Page 93 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

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

“Weak participation” in rural cultural benefiting project

and its reform strategy: A survey from 282 administra-
tive villages in 21 provinces across the country 〇a ①

FU Caiwu & WANG Wende 〇b ∗

National Institute of Cultural Development in Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

Abstract
Although the Cultural Benefiting Projects (CBP), led by the government in rural areas, have played an
active role in promoting grassroots rural cultural construction, it has sparked widespread controversy
due to performance issues. Should or should not the government shift its focus away from CBP at the
national policy level? The survey of 282 administrative villages in 21 provinces across the country
conducted by Wuhan University’s “Culture Frontline” in 2018 found a strong demand for public cultural
services for rural residents who generally approve of the CBP. However, they express high expectations
and relatively low satisfaction with the project, interpreted as “weak participation” (Nonparticipation
or Tokenism). The result also demonstrates that for the supply-side (the government), factors such as
service quality, service attitude, environment, facilities and equipment the project provided have notable
impacts on the rural residents’ approval degree to the CBP. For the consumer-side (the audience), their
sociodemographic variables such as gender, age, occupation, education, family income, and the distance
from the administrative village to the urban area significantly affect the rural residents’ approval degree.
Residents’ recognition for CBP is restricted by both the government and residents’ cultural capital. The
approval degree is not wholly reflecting the quality and intensity of the services provided, showing
an asymmetric relationship between the supplying effort of CBP and residents’ approval degree. The
findings then lead to the conclusion that the acceptance and consumption of public services by rural
residents is a selective acceptance process based on their cultural capital and preferences, and that
blindly strengthening supply-side product quality or investment scale may not increase the approval
degree of rural residents and rebuild the rationality of the CBP. Consequently, it challenges the formative
management (vertical control) of the CBP formed under the planning system. It has been apparent that
the characteristics of superficial and weak participation of the CBP require a general supply-demand
bilateral transformation, the establishment of a “nation-individual” incentive mechanism of cultural
consumption by the digital information technology platforms, and the goal-setting of consumer-side
policy innovation to guide rural public culture policy path for service transformation, and to explore
public-private partnership of cultural ownership in the countryside in order to build new shared cultural
spaces at the rural grassroots level.

Keywords
Rural public cultural service, Cultural benefiting project, Project system, Satisfactory level of residents,
Cultural consumption

The origin of rural Cultural Benefiting Projects (CBP) can be traced back to the 1990s. To
① This article is an outcome of the major project “Research on Cultural Construction in the Rural Vitalization Strategy”(No.
18ZD24) supported by National Social Science Fund of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to WANG Wende, Email: qimingxing@whu.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0003-2000-3914.