2002 — Building a Cultural Zhangjiajie (Part 2)
2. "Cultural input, tourism output" is the only way forward. (1) Cultural input is tourism input. It must be acknowledged that in recent years, several administrations have fallen short in cultural investment. During the "Ninth Five-Year Plan" period, the city completed a cumulative fixed asset investment of 19.29 million yuan in cultural and heritage infrastructure (of which Sangzhi County's construction of the He Long Memorial Hall alone accounted for
This article has been compiled from historical materials in the "Zhangjiajie Tour Guide Network" (33519.com · City Overview section). Some administrative divisions, population, socioeconomic data, and policy information may be outdated and are for reference only; for the latest situation, please refer to official releases by the local government and scenic areas.
2. "Cultural input, tourism output" is the only way.
(1) Cultural input is tourism input.
It must be admitted without concealment that in recent years several successive governments have incurred debts in cultural input. During the "Ninth Five-Year Plan" period, the city completed a cumulative fixed-asset investment of 19.29 million yuan in cultural and cultural relics infrastructure construction (of which 8 million yuan was spent on just one project, the He Long Memorial Hall in Sangzhi County), accounting for only 2.3% of the city's fixed-asset investment. To date, there is basically no cultural infrastructure at the municipal level and in Wulingyuan District. At the municipal level, apart from a "half-finished" project—the Mass Art Building—there are still no facilities such as a library, museum, cinema, or cultural square. Only one sports venue remains in the city proper, and it has been rented out and occupied for the sake of "money." Wulingyuan District is a blank area for "halls, theaters, troupes, and venues." The city proper and the core scenic area are the central zones of our city's cultural tourism, yet precisely in such key positions, cultural facility construction has been left blank! The direct cause of this situation is undoubtedly the late establishment of the city, the late start, the thin foundation, and the fact that a hundred undertakings await development, but it is also a fact that people hold prejudices against culture. Culture is always regarded as purely ideological, with attention paid only to its political attributes, and it is seen only as a public welfare undertaking with input but no return, so whenever money is mentioned, people get headaches.
Actually, this is an outdated notion. In the United States, Americans' emphasis on cultural consumption, cultural services, and the production and operation of cultural products has made culture a major pillar industry of American society, so much so that the British marvel that America's main economic advantage lies not in natural resources, nor in economic scale, but in culture! Domestically, places such as Shanghai, Shenzhen, Dalian, Suzhou, and Hangzhou have also, by activating cultural productivity, tasted all kinds of sweetness from the huge economic benefits generated by culture. Take the emerging city of Shenzhen as an example: from the very beginning, it incorporated cultural facilities into the overall urban construction plan and carried them out in step, so it has first-class domestic cultural facilities such as book cities, cinemas and theaters, gymnasiums, cultural theme parks, and convention and exhibition centers. Yet Shenzhen was established only a few years earlier than Zhangjiajie! Of course, it should be acknowledged that the starting points of the two places are different, but no matter how you put it, if the understanding had improved, our city's urban cultural facilities construction would not have remained basically blank for more than ten years, right? This shows that investing in urban cultural construction depends on economic strength, and even more on updating concepts. Why is it that despite having a treasured location like the core scenic area, our investment promotion has never been ideal? Apart from the urgent need to improve the soft environment, it is probably because our city lacks cultural appeal and temporarily cannot make tourists stay an extra day or two, which invisibly reduces direct and indirect tourism income. This is something investors first consider. Take the 'Senbao Festival' as an example; the effect of placing tourism product exhibition and sales activities in the urban area would certainly be better, but the last two editions were both held in Wulingyuan District because the urban area has no convention and exhibition facilities. The "Senbao Festival" artistic performances have always been open-air performances "like guerrilla warfare," mainly because there is no fixed venue such as a large theater or cultural square. Precisely because there are no corresponding cultural facilities, holding festivals, organizing competitions, and exhibitions and similar activities is constrained, and such activities are exactly important means to enhance a city's cultural taste, raise its visibility, and bring highlights and vitality to tourism. Sydney, because of the Sydney Opera House, a classic cultural facility, instantly rose from a third-rate city to a world-famous city and became a tourist destination attracting worldwide attention. Therefore, we must understand this principle: since urban construction must embody the principle of landscape orientation, it means that urban landscape orientation must be integrated with urban construction; therefore, increasing investment in cultural facilities is increasing investment in tourism facilities; increasing cultural investment is equivalent to increasing tourism output, and the investment is basically one-time, while the output is infinitely cyclical and expansive.
