Research on the Synergistic Evolution of the Policy Subjects of Public Cultural Services in China-Policy-Based Empirical Analysis ()
1. Introduction
Public cultural service is an important cultural undertaking in China, and is the country’s cultural calling card. The Chinese people enrich their cultural life and enhance their overall social cognition by making full use of public cultural resources. Public cultural service policies have been introduced one after another, and the study of public cultural service policies is conducive to strengthening the construction of the public cultural service system and providing policy guidance for public cultural services. Among them, the policy subject plays an important role in policy implementation. The realization of policy objectives requires the policy issuing body (government departments issuing public cultural policies) to formulate reasonable policy contents, and depends more on the effective policy implementation of the policy executing body (including government departments, enterprises and institutions and individuals involved in public cultural policies). The study of policy subjects is conducive to understanding the interaction between the subjects in the process of policy release and implementation, and provides effective guidance for policy formulation. Therefore, based on the policy text, this paper does research on the synergistic evolution of the subjects of China’s public cultural service policy, in order to make effective reference for the scientific formulation of China’s public cultural service policy in the future.
The current research on the main body of public cultural service policy is mainly divided into three aspects. One of them is the overall analysis of the policy subject, such as Cao Shujin analyzes the issuing body of public cultural service policy from the national level, and believes that the Ministry of Culture is the first policy issuing body in the policy making body of public cultural service (Cao et al., 2019) , and that the scarce cooperation phenomenon between the issuing bodies can be stemmed from the realities, but it has an important influence on the success or failure of the construction of public culture, and that the implementation of the policy formulated by a single department has a quick and practical effect, but the public cultural service system has an effective and efficient way to implement the policy. The implementation of policies formulated by a single department is quick and effective, but the construction of public cultural service system involves all aspects and requires coordination and cooperation between multiple departments; Li (2022) combs through the main progress in the development of China’s socialization of public culture and puts forward the meaning, principles, significance and problems faced by the universal non-basic public cultural services, pointing out that the development of universal non-basic public cultural services in the new period needs to be demarcated, and believes that the construction of a strong cultural country and the improvement of the public cultural service system requires the continuous promotion of public cultural service, which is the key to the development of a strong culture. It points out that the development of inclusive non-basic public cultural services in the new period needs to draw a clear line, and considers that the construction of a strong cultural country and the improvement of the public cultural service system need to continuously promote the development of the socialization of public cultural services, and that the creation of a new situation of inclusive non-basic public cultural services is one of the important contents. The second is the local case study about the policy subject, such as Xu (2017) in his doctoral dissertation takes Kaifeng City as an example, believes that the main body of the implementation of public cultural service policy has four categories: the government, enterprises and social organizations, and individual citizens, and puts forward that at present the main body of the implementation of the policy of public cultural service in Kaifeng City exists the problems of insufficient play of the main role, unbalanced development of the main body, and the differences in the main body’s value orientation, etc.; Wang (2022) uses the foreign social science data archive policy as a sample, in-depth excavation and refinement of the core elements of the policy, identify and classify the archive-based cultural policy subject categories and establish their respective division of responsibility. Thirdly, it is the research on the optimization of policy making path of policy subjects. In the process of cultural policy making, it often depends on the experience, wisdom, political judgment, adaptability and responsiveness of the cultural policy making subjects, so Liu (2010) emphasized that in the process of constructing responsive government, it should strengthen the cooperation and co-governance with the social subjects, and achieve the governance of the social public interest through extensive interaction and timely response. Wang (2017) in his doctoral dissertation, argues that the textual construction of cultural policy is the decision-making behavior of the subject of cultural policy, and it is the core link in the whole process system of cultural policy making, and on this basis, he constructs the content structure of the responsiveness of the local government’s cultural policy making, and makes a detailed elaboration of its features and main functions one by one; Peng (2020) , based on 25 policies related to the participation of social forces in public cultural services issued by the central and local governments, analyzes four main paths for social forces to participate in public cultural services from the content of the policy texts, namely, the government purchasing services from the social forces, the joint construction of branch libraries by public cultural institutions and social forces, the reform of the corporate governance structure of public cultural institutions, and the participation of social forces in the cultural volunteer services.
