The following is the abstract of a front-page article published by China Culture Daily on September 13:
Recent years, Weifang coheres the idea of bringing the intangible culture back to rural culture ecology, highlights three focus on preservation in overall, synergistic and developing, fosters rural thriving to support industry development.
Weifang intangible culture heritage has been classified in materially and spiritually. Material part can be run as a business, aims to be developed a business chain and attracts villagers participate in the produce process of cultural creativity merchandises. In spirit part, let opera, dance and other fork art to play well of the grass-root roles, trigger on the vigor among rural residents.
As early as 2014, the program of “Nine Thousands Embroiderers” had been initiated to explore new approaches increasing the villagers’ income through teaching and training rural women embroidery skills.
Meanwhile opera, folk dance, new year picture show are held at rural cultural square to enrich villagers’ spare time.
Qilu Culture( Weifang) Ecology Protection Area, is the first state-level culture ecology zone in Shandong province. 11 years on, local culture resources which represented by intangible culture heritage have been getting closer with public daily life. Numerous ICH projects plays new roles in our common life instead of been the exhibits only.
According to a certain statistics, at present, Weifang owns about 1850 traditional crafts firms and family workshops, their annual output value exceeded 25 billion RMB. Over 50 thousands employment are offered to rural residents whom including about 20 thousands women, thousands of the disabled and 1,200 low income people.
In addition, a three grades administration throughout province, city and county was firmly gone ground, thus forming a four levels cultural successive system, in which various scales exhibition hall/ center/showroom in city, county, town and community/ village.
Weifang also proposed to developproposed to develop the culture creativity in multilevel, cooperated with high education institutes, focusing on the need of tourism markets to increase the ICH commodities sales.
Jiangzhuang and Nijiazhuang are the birthplace of ash painting and howling mud tiger respectively. The local government has organized inheritors with domestic art colleges to set the research centers in local primary and secondary schools to promote the innovative development of folk art. Nie Chenxi, representative inheritor of Provincial Intangible cultural heritage of Nijiazhuang Clay Sculptures, invested more than 300,000 yuan to build Gaomi Folk Art research and practice base, as well launched the study-tour program jointly with six colleges, such as Shandong University, Tianjin University of Science and Technology.
ding role and set up positive examples in poverty alleviation. Shi Chengyou, owner of paper-cutting training center in Beiyangshan Village, loaned 1.6million RMB from government to build Beiyangshan Paper-cutting Art Museum. He also found a village-level paper-cutting association which owns over 150 memberships, and cooperated with other two villages, Zhaojialou and Majialou, building up a ICH study tour base that has receipted exceeded 20 thousands visitors.
