The Ministry of Culture is expected to introduce a new law next
year to further protect folk and traditional culture, a senior
official said yesterday.
To
learn from the successful experience of other countries, the
ministry and the Education, Science, Culture and Public Health
Committee of the National People's
Congress jointly sponsored an international symposium yesterday
in Beijing. Experts from at least 10 countries and regions took
part.
Zhu Bing, deputy director of the committee's Cultural Office, said
the law has already been drafted.
The proposed new law will aim to safeguard ethnic groups' unique
customs, folkloric literature, songs and dances, traditional operas
and handicrafts. It will complement the Cultural-Relics Protection
Law of 1982.
Meng Xiaosi, vice minister of culture, said: "In the period of
economically oriented development, it is easier for these cultures
to be influenced by modern civilization and get lost."
Protecting their intangible cultural heritage is now a problem for
many countries, especially developing ones.
The problem has been especially urgent in the case of China - a
country with 56 ethnic groups and a long history.
Jia Mingru, a senior official at the Ministry of Culture, said:
"Many ethnic languages, costumes, songs, dances and lifestyles are
disappearing as modern civilization steps into ethnic-minority
people's everyday lives."
Also, young people have different opinions about the arts, so they
tend to have no interest in carrying on their traditional cultural
heritage.
What is worse, a few people change traditional arts and folklore in
their performances to suit the audience's taste, which has damaged
these treasures, he added.
"We must push forward legislation in this field so as to save this
precious heritage from extinction," he stressed.
Jia said that the new law will encourage the collection and sorting
of different areas of China's cultural heritage, the provision of
funds for people involved in protecting cultural treasures and the
protection of the country's intellectual property relating to its
cultural heritage.
The Chinese Government has always been concerned about protecting
the country's cultural heritage, Jia said.
It
started to collect information on traditional culture in the 1950s.
To date, 173 genres of books have been published about folk songs,
stories, proverbs, opera, dance and musical instruments.
The government has so far named 204 people as officially recognized
master craftsmen and craftswomen and provided them with a
comfortable working environment to preserve traditional crafts such
as embroidery, cloisonne enamel and brocade work.
As
for protecting ethnic culture, the government encourages the
building of reserve areas to keep these "living human
treasures".
The first such reserve in China was set up with the cooperation of
Norway in Southwest China's Guizhou Province in 1996 to maintain
the Miao
ethnic group's unique culture.
Jia said that it is planned to set up 30 cultural reserves in
China's western areas.
Moreover, Southwest China's Yunnan Province last year became the
first to enact a local regulation on preserving folk and
traditional culture.
(China
Daily December 19, 2001)