Investigation into the hollowing out of rural reading rooms: no books borrowed in 3 years

As a project benefiting the people that enriches farmers' spiritual and cultural life, in recent years rural reading rooms have reached thousands of villages and towns and have been welcomed by farmers. As of now, China has built more than 600,000 rural reading rooms, with cumulative central government funding exceeding 20 billion yuan.

However, reporters learned through investigation that in some places this good deed has instead caused farmers considerable confusion: in some rural reading rooms the books provided are divorced from the realities of production and daily life, leaving farmers not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and some reading rooms even put on an "empty city stratagem," recruiting people to pose as temporary actors pretending to read when inspections come around... Why do rural reading rooms encounter such "awkwardness"? How can the public purse's money be spent without it hurting?

Reading rooms becoming a joke: the north gets introductions to growing sugarcane, dry land gets fish-farming books

Reporters visited several rural reading rooms in Hengshui, Shijiazhuang and other places in Hebei Province, and found that these reading rooms each hold around 1,000 books, covering planting and breeding, computers, politics and economics, culture and many other fields. But reporters also observed that very few people come to read.

The reporters' investigation found that the reason the reading rooms put on an "empty city stratagem" lies in the "willful" allocation of books: some books are severely out of step with farmers' reading tastes and cannot attract farmers' interest.

-- Divorced from actual conditions. Farmers in the rural areas of Hengshui mostly make their living growing watermelons, and many households have melon sheds. Villagers of Liuzhong Village, Dengzhuang Town, Taocheng District, reported: "The technique for growing melons has now advanced to the 'mid-sized arched shed,' yet the books in the reading room still talk about how to manage a 'greenhouse.' This knowledge is too outdated."

He Xiangjiu, vice chairman of the Cangzhou Municipal CPPCC in Hebei Province, said that sugarcane is mostly produced in the tropical regions of the south, yet in a northern rural reading room he saw a book on growing sugarcane?!

In a rural reading room in a village in Hongyang Township, Haiyuan County, Ningxia, the shelves hold such books as the "Handbook for Safe Production of Pollution-Free Rice" and "200 Questions on Large-Scale Freshwater Fish Farming Technology." Yet the village is located in the mountainous area of Xihaigu, has always depended on the heavens for its food, and has no water source available for irrigation; more than 30 households in the village even have to buy water from several kilometers away to drink. Water sources are extremely scarce, let alone raising fish.

-- Books brand new, CDs unopened. In reading rooms in some places, reporters found that many books were brand new, with no traces of having been much leafed through. In the rural reading room of Dage Village, Dengzhuang Town, Taocheng District, Hengshui City, there was a dedicated cabinet for audio-visual materials, yet many of those CDs had not been unwrapped.

"The most useless things in the reading room are the piles of old audio-visual materials. Nowadays everyone is into going online, and the content of these CDs is outdated too," said Shi Jiashun, village Party secretary of Sanlipu Village, Fucheng County, Hengshui City.

-- Not suited to the reading population. When reporters interviewed at the rural reading room of Dong'anjiazhuang Village, Shijiazhuang City, they found that the rules and regulations here were relatively complete, with a "Rural Reading Room Management System" hanging on the wall and a "Borrowing Register" and "Reader Suggestion Book" on the table. There were people in the reading room, but they were all the elderly and women.

Shi Jiashun said that most of the village's young and able-bodied people go out to work, leaving behind mostly children, women and the elderly, who would prefer more books of the fairy-tale and nutrition-and-health types, "but there aren't many such books in the reading room."

-- Serious homogenization of books. Chen Li, deputy director of the National Library of China, found during an earlier investigation that "in one rural reading room, there were as many as 7 copies of the book 'Winning at Business Banquets by Ordering Well,' and actually 12 copies of 'Registry and BIOS in Simple Terms.' A reading room has only 1,000 books in total, and to stock books like these, and so many copies of them, can farmers really make use of them?"

Chen Li told reporters that in most parts of the country rural reading rooms are uniformly supplied by press and publication departments at or above the county level, and within a given area, almost all rural reading rooms are supplied with the same books. This results in a limited variety of books, with a hundred towns and a thousand villages all looking the same, and serious homogenization of books, making it hard for readers to find the books they need among the limited selection.

