Actors dressed in ethnic costumes perform at the site of the Rural Spring Festival Gala Concentrated Performance. [Photo by Lei Ning/Xinhua]

The launch ceremony of the 2020 Rural Spring Festival Gala Concentrated Performance was held in Lishui, East China's Zhejiang province, on Jan 8. Themed "Rural Revitalization and Cultural Guidance", the ceremony's main venue was in Lishui.

The performance was launched simultaneously in eight other provinces or autonomous regions, including East China's Anhui province, Southwest China's Sichuan province, South China's Guangdong province, Central China's Henan and Hunan provinces, Northwest China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Shaanxi province, and Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.

Through combining offline displays of rural Spring Festival customs and online interaction forms, the 2020 Rural Spring Festival Gala connected hundreds of counties and tens of thousands of villages in China.

The Rural Spring Festival Gala in Lishui started in 1981, even earlier than the Spring Festival Gala held by China Central Television. Since then, with the help of the rural gala, Lishui has been committed to exploring new ways to benefit its people through culture, and trying to solve the unbalanced and inadequate contradiction in cultural development.

According to Li Hong, director of the public service department of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, as a vivid way to promote the vigorous development of mass cultural activities and the revitalization of rural culture, the Rural Spring Festival Gala has played an exemplary and leading role in promoting the modernization of rural governance systems and governance capacity.

Statistics show that during the Spring Festival holiday last year, Lishui attracted 1.07 million visitors to its rural homestay venues and achieved tourism revenue of 2.37 billion yuan ($343.46 million).