Restrictions on incremental financial investment in the construction of modern public cultural service system: Based on investigations of county public libraries

摘要

The establishment of the goal of building a national public cultural service system in 2015 has set up a clear goal that the state public financial investment should maintain a steady growth. However, through continuous observation of public libraries at the county-level, it was found that the traditional management mode of "increase output by increasing public investment" is losing its strength due to the dual constraints of growing institutional costs and the transformation of residents’ cultural consumption patterns. On the whole, the cultural industry has entered an overlapping period of "soft contraction" and structural transformation. The rising disparity between eastern, central, western China and northeastern China in the 21 st century combined with different variables such as financial subsidies, employees, population base and GDP affects the performance of public resources in county libraries, leading to ineffectiveness of the format management mode formed under the planning system to varying degrees and "L-type" performance mode in county-level public library. To raise the performance of grassroots public cultural institutions, it is no longer merely a technical issue of "increasing staff and adding money", but mainly the issue of deepening the reform of the structural management in the industrial system. At the macro level, it is necessary to go beyond the traditional ideas of largely increasing public input to motivate business development and performance improvement, and establish the policy design principles on the premise of "increasing public investment" and "innovation management system". At the middle level, the grass-roots units of culture should explore the establishment of independent status, improve the corporate governance structure, and transform from "input-driven mode" to "management innovation-driven mode". At the practical level, the government should further improve the system of purchasing public cultural services by social forces, exp