Actors perform during an acrobatic show in Sheyang County of Yancheng, east China's Jiangsu Province, Nov. 20, 2020. The show, which reappeared the legendary journey of Chinese merchants of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) along the Silk Road, was presented during the 14th Red-crowned Crane Culture and Art Festival on Friday.Photo:Xinhua

A country thrives only if its culture thrives. China is no exception.  During the process of China's transformation of becoming rich and strong with the world's largest middle class, it will inevitably see its culture subsequently enriched as a whole.

An important premise and symbol of a country's cultural prosperity lies in the continuous provision of public cultural services for ordinary citizens. At present, a pivotal task will be to boost public cultural services at the grassroots levels and aim for these new established targets.

In recent years, tremendous achievements have been made in the public cultural service sector. Today, the supply of diversified public cultural products and improved standardization is yielding fruitful results. However, there are still obvious shortcomings in terms of equal access of public cultural services, especially at the grassroots levels. 

For example, comprehensive cultural service centers have been established in some rural areas, but they lack visitors. Most of the books in the centers have not been borrowed or read for a long time. In some places, the supply of grassroots-level cultural services depends entirely on the demands of the local people. 

Many public cultural services agencies at the county- and township-level are short of professional talents. In many places, infrastructure and hardware such as computers and electronic-readers are fully equipped but lack adequate digital products.

The above-mentioned problems not only affect the cultural fulfillment of ordinary people, but they may slow the pace of building a culturally prosperous country. Therefore, we must take practical and effective measures to improve primary-level public cultural services as soon as possible.

First, efforts should be made to promote the equal access of public cultural services. We must take practical and effective measures to ensure public cultural resources are being made available at the grassroots level, even remote areas, in order to make up for the weakness. It is necessary to integrate the construction of rural public cultural service systems in order to revitalize townships and alleviate poverty by pooling funds, resources and talents. 

Second, we have to strengthen supply-side structural reforms of primary-level public cultural services. We must adhere to the principle of providing what the ordinary people need by establishing a demand-oriented mechanism and improving the pertinence and effectiveness of grassroots public cultural services.

Third, special attention should be paid to some key groups, such as minors, the elderly, the disabled and migrant worker populations. These people have a huge demand for public cultural services, but have been neglected under the traditional public cultural service system.

Fourth, we have to make full use of digital and internet technologies to innovate primary-level public cultural service systems. The digitization of public cultural services is an important means to solve the inadequate supply of primary-level public cultural services. In the future, the digitalization of public culture services must be placed in a more prominent place. 

In other words, we have to strengthen the cultural construction at the grassroots level, build multi-functional cloud platforms that combine public cultural services and market supervision, in order to realize the massive coverage and rapid dissemination of public cultural services. If we do this, we will ensure that vast swathes of ordinary people are able to enjoy high-quality public cultural services.

The author is a former deputy captain of the Beijing Military Region Air Force Cultural Publicity Team, and now works as a singer. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn