The village party secretary has become a "streamer," explaining benefit policies in local dialect; public cultural spaces have turned into summer classrooms that reassure children and make things easier for parents; in libraries people can not only read but also watch films, learn programming, and study anti-fraud knowledge… In Anhui, distinctive public cultural spaces are quietly becoming part of people’s everyday lives.

In recent years, Anhui has continuously improved convenient cultural facilities and steadily strengthened the province’s public cultural service system. Relying on the construction of "15-minute reading circles" and improving the nationwide reading service system, the construction of public cultural spaces has gradually reached standards of normalization, regulation, mass accessibility, and regular operation. As of the end of July, 2025, Anhui had completed and put into operation 600 public cultural spaces.

The completed public cultural spaces provide the public with services such as reading and sharing, art performances, training lectures, popular-science education, literary salons, film screenings, and public social activities, substantially expanding the coverage and effectiveness of public cultural services.

Across Anhui, localities insist on a people-centered approach, advancing public cultural space construction suited to local conditions and strengthening the integration of functions and business forms. Construction of public cultural spaces is coordinated with urban reading spaces, brick-and-mortar bookstores, New Era Civilization Practice stations, grassroots comprehensive cultural service centers and other urban and rural cultural positions; it complements and connects with resources in rural libraries, and is combined with cultural activities to bring together functions such as civilization campaigns, changes in customs, and film screenings—creating spiritual and cultural homes for people right at their doorstep.

In the 2024 Yangtze River Delta and some national provincial/city competitions for the most beautiful public cultural spaces, Anhui won 24 awards at one stroke, demonstrating the vitality and warmth of its public cultural space construction.

In 2026, Anhui will continue to include the public cultural space project among the provincial people’s livelihood initiatives, promote wider coverage and effectiveness of urban and rural public cultural spaces, and will write the public cultural space project into the province’s 15th Five-Year development plan—striving to build a new national model for public cultural space construction and to open a new chapter in the construction of urban and rural public cultural service systems.

Source: anhuinews.com