Cultural And Industrial Policy Research

Cultural industry policy is an aggregate of a set of policies that promote and standardize the development of cultural industry stipulated by the government. Cultural industry policy is an important component of national industrial policies and it is a policy that set "cultural industry" as its policy objective. Meanwhile, cultural industry policy is quite different from other industrial policies due to its complicated attribute. The particularity comes from the fact that, besides its economic value, cultural industry has quite conspicuous political and ideological functions.Governmental policies pose a heavy influence on the development of cultural industry. Such influence can be summed up as: to "accelerate" the growth of cultural industry; to "channel" the reshuffle of improper structure of cultural industry; to "rationalize" competition order of players; to "cement" global competitive force of national industry.Since the 1980s of last century, China's government has given out numbers of official policies concerning promoting and guiding the development of its cultural industry. Such policies have played a crucial role in the onrush of China's cultural industry. But it should also be admitted that there are some shortcomings and defects in China's existing cultural industry policies which hold up the further development of cultural industry. The problems can be shortly expressed as "lack, weak, over-changed, highly-scattered, inconsistent and over-abstract". "Lack" means that some necessary policies have not been mapped out by policy makers. "Weak" means the force that the government supports national cultural industry is not strong enough. "Over-changed" implies that the governmental policies are unstable and unpredictable. "Over-scattered" implies that the issued policies have no focus and no inclination. "Inconsistent" suggests that the different policies promulgated by different administrative departments are not consistent and harmonious. They are often against each other. "Over-abstract" means that the policy items stipulated are too vague and too principled so that they are unworkable and impracticable in reality. In order to improve the policy performance of cultural industry and give full play to industrial policy, Chinese government must solve above problems in the future.To make a scientific and practicable industrial policy, first thing the policy-makers should do well is to spell out an advanced but realistic policy goal. According to China's circumstances, the long-term policy goal of cultural industry is: through implementing constructive and effective industrial policies by the government, China's cultural industry should grow into one of the China's strategic pillar industries in the next 15 years (by 2020). The proportion of cultural industry to the GDP should be up to 5 percent from 2.15% in 2005. It should catch up with the U.S.A and become a powerful nation in term of cultural industry. Under such long-term goal, the policy-makers must set concrete objectives as to growth, quality, structure and global competitiveness and so on.Cultural industry policies are comprised of structure policy of cultural industry, organization policy of cultural industry and development policy of cultural industry. Among them, the structure policy is to optimize the allocation of resources between different industries; the industrial organization policy aims to optimize the allocation of resources among different enterprises in the inside cultural industry and development policy aims to optimize the allocation of resources among different regions and different generations. They work together to achieve a sustainable, rapid, and sound development of the cultural industry.Industrial structure policy of cultural production is formulated by government to rationalize structure of cultural industry. There exist two problems in the industrial structure of China's cultural production. One is that the industrial macro-structure is unreasonable and the share of cultural industry is relatively low in the GDP. The second is that the inner structure of cultural industry is unreasonable. The development of different sectors of cultural industry is unbalanced. In order to handle such problems, the government should, on one hand, strengthen the force financing the development of national cultural industry, channel more resources to flow into cultural industry from those oversaturated industries so as to increase the percentage of cultural industry in the GDP. On the other hand, government should take the initiative to optimize the inside structure of cultural industry in a bid to realize a relatively balanced development among different cultural sectors. The present force that the government supports its cultural industry is feeble. So it is necessary for the government to adjust its existed policies and give cultural industry more useful help.The problems existing in China's cultural industry organization include: the sizes of domestic cultural enterprises are too small compared with their foreign rivals; the industrial organization of cultural production is too splintered; the order of competition is too anarchy. On what conditions, the basic orientation of the industrial organization policy is to encourage big enterprises to become bigger and powerful, enhance the concentration ratio of industry, improve the economies of scale, up cooperation level on the basis of specialization and encourage efficient competition. This policy orientation can be denoted as "encourage the big, reinvigorate the small and cure of the anarchy". "Encourage the big" means that the governments give more preferential policies to big enterprises to help them become bigger and competitive. "Reinvigorate the small" implies that governments adopt effective policies to make small firms more specialized so as to ameliorate survival ability of small firms. "Cure of anarchy" means that governments use legal measures to prevent over-competition, vicious competition, maintain rational competition order and improve competition efficiency. The big grow stronger, the small grow specialized and the competition is rational-that is an ideal environment for China's cultural industry. Over the past years, China's governments have carried out the above organization policies of cultural industry and attained considerable success. The governments should take more effective policies to tackle such problems as big but not strong, small but not specialized and chaotic market order.The development policies of cultural industry include the district policy of cultural industry, technology policy of cultural industry and cultural foreign trade policy. The official data indicate that the disparity of cultural industry between different regions is larger than the disparity of GDP. China's government should offer more fiscal transfer payment to undeveloped regions; beef up its efforts to narrow the gap in the development levels of cultural industry among different districts and promote a common prosperity and development. As for industrial technology policy, the problem that should be solved is the insufficient investment in R&D and weak innovative competence. The governments ought to carry out vigorous technology policies such as pumping more funds into R&D, build a multi-entity investment system, promote technological innovative competence of cultural enterprises, accelerate technological upgrade of cultural industry and expedite industrial amalgamation. As for foreign trade of cultural goods, the fact is that China's cultural trade with foreign countries has a 10:1 trade deficit, which not only goes against sound development of China's foreign trade, but also threatens national cultural safety. In order to reverse such disadvantageous situation, China's cultural trade policy should be a somewhat protected trade policy. Concretely, the government should take advantage of relative items to provide necessary protect to those weak links of domestic cultural industry, curb the volume of import of foreign cultural goods and optimize import structure. At the same time, the government is required to adopt favorable policies to expand more export of China's cultural good to overseas market and drive more domestic cultural enterprises to go out. The target of policy is to narrow the trade deficit of cultural trade and reach an approximate balance between import and export of cultural goods in the near future. The long-term goal of policy is to boost international competitiveness of China's cultural industry markedly and make China's enterprises to become a global heavyweight in the international cultural arena.