Great Achievements

By Qi Yongye, our special reporter

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Great Achievements

By Qi Yongye, our special reporter

Cultural Dialogue's contribution to Zhejiang's cultural ‘Renaissance'

The release of a five-year guideline at the 8th session of the 11th Zhejiang CPC Congress, held in Hangzhou in 2005, opened a new page in the province's cultural pursuits.

China initiated its ‘cultural Renaissance' ambition back in 1986. The same year saw the birth of Cultural Dialogue. Over the past three decades, the monthly magazine has grown into an outstanding platform for the exhibition of the unique cultural diversity and depths of Zhejiang and the province's unwavering determination in cultural institutional reform.

President Xi Jinping's standpoints about the importance of further intensification of the cultural and technological innovation were made clear during his tenure in Zhejiang. The province has long been a torch bearer in the country's cultural endeavors that cover a full range of fields from traditional Chinese arts to modern developments. The province's outstanding leadership in literature, music, theater and dance has been introduced to an ever-increasingaudience by Cultural Dialogue over the years.

One of the feature articles of the first issue of the 1998 Cultural Dialogue was a summary of how the Zhejiang Xiaobaihua Yue Opera Theater has directed the ancient type of drama into a brand new modern track and brought new blood and flesh into the opera form.

In one of the issues in 2011, press photographer Xu Yonghui's photo essay 60 Years in Lens, about the story of the Wang Ajin family, is the best presentation of how the monthly magazine grasps the pulse of the times. The documentary-style story portrays the family's ‘long march' from poverty to a well-off life in a span of six decades.

氣勢恢弘的2012中國遂昌湯顯祖文化節開幕式。A moment of the opening ceremony of Tang Xianzu Festival in Suichang, Zhejiang in 2012.

The 5th issue of the 2012 Cultural Dialogue featured an article about the comeback of the Tang Xianzu legacy in Suichang, a county that is believed to be the hometown of the ‘Shakespeare of China'.

Over the years, the magazine has been keeping pace with the current of the cultural arena of Zhejiang, serving as a reliable source of what is going on in the province's TV and film industry, literature and theater.

Grass-root culture has always been an important focus of Cultural Dialogue, as reflected in a good many stories published in the magazine. The province's new countryside construction accomplishments, represented by Quzhou's Jiangshan City and Zhoushan's Dinghai District, were featured in the 3rd and 4th editions of 2014. Dubbed ‘the birthplace of China's village songs', Jiangshan is one of the country's first 27 sites for the piloting of China's ‘cultural center' project that aims to enrich the cultural life of rural people.

浙江的非遺保護工作取得了令人矚目的成就。Zhejiang has done a good job in preserving intangible cultural heritage.

The magazine has also proved itself to be an effective channel for the enhancement of public awareness of the importance of saving the forgotten cultural heritages from oblivion and an important witness of how the ancient arts and crafts and architectural treasures of Zhejiang have been done justice to. Over the years, the magazine has covered the province's cultural treasures represented by the West Lake, the Jing-Hang Grand Canal and the Jianglang Mountain from a variety of perspectives. One of the leading articles in the 3rd issue of the 1999 magazine depicts the vicissitudes of the West Lake of Hangzhou from a historical perspective.

Cultural Dialogue enjoys a loyal following also for its unsparing coverage of ‘cultural notables'. The magazine's commencing issue in 1986 featured an article about Cai Yuanpei, a Chinese educator and Esperantist known for his critical evaluation of Chinese culture and synthesis of Chinese and Western thinking. The magazine has covered cultural giants from ancient times to contemporary and modern China, such as Su Dongpo, Zhao Mengfu, Wang Yangming, Lu Xun, Feng Zikai, Ji Xianlin and Zhao Yuanren.

Zhejiang's fast-growing film and TV industry that features the rise of cartoon and animation innovation, as well as the province's vigorous cultural institutional reform, has also been well-documented by the magazine, as represented by The Hollywood of the Orient, published in the August edition of the 2009 Cultural Dialogue, and The Romance of the Song Dynasty, published earlier in 2015.