Xiao Guiqing: Promoting the Vigorous Flow of Sources for Cultural Innovation and Creativity
Cultural prosperity and flourishing are important hallmarks of Chinese-path modernization. Stimulating the vitality of cultural innovation and creativity across the entire nation and allowing all sources of cultural innovation and creativity to flow fully is an inherent requirement for building a leading country in socialist culture and developing the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the New Era. The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee proposed the developmental goal of "significantly enhancing the level of social civilization" during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period [1], clarifying the requirement to "stimulate the vitality of cultural innovation and creativity across the entire nation and allow socialist culture to flourish and develop." Standing at a new historical starting point, we must focus on aspects such as deepening the reform of cultural systems and mechanisms, enhancing cultural originality, fostering a favorable cultural ecosystem, and strengthening empowerment through digital-intelligence technology. This will effectively mobilize the enthusiasm, initiative, and creativity of all parties to participate in cultural construction, providing inexhaustible momentum for the solid advancement of building a leading cultural country.
Deepening the Reform of Cultural Systems and Mechanisms
Cultural systems and mechanisms involve the organizational structure of cultural construction and the basic processes of cultural production. Deepening the reform of cultural systems and mechanisms, with stimulating the vitality of cultural innovation and creativity as the central link, aims to clarify the relationships between various entities in cultural construction, define the principles and requirements for each stage of cultural production, and provide institutional guarantees for cultural innovation and creativity.
We must strive to improve the system of cultural management. To deepen the reform of cultural systems and mechanisms, we must adhere to the fundamental direction of serving the people and serving socialism, promoting the flourishing development of cultural undertakings and cultural industries. We must uphold the Party's leadership over culture to ensure the correct direction of cultural innovation and creativity. We must persist in using Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as our guide, deeply study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, and earnestly ensure the integration of study, thought, and application, as well as the unity of knowledge, belief, and action. We should formulate relevant policies and regulations to promote cultural innovation and creativity, advance the coordination between the improvement of the cultural management system and the transformation of government functions, and establish robust cross-departmental coordination mechanisms to boost the deep integration of culture with economy, technology, and education. We must improve the cultural market supervision system, strengthen inter-process and ex-post supervision, and enhance the transparency and credibility of regulation to create a clean and upright market environment for cultural innovation and creativity. We should scientifically formulate specialized methods for assessing the social benefits of cultural enterprises and public institutions, making specific institutional arrangements to prioritize social benefits and achieve the unification of social and economic benefits.
We must strive to improve the mechanisms for cultural production and operation. We should sound out the cultural industrial system and promote the transformation and upgrading of state-owned cultural enterprises; we should encourage, support, and guide the development of non-public cultural enterprises, protecting the property rights of private cultural enterprises and the rights of entrepreneurs in accordance with the law. We should optimize the allocation of resources in the cultural industry, sound out the foundational systems of the cultural market, strengthen the credit system of the cultural market, improve the quality of cultural market services, and enhance cultural market vitality. We must refine cultural economic policies, strengthen innovation-driven development, and promote the sustained and healthy development of the cultural industry. We should build a high-standard cultural market system, accelerating the construction of a unified, open, efficient, standardized, and orderly cultural market to facilitate the flow of cultural resources nationwide. We should strengthen the construction of cultural product and factor markets, leveraging the advantages of our country’s ultra-large-scale market and domestic demand potential to orderly develop factor markets for cultural property rights, copyrights, and talent.
Enhancing Cultural Originality
Cultural originality is a core element in measuring a nation's capacity and level of cultural innovation and creativity. The more than five-thousand-year civilization history of the Chinese nation has nurtured fine traditional Chinese culture; contemporary China is undergoing the most extensive and profound social transformation in our history and is advancing the grand and unique practical innovation of Chinese-path modernization. These provide precious historical resources and open up vast realistic spaces for breaking through conventional thinking, expanding cultural experiences, and endowing cultural products with unique aesthetics.
We must excavate and inherit fine traditional Chinese culture. Fine traditional Chinese culture has a long history and is broad and profound; it is the crystallization of wisdom and the essence of Chinese civilization. Guided by Marxism, we must comprehensively excavate the treasure house of five thousand years of Chinese civilization, connecting the essence of Marxist thought with the cream of fine traditional Chinese culture and integrating it with the common values that the masses "use daily without realizing" [2]. This ensures that the most fundamental cultural genes of the Chinese nation are adapted to contemporary China, coordinated with modern society, and integrated with realistic culture. We should focus on the modern interpretation and explanation of traditional culture, exploring new forms of cultural expression and channels of communication to create original cultural products that both manifest Chinese style and align with contemporary aesthetics. Based on being rooted in local soil and deeply planted in the era, we should work hard on expanding themes, content, forms, and techniques, promoting the combination of concepts and means, the fusion of content and form, and the mutual brilliance of various artistic and technical elements, making original works more diverse and captivating.
We must improve the service, guidance, and organizational mechanisms for literary and artistic creation and production. Through policy support and financial assistance, we should guide literary and art workers to focus on social reality, reflect the spirit of the times, and launch original masterpieces that possess both artistic value and social influence. We should sound out cross-field and cross-industry cultural promotion collaboration mechanisms, improve integrated media communication channels, and promote the exchange and collision of different artistic styles and creative concepts to stimulate more original inspiration and sparks. We should increase support for original boutiques that play a demonstrative and leading role, strengthen the construction of online cultural creation and production platforms, and promote the multi-level development of original online works. We should improve the level of industrialization, formulate and implement thematic planning for major film, television, and documentary creations, and establish a rolling, sustainable mechanism for creation and production. We should leverage the roles of intellectual property intermediaries and industry protection associations to advance the copyright protection of original cultural works.