As for our city's current cultural situation, the municipal Party committee and municipal government have long been fully aware of it; they simply feel the difficulties are great. As the old Chinese saying goes: 'If you wish to take, you must first give.' With determination, the difficulties can certainly be resolved. Just as in the beginning, when severe lags in transportation, energy, telecommunications, and tourism infrastructure in the scenic and urban areas directly constrained tourism development, if the severe lag in cultural construction is not promptly changed, it will inevitably become an increasingly serious bottleneck constraining our city's tourism development. If this problem is not solved well, our city will remain a culturally starving city, an anemic city, a city with no taste to speak of, and therefore a city lacking appeal!
Now, the time has come when we must discuss cultural issues!
(II) Thoughts and countermeasures for cultural investment.
1. Thoughts.
According to the principle of coordinated layout and highlighting key points, the main targets of current cultural investment are: first, in accordance with the arrangements of the 'Tenth Five-Year Plan' and the tourism industry development plan, build landmark urban cultural facilities such as the Zhangjiajie Cultural Exchange Center (including a cultural plaza, theater, youth palace, and senior activity center), Zhangjiajie International Sports Center, Zhangjiajie Central Library, and Zhangjiajie Ethnic and Folk Museum. Second, meticulously build distinctive culture. Tourism is our city's distinctive economy, and therefore should also be our distinctive culture. Surveying our city's three major blocks of cultural resources—historical humanities, ethnic and folk, and modern—there is great potential for excavation, refinement, and integration. On the premise of subordinating to the overall strategy of cultural development, it is suggested to focus on two highlights:
First, support the production of fine tourism literary and artistic works. As the domestic tourism market grows increasingly hot, tourism literature and art are attracting more and more attention. If in earlier years the tourism industry was busy 'conquering the world' with hardware construction and had no time to attend to such matters, then now that we have caught our breath a little, using tourism literature and art to elevate cultural taste and raise profile has become a hot topic of the moment. Take songs as an example: starting with Mr. Wang Liping's 'On Sun Island,' cases of a single song making a scenic area or a city famous, sparking a tourism boom in a region, and bringing overwhelming wealth have appeared repeatedly. Back then, the film 'Romance on Lushan Mountain' sent Lushan's tourism image soaring. A British writer's novel 'Lost Horizon' set off a burgeoning craze for finding Shangri-La, and remote Zhongdian County in Yunnan became crowded with tourists as a result. Places depicted in numerous famous works such as 'Record of the Peach Blossom Spring,' 'Record of Yueyang Tower,' 'Ode to the Red Cliff,' and 'The Qinhuai River in Lantern Light and Boat Shadows' have one after another become tourist hotspots. That culture can bring enormous social and economic benefits is evident from this. Take Hangzhou: not to mention anything else, just the two poignant and enchanting love stories of Xu Xian and Lady White Snake, and Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, are enough to make countless tourists linger and stay.
In recent years, our city has made several fruitful efforts in this regard, such as organizing forces to recommend works on Zhangjiajie themes for inclusion in primary and secondary school Chinese textbooks, and inviting famous figures from various quarters to write songs, articles, take photographs, and paint for Zhangjiajie, and so on. This method of promoting Zhangjiajie through the effect of famous figures is undoubtedly necessary, but mobilizing the strength of local writers, artists, and the broad ranks of literary and art workers to create outstanding works serving tourism in various literary and artistic forms, contributing to raising Zhangjiajie's profile and reputation, and through this means cultivating and bringing up our own cultural celebrities, is equally necessary. To this end, it is suggested that the municipal Party committee and municipal government establish a 'Zhangjiajie Tourism Literary and Artistic Creation Award Fund,' striving for no less than 1 million yuan during the 'Tenth Five-Year Plan' period, in order to catalyze a batch of fine tourism literary and artistic works themed on depicting, publicizing, and promoting Zhangjiajie, and to give corresponding awards to those who win national and provincial grand prizes. If so, local writers and artists who have long been in a scattered, guerrilla state will certainly, inspired by the municipal Party committee and municipal government, unite and make their contributions.
Second, run the 'Forest Protection Festival' well. The greatest feature of the 'Forest Protection Festival' is that it is the first in the world to raise the green banner, aligning with 'Environment and Protection,' one of the two major global themes; thus its purpose is lofty and its theme significant. But at present, its content seems rather thin, its form rather monotonous, its theme lacking in excavation, and its influence small—still far from the profile, reputation, and authority an international festival should possess. Some people therefore think this festival is optional, or even feel it is a burden. We believe that a tourist city should do everything possible to run well a 'flagship' festival. The key is to take a commanding view and make up for shortcomings, establish the festival-running approach of 'the festival sets the stage, culture performs, tourism benefits,' and carefully plan and operate it, absolutely avoiding the practice of hastily assembling a makeshift team. Beijing's Fragrant Hills, relying on just a few patches of red leaves, can make tourism flourish, with this autumn's visitors reaching more than 700,000 (people, not person-times!), achieving a virtuous cycle of red-leaf culture driving the 'red-leaf economy.' Here we have China's first national forest park, China's first batch of national geological parks, and China's first batch of World Natural Heritage sites—so we have even more reason to take forest culture and ecological culture to the extreme and make it a truly international tourism grand event and cultural festival.
