To attain the goal, the state would set up a special 250 million yuan fund. In May of 1998, China had 2,160 types of newspapers with a total annual circulation of 26 billion copies, according to information released at the 15th annual meeting of the World Communications Group. In 1998, China published more than 130,000 kinds of books with a total impression of 7.2 billion copies, about 10 times over 1952. There were about 8,000 kinds of magazines with a combined impression of 2.5 billion copies. In China, literary and artistic creation is flourishing.
China is a large cultural country with a long history.
Its 56 ethnic groups have created brilliant cultures with unique features. As a dynamic cultural heritage, folk literature has been handed down from generations in such form as stories, ballads and proverbs. In the 1950s and 80s, China launched two major collection campaigns for folk literature, collecting 1.83 million folk stories, 3.02 million folk songs and 2.48 million entries of folk proverbs with a total of four billion characters. They investigated and interviewed in Jilin, Hubei, Sichuan, Yunnan and Hebei provinces. They discovered a large number of old and new folk story narrators who were either propagators of traditional folk stories or creators of new folk stories in the countryside.