The digital economy promotes the high-quality development of China's cultural industry
Beijing, September 16th (Xinhua) - At the northernmost end of the Beijing central axis, the city's landmarks, the Drum Tower and Bell Tower, stand vertically and quietly in front and behind. Entering the Drum Tower, the digital interactive experience exhibition "Stories of Time" is currently on display. Through light and shadow shows, interactive experiences, and other means, it interprets the ancient people's cosmology and time and space views, allowing visitors to experience the fashion sparks generated by the collision of ancient architecture and digital creativity firsthand.
In today's China, more and more cultural heritage is presented in digital forms that are more accessible to the public, radiating new vitality and energy. Emerging digital cultural formats such as video live streaming, e-sports, and digital cultural heritage continue to emerge, promoting innovation in cultural consumption patterns.
At the 2023 Beijing Cultural Forum held on the 15th, experts and scholars from the government, universities, enterprises, and related institutions discussed the development opportunities and risk response of China's cultural industry under the digital economy. The attending guests expressed that the digital economy is reshaping the development mode and industrial ecology of the cultural industry, bringing opportunities for the high-quality development of China's cultural industry.
"The digital economy has brought new driving forces to the high-quality development of the cultural industry, and digital transformation has become a new engine for the high-quality development of the cultural industry." Wang Yiming, Vice Chairman of the China International Economic Exchange Center, said that digital technology has accelerated the innovation of the content, mode, format, and scene of the cultural industry, not only improving the production efficiency of the cultural industry, making cultural production faster, but also giving birth to new cultural formats and models, making cultural content more "visual, interactive, and immersive".
On September 14th, the cast performed instrumental performance of "Same Boat" at the Beijing Cultural Forum Cultural Evening Gala. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Chenlin
Huang Zhijian, Chairman of China Publishing Group Co., Ltd., introduced that with the continuous acceleration of knowledge updating cycle and the great improvement of information dissemination ability, the available content for publishing activities has increased sharply, and the production cycle of publishing products has been greatly shortened. The number of annual book varieties in China has increased from 15000 during the reform and opening up to more than 500000 currently.
"The new technological means enable the presentation of published content to be no longer limited to flat text or pictures, but presented in a more three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, and concrete form, achieving immersive reading," said Huang Zhijian.
Cloud performance, cloud exhibition, cloud classroom... cultural consumption meets all kinds of cultural needs of the public through various Internet platforms, making high-quality cultural products more popular, giving birth to more virtual cultural products, and driving digital cultural consumption. China Internet Development Report 2022 shows that the scale of China's digital cultural industry will reach 1.8 trillion yuan in 2022, accounting for 51.4% of the cultural industry, becoming the leading force of the cultural industry.
The audience watched an immersive light and shadow show on the first floor of the Drum Tower in Beijing. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Chen Zhonghao
Digital technology also activates the vitality of traditional culture, allowing more people to have close contact with precious cultural heritage.
Tencent Group's Chief Operating Officer, Ren Yuxin, stated that in recent years, companies have utilized digital technology to enhance the "presence" and interactivity of Chinese culture display and dissemination. For example, based on high-precision scanning, game engines, cloud gaming and other technologies, high-precision millimeter level reproduction of the Xifengkou Great Wall, super temporal and spatial historical reproduction of the Dunhuang Buddhist scripture cave, and digital technology research and development of cultural relics at the Palace Museum are still being promoted for the digital interactive display of Beijing's central axis.
At the 2023 Beijing Cultural Forum, 16 projects related to "technology empowering culture" were signed, involving multiple fields such as film and television, gaming, and tourism. Among them, Peking University's ancient book digitization and intelligent development and utilization project, together with Peking University and Tiktok Group, focuses on creating a digital platform that provides free ancient book reading services to the whole society. At present, the platform has opened more than 1600 ancient books for free, and has launched functions such as word segmentation search, image and text comparison, complex and simplified conversion, dictionary interpretation, and text and white comparison.
According to the Opinion on Promoting the Implementation of the National Cultural Digitalization Strategy released by China, by the end of the 14th Five Year Plan period, China will have basically built cultural digital infrastructure and service platforms, forming a cultural service supply system that integrates online and offline interaction and three-dimensional coverage. By 2035, a national cultural big data system with physical distribution, logical correlation, fast linking, efficient search, comprehensive sharing, and key integration will be established, presenting a panoramic view of Chinese culture and sharing the digital achievements of Chinese culture among the public.
On May 16th, visitors visited the "Van Gogh's World" panoramic digital art interactive exhibition at the Tianjin Digital Art Museum. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Sun Fanyue
Industry experts admit that the high-quality development of the cultural industry in the digital wave still faces multiple challenges, such as the difficulty of digital transformation for small and medium-sized cultural enterprises, insufficient supply of high-quality digital cultural products, and the existence of digital cultural gaps between different regions.
Zhang Ping, an academician of the CAE Member and a professor of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, believes that in the digital era, it is still necessary to improve the support and guarantee capacity of the new infrastructure of the cultural industry, strengthen the construction of industrial Internet and mobile Internet infrastructure relying on 5G, improve the "cloud, network and end" infrastructure of the cultural industry, and upgrade the traditional cultural infrastructure.
"In the face of the digital economy wave, only by learning to 'dance' with the digital economy can we fully utilize the latest achievements of digital technology in integrated development and promote high-quality development." Wang Yiming believes that technological innovation and cross-border integration are the driving forces for high-quality development of the digital culture industry. China should continue to promote the integration of the digital culture industry with intelligent manufacturing, smart services, as well as finance, logistics, education, sports and other fields, promote innovation in formats, models, and scenarios, and form a joint force for high-quality development.
