Chinese citizen will not have to pay to enter the country's
public art galleries in two years, said a joint statement by
the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Finance released
Thursday.
By the end of 2011, there will be no charge for Chinese citizens
to enter public art galleries at state and provincial levels. By
the end of 2012, all public art galleries will be free for
citizens, said the statement.
The move comes after the nation offered free access of its
museums and memorial halls to the public in 2008.
The statement said that finance departments at all levels should
increase investments to art galleries and libraries so they
could run without charging, while also enabling them to improve
basic public cultural services.
The central government will also arrange special funds to
subsidize art galleries and libraries in the less developed
central and western parts of China.
The statement said art galleries and libraries should improve
management and organizational structure to boost operational
efficiency, as well as to improve their services to special
groups such as children, rural migrant workers, and the elderly.
China opens museum on sex slaves
(click for details on Sify news)
China opens first
vegetable museum -
China's first vegetable museum
opened in eastern Shandong Province Monday, covering an area of
3,000 square meters.
China Shouguang Vegetable Museum
shows the relationship between the development of China's
vegetable farming and society, exhibiting items such as farming
tools, specimens and drawings from the Longshan civilization
period (2340 B.C. - 1940 B.C.) to modern period, said Wang Ziran,
deputy director of the museum's project team.
"You can find a
130-million-year-old plant fossil here and see the tools used to
farm vegetables in the Han Dynasty, about 2100 years ago," He
added.
The museum is located in Shandong's
Shouguang City, known as "Vegetable Town of China," where 56,000
hectares are used to grow vegetables out of a total 94,000
hectares of arable land.
The city area produced about 4
billion kilograms of high-quality vegetables in 2009, according
to the local government.
(Source: CCTV.com
April 20, 2010 )
China opens underwater museum
Westerners
banned from visiting China spy museum
Chinese man runs private museum on Sino-U.S.
relations in E China - Xinhua
Curators plead for more money after
free admission causes crisis in China museums.
Xinhua News
China sets
library standards for booming urban communities
China's Ministry of Culture on
Tuesday set building standards of public libraries to ensure
that they can meet the demands of the country's booming
urban population.
Population size would be the major reference for the size of
new libraries from Nov. 1, the ministry said in a circular.
In the
past, the size of public cultural facilities was usually
decided by local administrations, but in some counties and
villages, especially in eastern China, communities had
expanded quickly, beyond the scale of their libraries, said
a ministry official.
Under the
new rules, a library in an area with up to 200,000 people
should be a minimum of 800 square meters and a maximum of
4,500 square meters.
The
specific size could be decided by the local government in
accordance with practicality.
A
community with up to 1.5 million should have a library
ranging from 4,500 square meters to 20,000 square meters;
while libraries in areas with up to 10 million people should
range from 20,000 to 60,000 square meters.
"If local
governments want to build a library, they should follow the
standard, which was based on field surveys and reference to
international levels," said the official, who declined to be
named.
He said
local populations would include all residents living in an
area for at least six months, which would allow rural
migrant workers to use the facilities.
The
ministry started to draft the construction standard under
orders from the Construction Ministry in 2002. (Xinhua News
2008-10-21)
-
China opens digital library for blind -
A digital library for the
blind, where the visually impaired can listen to
electronic books, music or on-line lectures for free,
has opened in the Chinese capital.
Situated in the National Library, the facility was
jointly set up by the Information Center of the China
Disabled Persons' Federation, the National Library and
China Braille Publishing House.
It
was opened on the eve of the International Day of the
Blind, which falls on Wednesday.
About
200 electronic books, 500 audio programs and 500 video
programs are available at the library, covering ancient
Chinese culture, medicine, modern literature and daily
life. Some of the materials were provided according to
requests from the blind.
The
library plans to add at least 200 electronic books, 30
lecture videos and 500 audio programs every year.
China
has 82.96 million disabled people, of whom 16.91 million
are blind, according to statistics from the disabled
federation. (Oct.
15, 2008, Xinhua)
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