Page 95 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

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

predicament of “structural imbalance between supply and demand” for grassroots public cultural
products (W. L. LIN, 2007; FAN & X. M. LI, 2014). In the decentralized vertical structure of
the “central-provincial-county-township level”, cultural projects are influenced by different
behavioural logic of the central government, local governments, and the general public (S.S.
CHEN, 2014). From provinces, cities, counties to grassroots village committees, most of them
follow the “logic of administration” rather than the “logic of service” (L. C. WU, 2012). Some
of the cultural projects do not fully match with the daily needs of the people (B. CHEN, 2015),
resulting in problems such as the marginalization of the role of cultural services, the deviation
of cultural construction carriers, the disconnection between supply and demand of cultural
contents, and the shallowness of cultural mechanisms (SUN, 2016). These problems eventually
lead to the “institutional idleness” and “de-functionalization of tools” in the cultural construction
dimension (L.S. WANG, 2014). The rural residents’ “weak participation” in public culture is only
a “projection” of the system. Therefore, we suggest that the supply-side reform should be guided
by institutional innovation on the cultural consumption side, including autonomy heteronomy (J.
CHEN, 2017), government purchase of public cultural services (FU, HOU, & SHEN, 2018; G.X.
LI, 2019a), design optimization of service dissemination channel (CAO, YANG, & Q. LIN, 2014),
and construction of a government-led mechanism for the participation of multiple social forces in
rural public cultural service provision (S. H. LI & ZHAO, 2019; LUO, 2017).
Both points of view are coherent, but the latter seems to be more scientific and feasible in
guiding the policies and measures of supply-side reform through institutional innovation on
the consumption side. On the other hand, this also poses a higher requirement for theoretical
exploration, namely, to go deeper into the motivation and behaviour of residents’ cultural
participation based on the “institutional idleness” and to explore the feedback mechanism of
residents’ participation behaviour on the government’s formatted public supply system. These
research results may promote the reform and transformation of CBP and provide essential
theoretical support for improving and optimizing the national public cultural service system.

1 Origin of the survey and sample description

The CBP is a collective term for a series of national projects to support grassroots rural cultural
construction, including RRTC, Comprehensive Cultural Stations of Township (CCST), RFP,
the National Cultural Information Resources Sharing Project (NCIRSP), the Farmers’ Sports
Fitness Project (FSFP), the Rural Library (RL), and the DRA implemented by provincial
governments nationwide in the 1990s. Scholars have already summarized the starting time,
construction goals and related policies of each CBP (FU & Q. LIU, 2020), which will not be
covered here.
In January 2015, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of
the State Council issued the Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Modern Public Cultural