On August 27^th, the Information Office of the State Council held a news conference of building a society of moderate prosperity through culture and tourism. Hu Heping, minister of culture and tourism, talked about cultural public service as well as the guarantee and improvement of people’s livelihood. He said that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism would push forward cultural public service to make it more standard and equally distributed in different places; promote the integrated development of cultural public service in rural and urban regions; innovate the implementation of the project to benefit people through culture and launch mass cultural events, so as to construct a modern cultural public service system; to better guarantee people’s basic cultural interest and to satisfy people’s basic cultural need.

    Hu Heping said that cultural public service was about solving problems relating to reading books and newspaper, watching performances, visiting exhibitions and participating in cultural activities, so this kind of service was the main way to realize, safeguard and develop people’s basic cultural interest as well as a major example of people-centered development thoughts in cultural construction. Since the 18^th CPC National Congress. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism had been implementing decisions and arrangement of the State Council and the CPC Central Committee to create a modern cultural public service system that was convenient and effective with basic and equal access for people in both urban and rural areas, so as to enable people to have adequate, abundant and high-quality spiritual and cultural life.

    Hu Heping introduced the work of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism from four aspects. The first was stronger guarantee for people’s basic cultural interest. The government stipulated and implemented the law on public cultural service guarantee, the law on public library and the law on museums, national basic public service standards and standards or service contents for provincial, municipal and county governments to clarify the scope of people’s cultural interest guarantee. The authority would also enable people in different places to have different access to public cultural service and promote projects including “Chinese opera in rural areas”, employment and poverty alleviation through intangible cultural heritage and other people-benefiting project with culture. As a result, more people could share the achievement of cultural development. The second was to perfect facilities and internet for public cultural service. At the end of 2020, China had 3212 public libraries, 618 art galleries, 5788 museums, 3327 art museums, more than 40 thousand art stations and 575.4 thousand comprehensive cultural service centers of village level. All public libraries, art galleries, art stations, art museums and more than 90% of museums were opened to the public for free, so the government had met the goal of “no barrier nor threshold”. The authority also promoted a county-level system for art galleries and libraries and establish a new-type of public cultural space including urban reading room, cultural station and rural cultural hall, all of which were loved by people. Third, high-quality public cultural products and services needed to be more abundant on a daily bases. The government should adapt to people’s need and launch mass cultural event. During the Spring Festival of this year, the online and offline participation of national online “Rural Spring Festival Gala” was 124 million, making a small rural stage into a large social and people-benefiting stage. Mass singing event named “Sing a song for the CPC” was organized to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the CPC with 170 million participators. Many primary-level cultural events and cultural voluntary services were organized. For example, in Inner Mongolia, “Wulan Muqi” (a Inner Mongol revolutionary cultural troupe mounted on horseback) had been performing in pasture areas for decades to offer culture, service and happiness for herdsman. Forth, the vitality of public cultural service had been improved. The government needed to follow the informatization, enhance the digital construction of public culture, launch the promotion of digital library, build a cloud platform of national public culture and build panorama digital experience platform to let people enjoy high-quality public cultural service without leaving their homes. The authority needed to launch cloud purchase conference for public culture and tourism products to provide a platform to connect supply and demand and to introduce social participation.