Page 110 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

FU Caiwu & WANG Wende / “Weak participation” in rural cultural benefiting project 109
and its reform strategy: A survey from 282 administrative villages in 21 provinces across the country

awareness, low participation rates and weak participation logic in motivation. According to
Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation, civic participation can be divided into three
different levels of realization of people’s rights to participate: Nonparticipation, Tokenism, and
Citizen Power (Arnstein, 1969). From the perspective of cultural participants, LI argued that the
obligatory participation based on the family field, the occasional and dependent participation in the
social field, and the service-based participation in the community field correspond to the pseudo-
participation, tokenism, and substantive participation respectively (S. H. LI & J. Y. ZHAO, 2019).
The study found that the action logic of weak participation in rural CBP based on responsibility,
interest, and benefits is universal, manifested in the relatively low awareness rate and participation
rate. The survey of rural public services conducted by LI Shaohui’s team at Lanzhou University
also found that rural residents mostly showed pseudo-participation and symbolic participation in
the cultural projects delivered by the government (S. H. LI & J. Y. ZHAO, 2019).
The “shallowness” on the supply side and the “weak participation” on the consumption side
are the “two sides of a coin”. YAN and YE (2016) argue that the weak participation behaviour in
this weak participation field will be continuously produced and reproduced under the combined
influence of different factors and further solidified in China’s specific social context nowadays.
Thus it is becoming a severe problem that hinders the sustainable development of the rural public
cultural service system.
The phenomenon of “shallowness” and “weak participation” in the current cultural projects
is caused by many constraining deep-rooted institutions and habits on both the supply and
consumption sides (FU & Q. LIU, 2020), which essentially reflects the gap between the
government’s top-down supply and the residents’ bottom-up demand for culture. The phenomenon
result from the interaction between the external environmental mechanisms (quality of supply,
accessibility, and more) and the endogenous mechanisms that rural residents can reflect, which
is not only related to the subjective will of rural residents (intensity of consumption demand) but
also related to the urbanization and industrialization process of Chinese society since the reform
and opening up. In the central and western regions, the cultural service facilities invested by
the government have been neglected, where the participating population tends to be too old, too
young, and fragmented, indicating the CBP are not in line with the individual needs for cultural life
and social contact of most rural residents. The CBP, which should have carried the residents’ local
identity and cultural significance, have been alienated into the supply side’s (government) own
wishful thinking. “The government’s enthusiasm to promote cultural construction is far greater than
the community residents’ perception and understanding of cultural services based on their personal
meaning of life” (YAN & YE, 2016). Under the condition of residents lacking the enthusiasm
to participate, the CBP metamorphose into an institutional self-loop (“institutional idling”) of
grassroots cultural departments (L.S. WANG, 2014). Without the widespread endorsement and
participation of rural residents, the project investment (especially the incremental investment) will
aggravate the performance dilemma of the cultural projects. Therefore, the cultural projects have