Campaign aims to bring culture closer to residents

What more could a city need when its per capita GDP is more than $16,000 a year?

"Culture," said Chen Rong, one of Suzhou's senior officials, sitting in the e-reading room of a local library branch on a street dating to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279).

Chen, an archaeologist-turned-director of the Bureau of Culture, Broadcasting, Television, Press and Publication, is leading a government campaign to make cultural facilities more easily accessible for every resident.

"That's every resident, urban or rural," she said. "It means that he or she will need to walk no more than 10 minutes from home to reach our service network."

The campaign is on the city's government's to-do list for the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), Chen said.

One component of the so-called 10-Minute Campaign is to extend the public library system, to branch out with more service centers and reading rooms.

With government subsidies, Suzhou has introduced a practice where the public library pays for readers to buy newly published books, provided they return them after they're finished.

Readers can also use their smartphones to access the library system to decide on book titles to buy. Librarians are available to help process requests online.

It's all part of an incentive package designed to encourage residents of the city to spend more time reading, Chen said.

The other component of the campaign, she said, is to open up more venues for pingtan, a form of usually lengthy dramatic storytelling - sometimes lasting several months - that combines the singing of ballads with dialogue that originated in the area some 400 years ago and is widely appreciated across the Yangtze River Delta.

(Shanghai Start 06/24/2016 page14)