Fostering a Favorable Cultural Ecosystem
To promote the continuous eruption of vitality in cultural innovation and creativity and vigorously flourish cultural undertakings, we must effectively protect and mobilize the enthusiasm of cultural workers, forming a fashion that encourages bold innovation, courageous innovation, and inclusive innovation, thereby creating a favorable cultural ecosystem that supports cultural innovation and creativity.
We must adhere to upholding the fundamentals and breaking new ground to cultivate a culture of innovation. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Upholding the fundamentals and breaking new ground are dialectically unified; only by upholding the fundamentals can we ensure that innovation always moves forward in the right direction, and only through continuous innovation can we better uphold the fundamentals." To advance cultural innovation under the premise of upholding the fundamentals, and to persist in upholding the fundamentals under the guidance of cultural innovation, we must firmly establish a Marxist view of literature and art, consciously using Marxist stances, viewpoints, and methods to guide creation, and working hard to enhance the ideological depth, artistic quality, and spiritual connotation of works. We must persist in the "Two Combinations" [3], being adept at extracting the essence and drawing energy from the treasure house of Chinese culture, and being adept at refining themes and drawing inspiration from the practices of the New Era, focusing on the themes of the times and using artistic works to manifest the demeanor of the era and reflect magnificent practices. We should actively and proactively learn from and draw on all outstanding achievements of human civilization to broaden the horizons of the culture of innovation in the New Era. We must earnestly increase our sense of responsibility and mission, accelerating the transformation of concepts, mindsets, behavioral patterns, and work methods that do not meet the requirements of innovative development, excavating innovative potential, maintaining innovative resolve, and creating a favorable ecosystem that produces quality works, talent, and benefits.
We must persist in "letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend" [4]. We must implement the Party's organizational line, principles, and policies for literature and art, adhering to the "Double Hundred" policy to continuously develop the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the New Era with strong ideological leadership, spiritual cohesion, value appeal, and international influence. We should promote academic democracy, encouraging the conduct of equal, healthy, lively, and fully reasoned academic contention, forming an excellent academic style that values quality works, rigorous scholarship, integrity, and responsibility, and creating a clean, upright, mutually learning, and positive academic ecosystem. We should promote democracy in literature and art, fostering cultural innovation and creativity in terms of concepts, content, styles, and schools. We should value and strengthen literary and art criticism, allowing it to play its role in praising the excellent and disparaging the inferior, as well as "clearing away the turbid and promoting the clear" [5]. This creates an atmosphere for literary and art criticism that dares to seek truth from facts, dares to state a position, and dares to state a stance. We should guide literary and art workers to take root among the people and in life, consciously sharing the same breath, destiny, and heart with the people, perceiving the essence of life and thoroughly understanding the foundations of life among the people, and drawing nourishment from the great practices and rich, colorful lives of the people.
Strengthening Empowerment Through Digital-Intelligence Technology
To stimulate the vitality of cultural innovation and creativity, we must give full play to the advantages of information technology, promoting the digital-intelligent empowerment and information-based transformation of cultural construction, and converting the advantages of cultural resources into advantages for cultural development.
We must explore effective mechanisms for the integration of culture and technology. Currently, a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is in the ascendant; new information technologies are developing rapidly, profoundly changing the ways culture is created, produced, disseminated, and consumed. We must advance the integration of culture and technology, scientifically formulate development plans, sound out policy support systems, and build cross-departmental coordination mechanisms. We should explore the construction of national cultural resource databases and cultural creative material databases, strengthen the construction of infrastructure such as computing power and corpora, and enhance data processing capabilities to provide technical support for the integration of culture and technology. We should create cultural and technological integration platforms that combine online and offline elements, nurturing more high-quality cultural industrial parks and demonstration bases for cultural and technological integration. We should encourage cultural enterprises to increase investment in research and development, deeply understand the needs of the cultural industry, enhance independent innovation capabilities, and develop cultural and technological products that better meet market demands. We should improve governance capabilities in the cultural field under information-based conditions, strengthening the construction and management of online content, and vigorously promoting and practicing socialist core values.
We must accelerate the development of new types of cultural business formats. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "We must adapt to the trends of digital industrialization and industrial digitization, accelerating the development of new cultural business formats, transforming and upgrading traditional cultural business formats, and improving quality, efficiency, and core competitiveness." We should accelerate the development of new formats such as digital publishing, digital performance, digital art, digital printing, digital creativity, digital animation, digital entertainment, and high-tech video, transforming and upgrading traditional cultural formats to promote structural adjustment and optimization. With the help of technologies such as artificial intelligence and holographic projection, we should build interactive spaces and create intelligent scenes and immersive environments, enriching and expanding the presentation forms, display scenes, and dissemination scope of cultural relics and cultural heritage, and excavating the humanistic spirit, value concepts, and moral standards hidden within them. We should promote the deep integration of culture with fields such as tourism, education, and healthcare, forming more new growth points for the cultural industry and building a high-level, full-chain, multi-functional modern cultural industrial system.