Cultural Center Of Local Taiwan: Philosophy, Practice And Enlightenment

Since the past researches on the status of Taiwan’s cultural industry were more concerned about introductions on macro level rather than analysis of typical cases, this study is focused on the development of local cultural museums in Taiwan. According to the classifications by scholars in Mainland China, local cultural museum is a special case that lies between cultural industry and cultural affairs. This article describes the recent development of local cultural museums with the aid from the relevant literatures, and studies the distribution and the classification of more than two hundred local cultural museums in Taiwan. This article also discusses the construction of Taiwan local cultural museums under planning, subsidies and guidance from the government. Some flexible ways of construction are investigated, such as publicly-owned-and publicly-managed museums, publicly-owned-and-privately-managed museums, privately-owned-and-privately-managed museums as well as the other ways like professional planning, volunteers and community participation, hence the local cultural museums are harboring the characteristics of Taiwan and easy to be used for reference in similar practices in Mainland China at the same time.This article sums up the concepts in the constructions of Taiwan local cultural centers, including the characteristics of the theory and guiding ideology:focus on the demand of the times, which means the pressure and impetus that the trend of globalization brings to the economic, social and cultural development, such pressure and impetus have helped promote the development of localization, which is "the other side of the coin" of the globalization. Thus the promotion of local cultural centers is founded by the origin of the "new museology" and is supported by plans such as "general construction of communities" all the time. This theory is manifested by the reorganization of resources, based on ideas such as "building local cultural strongholds", the layouts of " cultural life circles" and " lifelong learning ". The historical-cultural resources, human resources and marketing resources are expected to be activated and utilized with the means of "culturalized industries " and "industrialized culture"(the terminology in Taiwan is called vitalization), in order to lay the foundation of sustainable development (The terminology in Taiwan is called sustainable management). In the description of the interview cases, the article also demonstrates the marketing mechanisms of the cultural industries and cultural enterprises on micro level, including some details of the arrangements, difficulties, solutions and practical experiences in local cultural museum management.This article also points out the similarities between the definitions for local cultural museum in Mainland China and Taiwan. The basic background of the local cultural museum construction in mainland China encompasses the governmental purpose of building public cultural service system that covers the entire country. Although the wordings about policy or concept are different in Taiwan, basic vision takes similar points. This is the basis on which Mainland China and Taiwan may learn experiences in building local cultural centers from each other.