in other scholars’ surveys. For example, LI Jing’s
investigation of a local theatre troupe of DRA in Hubei found that the “cultural and art troupe” that
undertook to send operas to the countryside had a “passive attitude when coping with the task”
in the implementation process, and the content of the program is repetitive with no significant
changes which means a program list can be used for multiple performances. “On the stage, some
actors are not full of stage emotion, causing negative effects on the whole performance. The
actors and staff left the stage in a hurry as the performance ends, without paying attention to the
audience’s emotional acceptance and the quality of the performance.”
At the same time, some publicity activities by co-sponsors (legal knowledge, medical and health
knowledge, etc.) are also poor jobs, “some co-sponsor staff leave the publicity manuals or publicity
panels at the site of the event and then focus on playing with their cell phones until the end of the
event. Then, they will bring back the manuals that were not given away.”
As a local co-organizer, the township and village committee “just wants to finish the task, the
cultural activities are not well organized”. The townships and village councils are often “just trying
to get the job done”. Some of them are not ready for the day of the program (J. LI, 2019). Although
rural residents have public cultural needs, they are not interested in the government’s public
services “delivered” to them, so they participate passively. In general, it is a “pseudo-participation
level of ‘government regulation’” or a “symbolic participation level of ‘knowing’”, showing a
fundamental characteristic of “weak participation” (J. Y. LI & ZHAO, 2019).
Through the analysis of the optimal scale regression model, we found that the approval of the
CBP by rural residents was influenced by the quality of the supply products (services) of the
project, the residents’ demand and the distance from the administrative village to the urban area (see
Table 9). The results are summarized as follows.
Firstly, the quality of activities, staff’s service attitude, venue and environment, and facilities
and equipment significantly affect rural residents’ approval of cultural projects from the supply
side. Among them, the programs’ quality significantly affects rural residents’ recognition of the
CBP except for the RL; the service level of staff greatly influences rural residents’ approval of the
RRTC and RL; the venue and environment have an evident impact on rural residents’ approval of
the NCIRS, RFP, DRA, and FSFP; the condition of facilities and equipment has apparent effects
on the audience’s approval of the NCIRS and DRA.
Secondly, socio-demographic variables such as gender, age, occupation, education level, and
household income of rural residents significantly affect the approval of cultural projects by rural
residents from the demand side. From the gender perspective, men’s approval of the RFP, RL and
FSFP is higher than women’s. From the age perspective, the older group has a higher approval
of the RRTC and DRA than the younger group, and the approval of DRA was significantly lower
among residents under 18 years old than among residents 18 years old and above (middle-aged and