Chinese authorities urge boosting quality of public cultural services

BEIJING — Chinese authorities have urged efforts to boost the high-quality development of public cultural services, according to a recent statement.

Jointly released by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Finance, the statement aims to address the insufficient supply of high-quality public cultural services through a raft of measures targeting key areas.

It proposes steps to beef up the standardization and digitalization of public cultural services, optimize the primary-level networks that provide public cultural services and expand public cultural spaces in rural and urban areas.

More efforts are urged to make the best of county-level libraries and cultural centers, use well-functioning cultural stations in towns and townships as sub-centers for public cultural services and create more refined book-reading and arts space for the public, the statement noted.

The statement also called for efforts to invigorate the cultural life of rural residents, and incorporate rural cultural development into China's rural governance model.