Shanxi banks on its cultural credentials

Coal-dependent Shanxi province plans to boost its cultural industry and make its economy more diversified.

The added value of the cultural industry in Shanxi reached 38 billion yuan ($6 billion) in 2011, an increase of 32 percent year-on-year, official figures show. The growth rate is much higher than the province's GDP growth in 2011, which stood at 13 percent.

By the end of 2015, the province plans to increase this added value to about 100 billion yuan, making culture another major industry, says Yuan Chunqing, Party chief of Shanxi, who is in Beijing to attend the ongoing national legislature session.

"Shanxi has rich resources - not only in coal but also in culture. We shall explore these cultural resources as hard as we excavate coal," he says.

Official figures show Shanxi has 271 historical and cultural sites under State protection, ranking top of all provincial-level administrative regions in the country. Mount Wutai and the Yungang Grottoes in northern Shanxi are both UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Shanxi plans to establish five cultural regions - of Buddhist culture in the north, Shanxi merchant culture in the center, ancestor culture in the south, red revolutionary culture in the southeast and Yellow River culture in the west.

In addition, the province will support 10 cultural industry bases, each with an annual output of more than 1 billion yuan, and 100 cultural companies, each with an annual output of at least 100 million yuan, according to the Shanxi government.

Hu Suping, chief of the publicity department of the Shanxi committee of Communist Party of China, says the province is also tapping the overseas cultural market.

She says the dance drama Forbidden Fruit Under the Great Wall, performed by Shanxi Performing Arts Academy, gave four shows at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the United States in December 2010. Another Shanxi grand dance show, about Chinese traditional opera, will take place at the Sydney Opera House in Australia in June.

Another major purpose of Shanxi's cultural development is to ensure ordinary residents can benefit from a thriving cultural industry.

"We've been making great efforts to increase public cultural services, especially at the grassroots level, in the countryside and mountainous areas," Hu says.

In the coming years, a large number of community cultural centers will be established, she says.