In summary, Chinese scholars’ current research on public cultural service subjects mainly focuses on the overall construction, evolution and optimization path of the public cultural service policy system, with few studies identifying and analyzing the current status of the synergistic network structure of public cultural service policy subjects. Therefore, this paper selects the central-level public cultural service policies issued from January 2006 to August 2022 as a sample, divides the development of China’s public cultural service policies into the starting stage, modernization construction stage and high-quality development stage based on the historical node of five years as a stage, adopts the method of naming entity identification and social network analysis, and starts from the two dimensions of the issuing body and the implementing body of the public cultural service policies. The article adopts the named entity identification and social network analysis method to analyze the public cultural service policies from the dimensions of the issuing body and the executing body. The article draws the synergistic network of policy subjects in different stages through Ucinet software, identifies the key nodes in the synergistic network of subjects, and visualizes them. The article summarizes the different characteristics of the synergistic network of public cultural service policies in China at different stages, so as to provide an effective reference for the scientific formulation of national public cultural service policies in the future.
2. Research Design
2.1. Sample Selection
The data for the text of the policy in this article comes from the policy database Beida Faber (https://www.pkulaw.com/) and the “Beida Faber” (https://www.pkulaw.com/) of the Shanghai Library Base of China’s National Culture and Tourism Public Service Research. The data of this paper are from the “Public Cultural Service Policy Database” and Peking University Fabulous. In this paper, the time of policy introduction is set as 2006-2022, and the retrieval time is June 20, 2023. Sample selection criteria: existing normative policy documents issued by central-level government departments; policy documents with the name or content of “public cultural services”; policy documents of laws and regulations, circulars, opinions, decisions, outlines, plans and reports. The types of policy documents are laws and regulations, circulars, opinions, decisions, outlines, plans and reports. According to the criteria, this paper finally sorted out 167 valid samples, and the samples of the last three years are shown in Table 1:
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Table 1. Table sample of selected policies (2020-2022).
2.2. Sample Stage Division
This paper takes the Outline of the National Cultural Development Plan for the Eleventh Five-Year Plan Period as the starting point of the study, and takes the cultural development plans issued by the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the General Office of the State Council (GOSEC) every five years as the nodes, and divides the development of China’s public cultural service policies into the following three phases: the first phase (2006-2012) is the starting phase of public cultural services. The first stage (2006-2012) is the beginning stage of public cultural services, the concept of “public cultural services” was first proposed in 2006, and then many policies with the theme of public cultural services have been introduced one after another; the second stage (2013-2017) The second phase (2013-2017) was the modernization phase of public cultural services, in which the state coordinated and promoted the balanced development of public cultural services, strengthened the supply of public cultural products and services, and promoted the integration of public cultural services with modern science and technology; the third phase (2018-present) was the high-quality development phase, in which the state encouraged the government to purchase public services, and accelerated the network of facilities, diversification of supply, and integration of urban and rural areas. The third stage (2018-present) is the stage of high-quality development, during which the State encourages the government to purchase public services and accelerates the networking of facilities, diversification of supply and integration of urban and rural areas to achieve high-quality development of public cultural services.
3. Research Methodology
This paper focuses on mining and analyzing policy texts using two methods: named entity recognition and social network analysis. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a task aimed at identifying the boundaries of entities in a text and categorizing them accurately (Liao & Xie, 2022) . Firstly, the selected policy samples were subjected to institutional name recognition, (as mentioned before, extracted from the places where the policy contains names and the places where the policy content contains public cultural services) the phrases indicating the names of Chinese governmental departments in the target text were identified in the dimension of policy issuing body, and the phrases indicating the names of the implementing agencies in the target text were identified in the dimension of policy executing body; and secondly, the commonly used social network analysis tool Ucinet to measure the network structure indicators of the subjects in the extracted Chinese public cultural service policies, and to draw the mapping of Chinese public cultural service policy releasing subjects and executing subjects respectively, in order to better study the collaborative network structure of the subjects of public cultural service policies.