-- May become a channel for pushing slow-selling books. According to reports, some of the books now in reading rooms are overstocked books. Some experts point out that good books cost more, and too low a discount means losing money, so it cannot be ruled out that rural reading rooms have become a channel for publishers or bookstores to push their backlog of slow-selling books.

Chen Min, director of the Culture, Education, Health and Historical Records Committee of the Changsha Municipal CPPCC, also pointed out that during an investigation in Hunan he found that the vast majority of books purchased for rural reading rooms were published within the province, with very few published outside it, and therefore he also raised the question of "whether there is local protectionism in the procurement of books for rural reading rooms."

No one came to the reading room to borrow books for 3 years; "actors" recruited to deal with inspections

Besides the problem of book provision, some rural reading rooms are poorly managed and irregularly open, making it difficult for the public to borrow books, all of which contributes to low usage rates.

Some persons in charge of rural reading rooms in Hebei interviewed by reporters said that the village books can only be read inside the reading room and generally are not lent out, mainly for fear that villagers will lose them or that children at home will tear them.

Yang Peihua, manager of the rural reading room in Liuzhong Village, Dengzhuang Town, Taocheng District, Hengshui City, said that the village reading room has no fixed opening hours; whoever wants to read just finds someone to open the door.

In the rural reading room of the Xinrang Village Committee, Nada Town, Danzhou City, Hainan Province, the borrowing records show that no one had come to borrow books from this rural reading room for 3 years.

"Due to the lack of sustained service guarantees, many rural reading rooms cannot open normally after being built. During our investigations we found that some rural reading rooms, in order to deal with inspections, recruited people to pose as temporary actors pretending to read," Chen Li said.

In recent years, although departments at all levels have vigorously improved public cultural services, reporters learned from visiting multiple villages that farmers' spiritual and cultural life remains barren. The elderly mostly gather outside the houses to bask in the sun, and some women have singing and dancing activities. Some grassroots officials said that rural reading rooms exist in name only, and farmers do not even know there is a rural reading room.

Chen Li believes that some rural reading rooms have already caused duplicated investment and waste of public finances. The goals of rural reading rooms and the existing cultural system's county-level public libraries, township comprehensive cultural stations, and village comprehensive public cultural service centers are completely identical. The construction of digital rural reading rooms being promoted in various places also highly overlaps in resource building and service departments with the existing cultural sharing project, the public electronic reading room construction plan, and the digitalization promotion project.

Listen more to farmers' voices; money must be spent where it counts

"There's a big pile of books we don't need, and not a single book we do need." The farmers interviewed by reporters said they hoped the money would not be spent so painfully and that relevant departments, when procuring books, would visit different villages and towns to understand the needs; otherwise no matter how many books are supplied it is meaningless. They want more books suited to the new situation of agricultural production technology and structural adjustment, and more books that fit current daily-life needs.

Wang Yongbo, a villager of Dong'anjiazhuang Village, Shijiazhuang City, also told reporters that he hoped the entire county and city would build a remote online library and make good use of online resources.

"Farmers are the main consumers, and they must be given a voice; otherwise, force-feeding them things they don't need will only end up being abandoned." He Xiangjiu said that relevant departments should take the initiative to understand the needs of the farmer masses, constantly update and bring in books suited to farmers' needs, and make rural reading rooms a good place for the broad rural masses to obtain spiritual nourishment.

Chen Min pointed out that the development of rural reading rooms must be considered from a long-term perspective, and public money must be spent where it counts. The bidding and procurement process for books for rural reading rooms must be open and transparent to the outside. People's congress deputies, CPPCC members, and farmer representatives should participate in the entire process of book bidding and procurement.

Chen Li suggested that various cultural service projects and people-benefiting projects should be coordinated and integrated to form a joint force; the county's public library could be taken as the leader, with effective use of township comprehensive cultural stations, village comprehensive public cultural service centers, etc., to achieve interconnection and interoperability, integrate rural reading rooms and the cultural information sharing project, hold more cultural activities that the masses love to see and hear, and manage and use rural reading rooms well.