President Visits Literature Archives

President Visits Literature Archives

President Jiang Zemin visited the new Modern Chinese Literature Archives Thursday and expressed his congratulations on the opening of the museum.

Located in north Beijing, the archives is a major cultural project that has received support from the central government and the president, who is also the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

In 1993, Ba Jin, president of the Chinese Writers' Association, wrote to Jiang asking if a new facility could be built to house the impressive collections of China's contemporary literature. Jiang publicly backed the project and inscribed the name of the museum.

The museum is now China's largest modern literature research center and library where all literary works and reviews published since 1911 are stored.

The facility will serve as a literature museum, library, archives and center for literature research and exchange. It holds some 300,000 books, and when the third-phase construction of the facility is completed, it will be the largest of its kind in world today.

During the visit, