Sun told an on-going national cultural conference that by the end of 2001, China had had 223,000 units running businesses related to culture, entertainment, audio and video products, performing arts, as well as artworks, with total fixed assets amounting to 46.8 billion yuan (US$5.7 billion).

Nearly 920,000 people were engaged in the cultural industry, which has an annual revenue of 2.02 billion yuan (US$241.6 million), and an added value of 11.89 billion yuan (about US$1.4 million), said Sun.

China had made rapid progress in attracting non-governmental sectors to share the domestic markets of cultural products, with non-governmental sectors employing 4.4 times more people than the state-owned sector.

In addition, cultural consumption was also progressing in a market-oriented way, and a special department of cultural business was set up in the Ministry of Culture in 1998 to prop and boost cultural industries, said Sun.

China's artistic performance market, Sun acknowledged, had also developed rapidly over recent years, saying that the market had performed well in opening up to the non-governmental sector.

(Xinhua News Agency January 11, 2003)