Shanghai resident Wang Yanqing, 38 years, was reminded of the good old days at the university as she attempted to get enrolled for autumn courses at the Shanghai Resident Night School. When the registration portal opened, close to 900,000 eager applicants inundated the site, fighting their way for available places in popular courses such as archery, baking, leather crafting, popping, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

With a fee as modest as 500 yuan per series of 12 classes, the Shanghai Resident Night School has become one of the most popular cultural service hubs in the city, famous for accessibility and quality instructors.

The night school offers courses to applicants aged between 18 to 55, while semesters take place both during spring and autumn. This autumn, it goes to 37 branch campuses and 367 teaching venues across the city.

Night school provides precious opportunities for self-cultivation and exploration for Wang, who has honed her dance skills at the primary campus of the Shanghai Mass Art Center since 2021. “Elderly people have senior universities and children have various art training institutions. We young people also need public cultural services to pursue our interests and enrich our lives,” Wang said. As such, she said night school offers highly reviewed courses, fantastic teachers, and affordable prices which make it easier to find classes close to home.

China has actively worked to improve its system of public cultural services in recent years as a way of widening its basic services among more people.

The July resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on advancing modernization stipulates for improvement in the public cultural service system with a focus on delivering high-quality cultural resources to grassroots communities and enhancing the involvement of social entities in providing public cultural services.

Notably, public cultural services should become “better quality, more efficient, fairer and sustainable,” said Li Guoxin, director of Peking University’s national center for modern public culture research. This would ultimately enhance the sense of cultural satisfaction and happiness of the people, he added.

This approach by the Chinese government ensured that it continued to advance innovation and reform within the public services of culture. The construction of more than 35,000 new public cultural spaces has been done across both urban and rural areas, incorporating libraries and cultural centers, which have ensured great access of culture for the people.

Since 2017, reading spaces have been booming in the capital city of Anhui province, Hefei. Now more than 100 urban reading spaces have arisen, which each and every resident can reach within a 15-minute walk from home.

Full-time mothers need a reading space to temporarily set aside family troubles and just be themselves, said Ji Yuanyuan, who lives in Hefei’s economic development zone. Before changing her life to dedicate full time to her family, she found that many women fell into anxiety upon returning home. This led her to open a book club in 2017, where mothers converge to give recommendations on reading and share experiences about parenting.

The club meets at the Forest Book House, a community reading space offering not only reading facilities but also with workshops on calligraphy and crafts. The book club attracts about 400 visitors daily, having hosted 140,482 readers last year.

“There are over 100 ladies members,” said Ji, “and we meet every Thursday afternoon at the Book House. It was how meeting like-minded people could help soothe our anxieties and raise our spirits.”

In the first half of the year, urban reading spaces in Hefei welcomed 4.86 million visitors, which translates to 1.115 million books borrowed and almost 9,000 events held there, according to Meng Xianlei, a staffer with the culture and tourism bureau of Hefei. “All of this reflects the spirit of the resolution about the reform of reading spaces,” Meng said. “The whole government has begun to build, own, and operate reading spaces through bidding processes.”.

From this year, Hefei will transform the reading spaces into cultural stations that also provide art exhibitions, training seminars, literary salons, film screenings and other services.

Wang hails from Guilin in Southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. She has appreciated her public cultural facilities in Shanghai, even though they are quite far away from her hometown. The city’s libraries, art centers, and communal spaces have not only enriched her life but also created a welcoming environment for her mother, who recently moved to Shanghai. “She enjoys weekly free movie screenings at the community cultural center near our home. These public cultural spaces have helped her quickly build a social circle in this new city,” Wang added.