Enable Rural Bookhouses to Deeply Root in Local Soil and Culture
2026-07-24
Recently, the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs jointly issued the Action Plan for Promoting Reform and Improvement of Rural Bookhouses to Advance Rural Reading. The plan inherits the legal spirit of the Regulations on Promoting National Reading, shifting its core focus from "universal coverage" to "quality enhancement and efficiency improvement," and from "physical deployment" to "effective service." This marks a new developmental direction and reform pathway for this grassroots public cultural service carrier, representing a systematic deployment to empower rural comprehensive revitalization through cultural revitalization.
Rural bookhouses are a foundational project to safeguard farmers' basic reading rights and bridge the "last mile" of cultural benefits delivery. Since its implementation, millions of reading points have spread across rural areas, with billions of books reaching households, fundamentally resolving the rural dilemmas of "difficulty in purchasing, borrowing, and accessing books." They have become a hallmark carrier for balanced public cultural service delivery. However, with economic and social development and rising living standards, traditional bookhouses face urgent challenges such as supply-demand mismatches, insufficient vitality, and low efficiency. Currently, promoting reforms to upgrade rural bookhouses is timely—it aligns with evolving eras and responds to people's livelihood needs, ensuring no blind spots in building a society rich in reading and letting the sunlight of public culture shine across rural landscapes.
How should rural bookhouses be reformed and upgraded? The answer lies in "pragmatism," with the core goal of breaking administrative inertia and returning to the "rural" essence, enabling bookhouses to deeply root in local soil and culture, resonating with rural cultural revitalization.
Optimize layout patterns through integrated consolidation. Managing villages is like tending fields—adapt to local conditions and leverage trends. The plan proposes bidirectional integration of "bookhouse+" and "+bookhouse" models, offering practical pathways to revitalize existing resources and deliver precise empowerment. Villages vary in size, population density, and industrial characteristics; a single standard cannot govern all areas. For central villages with concentrated populations and solid foundations, strengthen "bookhouse+" functions by expanding comprehensive services like reading learning, agricultural technology training, policy dissemination, and child care, creating rural cultural hubs. For sparsely populated villages with low usage rates, adopt the "+bookhouse" embedding model, integrating with party-mass service centers, civilized practice stations, convenience stores, etc., to achieve multi-functional spaces and resource efficiency. Reforms should avoid large-scale demolition/reconstruction or superficial efforts, ensuring reading spaces align with rural realities and public needs, returning bookhouses to their original purpose, to the people, and to practicality. Through the fragrance of books, refine local customs; through reading, unite hearts—injecting deep, enduring spiritual momentum into rural comprehensive revitalization.
If books don’t match needs, bookhouses will naturally lose vitality. This reform drives supply-side transformation, returning book selection power to the public to precisely address real demands like skill-based wealth creation, children’s reading, and health wellness, ensuring books on shelves truly enter production and贴近 life. Meanwhile, actively embrace digital trends to enrich online offerings like audiobooks, video classrooms, and cloud resources, adapting to diverse reading habits and needs, making books relevant and services user-friendly, enabling more people to fall in love with reading.
**A single bookhouse and a row of bookshelves are merely physical carriers; nurturing a rural reading ecosystem hinges on atmosphere creation and value guidance.**紧扣 key nodes like agricultural cycles, traditional festivals, and school holidays, launch grounded, accessible activities such as agricultural tech sharing, parent-child reading, theoretical dissemination, and local storytelling. Cultivate local reading promoters, leveraging rural teachers, returning youth, and farming experts to drive reading habit formation through local language and relatable stories, making reading gradually a new lifestyle trend in rural areas.
Establish long-term mechanisms and strengthen collaborative synergy. The sustainable operation of rural bookhouses lies in simplifying processes and prioritizing pragmatism. The plan clarifies reducing burdens for grassroots levels, firmly opposing "showcase projects" or image engineering, freeing grassroots workers from ledger reports and inspection formalities to focus on serving the public and organizing activities. Simultaneously,凝聚 multi-departmental合力, guide social participation, and build a multi-party co-construction, co-governance, and shared-benefit framework, ensuring bookhouses operate sustainably and deliver lasting public benefits.
A room filled with book fragrance can nourish a local area; a continuous cultural heritage can build the foundation for revitalization. The reform and upgrade of rural bookhouses are both a supply-side reform of public cultural services and a "people-centric" answer to grassroots governance. Bookhouses are not merely book distribution hubs but also sanctuaries of nostalgia and connection points for public sentiment. Their value lies not in architectural decoration but in closeness to the people and service to livelihoods; not in physical coverage but in effective nourishment and silent influence. When the wind of reading permeates rural landscapes and the scent of books nurtures local culture, rural bookhouses across China will, with enduring strength, build a spiritual dam for rural comprehensive revitalization, writing a new chapter of cultural rural nourishment and soul-empowerment in the grand journey of Chinese-style modernization.
Edit:WENWEN Responsible editor:LINXUAN
Source:Guangming Online - Guangming Daily
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