4. Analysis of Policy Issuing Subjects
4.1. Basic Description Statistics
From the statistical results of policy issuing bodies from 2006 to 2022, there are 43 issuing bodies of public cultural service policies in China. Due to the large statistical time span and the problem of changing the name of the policy issuing body during the period, this paper always follows the existing name of the issuing body, with the Ministry of Culture as the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the Ministry of Science and Technology as the Ministry of Science and Technology. Table 2 provides statistics on the issuing bodies of China’s public cultural policies and their individual and joint issuance volumes, with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the General Office of the State Council, and the Ministry of Finance releasing 71, 46, and 20 policy texts, respectively, ranking in the top three in terms of the total volume of issuance volumes. The main body of the issuance generally presents the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the General Office of the State Council and the Ministry of Finance as the core, and the characteristics of the co-existence of multiple main bodies. There are 17 subjects involved in issuing documents individually, with a total of 104 policy texts issued. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the General Office of the State Council and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage issued 34, 20 and 6 items respectively, ranking the top three in terms of the amount of individual texts issued. According to the stage division, from 2006 to 2012, there were 9 subjects that issued texts individually, with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism
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Table 2. Statistics on the number of articles issued by the main issuers of public cultural service policies in China.
and the General Office of the State Council issuing the largest number of texts, 16 and 12 respectively. From 2013 to 2017, there were 14 subjects that issued texts individually, with the General Office of the State Council and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issuing 15 and 13 items, and the newly added subject State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) issued 5 items in the 3rd place. There are 6 subjects of separate issuance in 2018-2022, with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the General Office of the State Council remaining the core subjects of issuance in this period, issuing 5 and 3 items respectively. There are 39 subjects involved in joint issuance, with a total of 63 policy texts issued. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the General Office of the State Council and the Ministry of Finance jointly issued 37, 16 and 18 policy texts respectively, ranking in the top three in terms of the number of jointly issued policy texts. The number of policies jointly issued by three subjects was the highest, 17; the number jointly issued by two subjects was the second highest, 11; and the number jointly issued by four or more subjects was the least, 10. When the number of issuing subjects reaches 4 or more, as the number of issuing subjects increases, the frequency of subject coordination decreases and the number of joint issuance decreases.
4.2. Network Analysis
Based on the 167 policy samples selected, this paper constructs an N × N order matrix between the policy issuing bodies of public cultural services in China during the period of 2006-2022. On this basis, the Chinese version of Ucinet software is borrowed to draw the cooperation network mapping of the policy issuing subjects in each stage during the 17 years, as shown in Figures 1-3, which shows the distribution of each policy issuing subject in the network more clearly. The nodes in the graph represent the policy issuing subjects, and the connecting lines represent that the issuing subjects have jointly participated in the issuing of at least one public cultural service policy.
In the initial stage (2006-2012), a total of 65 policies on public cultural services were issued, and there were fewer policy issuing bodies, with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the General Office of the State Council having a higher
number of network connections and a central position in the network. The total number of jointly issued policies is 23, with a sparse network structure among the issuing subjects and mostly two-by-two co-operation, indicating a lack of co-operation awareness among the issuing subjects. In the modernization phase (2013-2017), a total of 73 policies on public cultural services were issued, and the number of policy issuing subjects increased, with a total of 24 jointly issued policies, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism retained a central position in the network, while the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Finance also became the main issuing subjects in this phase, and the size of the network and the number of networks increased compared with the previous phase, and the network structure became more balanced stage, the network size and the number of networks have increased and the network structure has become more balanced, indicating that the sense of cooperation among the publishers of public cultural service policies has increased. In the stage of high-quality development (2018-present), a total of 29 public cultural service policies have been issued, with the number of issued policies decreasing compared with the previous two stages, but the number of issuing subjects expanding to 1.5 times that of the initial stage, and many issuing subjects not directly related to public cultural service work also starting to participate in policy formulation, making the network structure more balanced and stable.
5. Analysis of Policy Implementation Entities
5.1. Basic Descriptive Statistics
Public policy implementation takes the realization of the fundamental interests of the broadest masses of people as its starting point (Zeng & Zhong, 2023) . The main body of public policy is the actor who directly or indirectly participates in the whole process of public policy, and the main body of the implementation of public policy in China includes the administrative institutions, the judiciary, the legislature, the ruling party and the public. Taking the previous article as a reference, this paper defines the implementation subjects of public cultural service policies as government departments at all levels and various libraries and cultural institutions mentioned in the policy text. The policy texts in the sample whose titles include “public cultural services” are identified as named entities within the scope of the whole text, and the paragraphs in the sample whose titles do not include “public cultural services” but whose contents include “public cultural services” are identified as named entities within the scope of the whole text. Named entities were identified for the paragraphs in the sample that did not contain “public cultural services” in the title, but contained “public cultural services” in the text, and the extracted nouns for the implementation subjects are summarized in Table 3.
