Gaizhou City makes “intangible cultural heritage talents” a distinctive business card of the city

Gaizhou City continues to promote the “talent-driven city” strategy, and by promoting the excellent traditional Chinese culture, it builds a platform for intangible cultural heritage talents to help rural revitalization. “Intangible cultural heritage talents” are becoming a distinctive business card of Gaizhou.

Gaizhou City has a long history and profound cultural heritage. As early as the Han Dynasty, it was an important town in the northeast where merchants gathered. It is the birthplace of shadow puppetry, Liaonan opera and Liaonan stilts yangko. In order to revitalize the intangible cultural heritage team, Gaizhou City, guided by party building, has formulated a three-year action plan for new breakthroughs in the comprehensive revitalization of talent services, increased the training and support of professional talents in the field of culture and art, and accelerated the construction of philosophy, social sciences and literature and art talent teams.

Start the census of intangible cultural heritage projects and inheritors, improve the construction of the intangible cultural heritage inheritance system, scientifically classify various types of intangible cultural heritage talents, and dynamically establish an intangible cultural heritage talent information database. Through the discovery, introduction, cultivation and training of intangible cultural heritage talents, the echelon sequence of the intangible cultural heritage talent team is gradually taking shape. At present, Gaizhou City has 16 intangible cultural heritage projects, 3 intangible cultural heritage inheritance bases, and 23 representative inheritors, including 2 national-level and 3 provincial-level.

In order to expand the influence of intangible cultural heritage works, Gaizhou City actively organized Liao Opera Troupe and Shadow Play Art Troupe to participate in the “Northern Shadow Play Helps Rural Revitalization” exhibition and performance activities, and successively went to Faku County, Shenyang City, Tieling County, Tieling City and other places to sing Liao Opera excerpts and perform shadow plays for the audience, so that audiences inside and outside the province can understand the traditional culture and intangible cultural heritage projects full of local characteristics, further expanding Gaizhou’s popularity and the influence of intangible cultural heritage works. In the 2024 “Doctor Shenyang Tour” event, Irgen Jueluo’s paper-cutting works and Gaizhou gourd carving works were exhibited as Gaizhou’s characteristic cultural and creative products, attracting many outstanding students to stop and watch.

At the same time, Gaizhou City actively encourages and supports intangible cultural heritage talents to establish economic entities. Zhao Congzhuo, the intangible cultural heritage inheritor of Irgen Jueluo’s paper-cutting project, is a member of the Liaoning Provincial College Students’ “Stay in Liaoning, Come to Liaoning, Return to Liaoning” Propaganda Team. He has trained more than 3,200 people in colleges and universities in the province and was named “Advanced Individual in Liaoning Province’s Entrepreneurship to Promote Employment”, leading more than 60 villagers in Huaishufang Village in his hometown to learn paper-cutting skills and increase their income during the slack season.