More cultural public services to outsourced

China's government is trying to involve the private sector in more public services related to culture by offering government procurement contracts.

The State Council, China's cabinet, on Monday issued an instruction to expand government procurement of cultural services such as sporting events, museums and libraries, as well as a list of 38 different cultural services that are open to private contractors.

The policy is an effort to supplement the limited funds and resources the government spends on public cultural services.

About 117.27 billion yuan (19 billion US dollars) in government funding was spent on public cultural services in 2013, according to the Ministry of Culture.

Although the figure had almost doubled from that of 2010, it did not meet the actual demand and a large part of the fund went to operational use other than improvement of the services, the ministry said in a statement.

The new policy encourages local governments to outsource activities such as non-profit sport events, film screening events and book clubs, protecting traditional cultural heritage and running museums, libraries and public theaters.

The private parties should be legally registered and qualified. They need to obtain the government procurement contracts through set procedures but local governments are allowed to design the procedures according to local situations, the State Council document said.

Wu Zhinan, a research fellow with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told Xinhua that the new policy is to break the monopoly of government-sponsored cultural institutions in public cultural services.

If properly designed and implemented, the policy would bring constructive competition and improve the quality of public cultural services, Wu said.

However, the procedure for bidding for such contracts should be tightly supervised and open to the public so as to prevent backdoor activities, he said. Endi