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Table 3. Summary of terminology of the executive body (partial).
A secondary extraction was carried out from all the aggregated executive subject terms, extracting subject terms that appeared at least 2 times in the sample of policy texts, summarized in Table 4.
As can be seen from Table 4, the categories of cultural enterprises and institutions have the highest frequency of “libraries”, “cultural centers” and “museums”, with 84, 65 and 63 occurrences respectively. Libraries, museums and cultural centers are mentioned several times in the sample of public cultural service policies, referring to them as the “three libraries”. In the category of cultural administrative departments, governments at all levels, units of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and cultural departments at all levels occupy an important position, with the noun “governments at all levels” appearing as often as 79 times, units of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps as often as 74 times, and the noun “ministries of culture at all levels (departments and bureaus)” as often as 80 times. The frequency of the noun “all levels of government” is 79 times, the frequency of the units of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is 74 times, and the frequency of the noun “all levels of
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Table 4. Frequency statistics of executive subject terms.
ministries (departments and bureaus) of culture” is 61 times. In the category of cultural workers, the term “social forces” appears frequently, with a frequency of 50 times. This indicates that among the three categories of policy subjects, namely government cultural departments, cultural enterprises and institutions, and cultural workers, cultural enterprises and institutions occupy a very important position in policy implementation, with government departments playing the second most important role, cultural workers the least important, and the roles of the three in public cultural services showing a decreasing order.
5.2. Network Analysis
As shown in Figures 4-6, the network of executive agents in the three stages shifts from sparse to dense. With the promotion of time, some new types of subjects such as online platforms and cultural volunteers have appeared among the enforcement subjects, to which we should pay attention.
6. Discussion
The synergistic interaction between the policy issuing bodies is conducive to the introduction of “policy consensus” into the content of policy formulation, which is conducive to the achievement of effective decision-making (Hong & Ma, 2021) . At present, China’s public cultural services policy issued by the main body of the “subject is too centralized” to “multiple subjects synergistic” trend, but the policy issued by the main body is still mainly to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the State Council General Office of the main. At the same time as guaranteeing the dominant position of the government’s issuing body, the relevant policies should be issued to guide the social body to invest in construction funds, and to actively speak out and make suggestions, so as to promote the pluralistic mode of supplying public cultural services. With regard to the implementation
of public cultural service policies, through subject clustering, cluster division and centrality ranking, it is found that the main body of policy implementation is mainly dominated by cultural institutions such as libraries, cultural centers and museums, with government cultural departments, cultural enterprises and cultural workers accounting for a smaller proportion of policy implementation. The policy text has more specific guidance for libraries and other institutions, but most of the words “encourage”, “guide”, “promote” and so on are used for social implementation subjects, which to a certain extent indicates that the social implementation subjects have not been given enough attention. There should be more detailed guidance in the policy text.
The issuing body of the policy has a supervisory and control role over the executing body, and the executing body has a feedback role to the issuing body. In a few groups of implementation subjects, there are emerging subject terms in recent years, such as “cultural volunteers”, “small and medium-sized cultural enterprises”, “intelligent libraries”, “network platforms”, and “cultural organizations”, “network platform” and so on, the policy publisher should pay attention to this kind of emerging subjects, guide them from the policy, make clear their specific policy implementation process, and strengthen their role in policy implementation, so as to promote the high-quality development of public cultural services. On the whole, the evaluation mechanism of the implementation effect of China’s public cultural service policies is not clear enough, and the relevant construction should be strengthened to promote the improvement of policies with feedback results. In the release and implementation of policies, the participation of social mass subjects and cultural workers subjects is low, but both have an irreplaceable position in public cultural policies, and their participation should be actively improved. It is necessary to absorb social forces and encourage the training of a team of cultural professionals to provide basic support for public cultural services.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the financial support provided by the project of Cultivation for Young Top-motch Talents of Beijing Municipal Institutions (ID: BPHR202203216).