China's cultural industry drive diversifies people's playbill
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Vince Jin, a young accountant living in Shanghai, had never dreamed of watching the live performance of his favorite Gothic metal band, Lacrimosa, in China.
"They're not Faye Wong or Michael Jackson..." said Jin, 25, recalling that the news of the German band's Shanghai concert bailed him out of those uneventful days "with wildness and hope."
Jin spent all his internship money on a VIP ticket, which included an autograph poster, a photo shoot opportunity with the German duo, and a front row seat for the live show.
Jin called the live night "one of the most beautiful memories in my life."
It was the night of Oct. 15, 2006, the first year of the 11th Five-Year Program, mapped out by the Chinese government to boost the country's all-around development from 2006 to 2010.
In 2009, Lacrimosa came back to China again, and Jin was able to enjoy his beloved band again.
The 11th Five-Year Program noted in its preface that the supply of cultural products and services did not meet people's increased demand and the five-year period would be a key phase for the development of the country's cultural industry.
"Over the past five years, the most obvious effect of China's efforts to promote cultural industry was that Chinese people had many more choices in the market," Zhang Xiaoming, vice director of the cultural research center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Xinhua.
With American pop band Linkin Park, German countertenor Andreas Scholl, British TNT Theater and many more in between, the country's thriving performance market was book-ended by Richard Wagner's epic opera "the Ring of the Nibelung," which was staged by the Cologne Opera for two rounds this September in Shanghai.
The 16-hour opera marathon, with four parts, was put on stage in its entirety at the Shanghai Grand Theater for four consecutive nights each round -- a rare practice in the opera's global performance records.
The number of foreign commercial performances approved by the Chinese government reached 911 in 2010, up 62 percent over 2006, according to the Ministry of Culture.
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