Page 94 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

FU Caiwu & WANG Wende / “Weak participation” in rural cultural benefiting project 093
and its reform strategy: A survey from 282 administrative villages in 21 provinces across the country

inherit the Chinese traditional culture and enrich the spiritual and cultural life of the masses, the
government started the Dramas in the Rural Areas (DRA) project in 1995; to solve the problems
of rural residents in listening to the radio, watching TV, and watching movies, the government
also launched the Rural Radio and Television Coverage (RRTV) and the Rural Film Projection
(RFP) in 1998. In 2007, the 17th National Congress of the CPC put forward the CBP concept and
development goal to promote the significant development and prosperity of socialist culture and
ensure that the fruits of development benefit the people. More than 20 years have passed since
the implementation of the project and attention to issues, such as service efficiency, has aroused
academic discussion. Is it necessary to further adjust, optimize, and upgrade the project with the
development of digital technology and the change of consumption environment? These issues can
only be resolved by studying the cultural participation of residents in the public cultural service
system (S. H. LI & J. Y. ZHAO, 2019).
Based on the government operation process of “input-management-output-result” (NI,
2007), Chinese scholars have proposed performance evaluation standards based on the target
dimensions of effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness (ZHUO & G. C. XU, 2010; ZHENG &
LIAO, 2013). However, as a public service, the performance evaluation of CBP cannot be
separated from the cultural participation behaviour of residents. When discussing the low
performance and insufficient resident participation, two different views emerged in academia
and brought up different reform paths accordingly. 1) Insufficient public investment, especially
at the grassroots level, is the main reason for CBP’s ineffectiveness or low performance. The
problem is exposed by the decreasing ratio of national public culture financial expenditure to total
financial expenditure year by year (YAO & OUYANG, 2018; X. Q. XU, 2016), the differences
in financial investment between different sectors (Q.S. WANG, 2011), the differences in public
cultural investment between urban and rural areas (Q.S. WANG; Y. X. MA, 2013), the fact that
the primary cultural sector has more affairs power than financial power (W. LIU & C. MA, 2013),
and the lack of human resources in rural culture (ZHOU, 2014), and so on. The scholars advocate
increasing public investment and integrating public resources to expand the scale of rural public
cultural services and improve the quality and performance of rural public cultural services. The
examples include promoting the equalization of regional and urban-rural public cultural services
by increasing investment (L. C. WU, 2014, 2019) and supporting rural public cultural services
through the general branch system of county libraries (cultural centers) linked to township
cultural stations (G.X. LI, 2019b; JIN, 2014). Moreover, most of them support the supply-side
optimization in the cultural field, where the general-branch system of county-level public cultural
facilities is its typical path. 2）The main reason for the “efficiency deficit” of cultural projects is
the management system rather than the scale of investment (FU & Q. T. XU, 2017; Q. L. LUO,
2017; FU & Q. LIU, 2020). Under the “top-down” industrial system decision-making model,
select preferences often dominate cultural consumption preferences at the grassroots level, and
most of them deviate from the actual needs of farmers (YE, 1997; QU, 2017), leading to the