The number of museums registered in China has reached 4,165, which doubled in the past 10 years, according to new figures revealed on Dec 25. Among them, there are 300 new state-owned museums and 276 new private museums.

The Suzhou Museum is a museum of ancient Chinese art, in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.The current building of Suzhou Museum was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei in association with Pei Partnership Architects.[Photo/sina.com.cn]

In 2014, the central government arranged up to 660 million yuan ($106 million) in funding for the restoration of a number of movable cultural relics and 53 preventive conservation projects of museum collections. Eight thousand pieces and sets of precious cultural relics and more than 20,000 pieces of bamboo and wooden slips have been repaired. Paying close attention to museum management will be one of the main endeavors concerning cultural heritage in 2015.

Li Xiaojie, head of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, said despite the rapid development of museums in China, new problems follow, such as the lack of collections, limited ways of displaying objects and the lack of professionals to work at the museums.

Li pointed out that in conjunction with the first national survey of movable cultural artifacts, collection management should be strengthened, and the registrered objects need to match with what is in the collections. The scope of the museum collections should be expanded, the assessment of private museums' operations carried out and the access system of private museums standardized.

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