IN China, finding museums has seldom been a problem. But unless they are big and well-known, many fail to be taken seriously by visitors because they don’t have the resources to manage their collections or haven’t been officially registered as museums.

    However, change is afoot. Last week, Premier Li Keqiang set the course to make the country’s museum sector less chaotic by signing the State Council’s first regulation of museums, effective beginning March 20.

    The new rules state that all museums have collection reservation areas, complete management systems and approval documents.

    “The greatest breakthrough is that the new rules give equal status to State-owned museums and private ones,” Duan Yong, head of the museum supervision office for the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, told China Daily.

    “The two are no longer treated differently in terms of duties, qualifications, financial support or supervision.”

    China had 4,165 registered museums by the end of 2013, according to last year’s statistics released by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage on May 18, International Museum Day.

    Of these, 811 were privately owned. Together, the museums attracted more than 600 million visitors in 2013.

    However, at least 20 percent of the country’s museums aren’t registered with the authorities, 30 percent are unable to make ends meet and 60 percent do not even have a complete inventory of their collections, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency, citing a source in the State Council’s Legislative Affairs Office.

    A detailed inventory of collections and identifying information for all cultural relics will be required for a museum to become licensed, according to the new regulations.

    A cultural relic with an “unclear origin” will not be allowed in a museum’s collection, it adds.

    In order to better identify museum exhibits, a national general survey of cultural relics is underway.

    The process will help create a national database of all items that are preserved in China’s various museums.

    More than 12 million cultural relics have been assessed so far.

    The general survey will last until the end of 2016, according to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

    The new rules also encourage museums to be open to the public for free and all museums are required to open to the public within six months of being licensed.

    “Rational business operations,” such as developing cultural innovation products, are also encouraged.

    “Many Chinese museums are public institutions, fully supported by fiscal expenditures. It used to be unclear whether they could make a profit, which can be an obstacle to nurturing creativity,” said Zhang Peng, a member of a national committee for cultural innovation products under the Chinese Museum Association, the industry supervision body.

    However, the new rules encourage museums to explore multiple ways to get financing, “so long as basic discipline and its role as an educator” aren’t changed.

    “Collections are museum treasures. Making money isn’t the priority, but it will help establish a link between cultural institutions and the creative industry through things like souvenirs,” said Song Xiangguang, a museology professor from Peking University. “It will enhance people’s consumption of culture.”

    China’s State-owned museums are public institutions, which generally lack enterprising business models, and many existing management problems are attributed to the institutions’ overwhelming dependence on government administration and aid, Song says.

    “The private museum boom nationwide in the last decade brought unprecedented challenges and made us realize that the demand for museums is diverse, and, therefore, the urgency to promulgate such a regulation,” he says.

    “It will upgrade management levels and will simultaneously provide the industry with professional guidance that was considered insufficient in China so far.”

    Though Song feels the new rules are good first steps, he says they have limitations.

    For example, popular science institutions and military museums are not included in the regulation.

    “The regulation focuses on museums exhibiting cultural relics, so it does not pay equal attention to those of folklore, natural science and the fine arts, but a complete museum system should include a wider range,” he adds.

    In addition, it might be difficult to coordinate the efforts of different government departments because the cultural relics administration is not the only department responsible for museum management.

    “Perhaps, a national museum law is still needed to solve such problems,” Song said.(SD-Agencies)