Study On The Evaluation Of Cultural Soft Power Of Chinese Cities

"Cultural soft power" is a local original discourse based on the practice of cultural construction of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,which is an innovation and transcendence of western "soft power" discourse."Urban cultural soft power" is a concept derived from "cultural soft power",which is the promotion and expansion of "cultural soft power" discourse.To build a socialist cultural power and comprehensively enhance China’s cultural soft power,it is inherently required that all cities in China strengthen cultural construction and comprehensively enhance urban cultural soft power.The effectiveness of the construction of urban cultural soft power needs to be evaluated,and the evaluation of urban cultural soft power needs to be based on a scientific evaluation index system.The evaluation of urban cultural soft power is a weak link in the research field of cultural soft power in China,which needs to be deepened and strengthened.The research on the evaluation of urban cultural soft power is conducive to building a scientific evaluation index system of urban cultural soft power,complementing the weaknesses of the evaluation research on urban cultural soft power in China,and providing an evaluation basis for quantifying the effectiveness of urban cultural soft power construction;It is helpful to find and diagnose the problems in the construction of urban cultural soft power,and then improve the cultural soft power of the city;It is beneficial to clarify the direction and focus of urban cultural soft power construction,and guide urban managers to improve urban cultural soft power towards the key areas and direction of evaluation index setting;It is conducive to improving the urban governance system and improving the level of urban governance.It is the premise of designing a scientific evaluation index system of urban cultural soft power to clarify the connotation,generation mechanism and manifestation of urban cultural soft power.The soft power of urban culture is the sum of the cohesive force,attraction,influence and other spiritual forces generated by various actors in a city through the development and utilization of cultural resources and the role of the media on the audience.Cultural resources that can be developed and utilized generally refer to all resources with cultural attributes,including material culture,behavioral culture,institutional culture and spiritual cultural resources.The main actors of exerting and using the soft power of urban culture are the government,enterprises,residents,etc;The available media mainly include radio,television,newspapers and the Internet.The audiences of urban cultural soft power mainly include permanent residents in the city,as well as foreign tourists,job seekers,investors,scholars and other groups.The formation of urban cultural soft power is the result of multiple factors.Without cultural resources,the soft power of urban culture is water without source and wood without roots;Without the government,enterprises and other actors,cultural resources cannot be developed and utilized,nor can they be transformed into cultural soft power;Without an audience,it is pointless to promote and use the soft power of urban culture;Without various media,the soft power of urban culture cannot be effectively disseminated and diffused.The soft power of urban culture is mainly manifested in the cohesion and centripetal force of urban residents;It is mainly reflected in the attraction of tourists,investors,job seekers,overseas students and other groups,as well as the image of the city.To carry out the evaluation of urban cultural soft power,we need to use a certain theoretical analysis framework and absorb useful ideological resources.The western theory of soft power and China’s theory of cultural soft power provide a theoretical reference for the evaluation of urban cultural soft power.The idea of cultural soft power contained in China’s excellent traditional culture has a certain inspiration for the evaluation of urban cultural soft power.The evaluation of urban cultural soft power consists of a series of elements.To carry out the evaluation of urban cultural soft power,a certain process should be followed.The evaluation of urban cultural soft power refers to the process in which the evaluator uses special evaluation methods and standards to judge the cultural soft power of a single city or multiple cities and give a comprehensive evaluation result through the processing of evaluation data and evaluation information.The evaluation index system of urban cultural soft power is highly subjective.For the same evaluation object,the evaluators use different evaluation index systems and different evaluation methods,and the evaluation results will be different.There are two types of common urban culture evaluation,namely,public opinion survey evaluation and mathematical statistics evaluation.Generally speaking,a complete evaluation system of urban cultural soft power includes evaluation subject,evaluation object,evaluation target,evaluation index system,evaluation method and evaluation result.The general process of carrying out the evaluation of urban cultural soft power is to define the evaluation target,determine the evaluation subject and object,build the evaluation index system,collect and process the evaluation information,and finally analyze and feed back the evaluation results.To carry out the evaluation of urban cultural soft power needs to build a scientific evaluation index system.The basic principles of constructing the evaluation system of urban cultural soft power are: adhere to the guiding position of Marxism,highlight the ideological attribute;Adhere to cultural self-confidence and select evaluation indicators with Chinese characteristics;Adhere to the people-oriented and highlight the Chinese value position of cultural soft power evaluation;Adhere to the unity of quantitative evaluation and qualitative evaluation;Adhere to the unity of universality of evaluation index system and diversity of evaluation objects.Based on the generation mechanism and manifestation of urban cultural soft power,this paper constructs a set of evaluation index system of urban cultural soft power,which includes two levels,nine first level indicators and 38 second level indicators.This paper uses the analytic hierarchy process to give weight to the indicators,and uses the linear weighting method to calculate the comprehensive index of urban cultural soft power.The evaluation index system constructed by the article selects evaluation indexes with Chinese characteristics such as "patriotism education base","national civilized city","national historical and cultural city",which highlights the requirements of the times for cultural self-confidence and the Chinese position of cultural soft power evaluation.The operability and effectiveness of the evaluation index system of urban cultural soft power need to be tested by empirical evaluation.This paper selects 7 case cities,including Beijing,Chongqing and Changsha,to conduct an empirical study on the evaluation of urban cultural soft power.The empirical evaluation results show that the evaluation index system constructed in this paper is highly operable and can truly,comprehensively and effectively reflect the objective situation of the case city’s cultural soft power.The evaluation index system constructed in this paper has high application value.The index selection is reasonable,the weight setting is scientific,the data is easy to obtain,and the evaluation results can be verified.The evaluation index system constructed in this paper is forward-looking and can be used to evaluate the cultural soft power of cities at prefecture level and above in China.