In pursuing cultural construction, the municipal finances are obviously insufficient. Where will the money come from? We might expand our thinking in the following aspects:
First, revitalize urban assets and attract investment. The city is the largest state-owned asset. The government can earn money not only by collecting taxes from enterprises, but also by operating the city to increase fiscal revenue. Dalian, Guangzhou, Hefei, and within our province Changsha, Yueyang, Changde, Chenzhou, and other places have undertaken large-scale urban renovation and construction; one successful experience in raising and financing funds is through exchanging land for development, auctioning land use rights, auctioning advertising rights, leasing, auctioning, paid fixed-term transfer, or public bidding for contracted management of public facilities such as bus routes, taxi operating rights, public toilet operating rights, piped gas operating rights, as well as water supply, sewage treatment, and road construction; auctioning naming rights for urban roads and plazas; and issuing urban construction bonds, and so on, to obtain the large amounts of funds urgently needed for urban construction. Take Chenzhou as an example: in recent years, of the 1.08 billion yuan used for urban infrastructure construction, 75% came from market operations and revitalizing urban assets. Our city's construction of Yongding Avenue and Guanyin Bridge was also the result of exchanging land for development. Therefore, we can absolutely think along these lines: let investors build us a cultural exchange center or an ethnic and folk museum, and we repay them with land, or through leasing, transfer, auction of operating rights for public facilities such as sanitation, landscaping, municipal administration, water supply, and public transport. We should also actively seek bank loans and try issuing urban construction bonds.
Second, seek social donations. The Tianzi Pavilion on Tianzi Mountain was funded and built by the Shenzhen municipal government, and the Zhangsuo Highway and the Ruiying Path in Yangjiajie were funded and built by Hong Kong businessmen respectively. With such a treasured spot, as long as we are willing to run around and dig in, we will 'reap what we sow.' We can repay donors with honors such as carved stones, steles, statues, and naming rights. The aforementioned establishment of a 'Zhangjiajie Tourism Literary and Artistic Creation Award Fund' is beneficial both to flourishing cultural undertakings and to tourism promotion; this sum can absolutely be funded by the city's first-grade scenic spots. Under heavy reward, brave men appear; under heavy prizes, fine works emerge. Since this kind of thing will bring direct benefits to tourism enterprises' own development, they will be happy to open their wallets.
Third, implement cultural policies. The State Council and provincial government have formulated some very specific policies to support the development of cultural undertakings, including continuing to levy cultural undertaking construction fees, which after being turned over to the provincial treasury are returned for provincial and municipal cultural undertaking construction; reducing or exempting relevant fees for landmark, public-benefit publicity and cultural infrastructure approved by planning departments; increasing fiscal input for publicity and culture and making good budget arrangements for special funds; and encouraging donations to publicity and cultural undertakings—more than ten items in all. Putting these policies into effect is both the municipal finance's duty and strong support for building a cultural Zhangjiajie and accelerating the urban landscapeization process. It is suggested to introduce policies for developing our city's cultural industry as soon as possible, so as to attract more people to engage in the cultural industry.
Fourth, promote 'conceptual input.' This is a kind of cultural input that does not require the government and functional departments to spend additional money. Urban construction is both an economic act and a cultural act—from the overall and partial planning and layout of the city and the overall style of urban buildings and color tones, down to the naming of a street, the shapes of green belts and trash bins, and the beautification of lighting, and so on. Whether there is cultural awareness and a cultural eye makes a completely different effect. Building the same house, if one does not regard it as a cultural act, will inevitably make it a 'matchbox' with no artistic sense or beauty to speak of; the result is adding another piece of fat to our city and leaving another aftereffect for the city's landscapeization. But once cultural awareness and a cultural eye participate, 'ingenuity' as mentioned by Premier Zhu will be embodied everywhere; if ingenuity is applied everywhere, culture will flourish! Architecture is a city's face, and this face can only be polished bright by the input of cultural concepts. By analogy, every aspect of urban construction is both an economic act and a cultural act. Only when our city managers and the broad citizenry all learn to think about problems and do things with cultural awareness and a cultural eye will 'building a cultural Zhangjiajie' not remain merely a slogan.
Today's cultural input is tomorrow's tourism output!