China's Cultural System Reform
China’s Cultural System Reform, initiated in the early 2000s, aims to invigorate the previously sluggish cultural industries, which have been stimulated by three decades of planned economic reforms, to the open market.
Many believe that the reform, which is relevant to a number of industries, including, media, publishing, film and performing, has shaped China’s future just as much as the country’s economic transformation. The reform was given particular emphasis following the sixth plenary of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which concluded on October 18, 2011. At the session, the Party declared its intention to stimulate cultural development to increase the country’s soft power in the world.
The added value of China’s cultural industries has hovered around the three percent mark since 2000 for its contribution to the GDP. The figure is out of step with the rapid pace of China’s economic growth. Zhao Qizheng, the incumbent dean of Renmin University’s School of Journalism and an ardent advocate of public diplomacy, called China “a country with huge cultural deficits”. He said: “If China continues to export televisions rather than TV programs, it will remain a manufacturing center, despite its 5,000-year-old civilization.”
Liu Binjie, director of the General Administration of Press and Publication and Copyright Administration, said China’s culture and art lack creativity because 90 percent of those industries’ output is not originally designed. “That’s why Chinese love foreign blockbusters, said Liu. “Big foreign films overwhelm ours in terms of creativity and promotion.”
China has opened part of the cultural sector to private ownership in order to boost the domestic cultural market. In addition, it has undertaken a systematic reform of State-owned groups, encouraging them to convert to stake-holding cooperation. The restructuring program started to boom between 2006 and 2007, when a number of media, including, Shanghai Xinhua Media Co. Ltd., Xinhua Winshare and Liaoning Publishing and Media Co. Ltd., were listed in the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Ltd ,on A-share market via reverse merger or initial public offerings (IPO).
However, the country still needs laws and specific policies, following a set of revised legislation, including Copyright Law, Regulations on Administrations of Films, Regulations on Publication Administration and Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performance, to guarantee a regulated market for the reform.
Qi Yongfeng, a researcher at the Communication University of China’s Institute for Cultural Studies, also stressed the need for immediate action.“Now is the optimum time to deepen culture system reforms,” he said. In an interview with the bilingual business magazine Caijing, Qi commented that the reform should focus on four key aspects: lowering the threshold for investments, allowing cross-region integration, improving legislation in the cultural industries and opening the sector to foreign capital.
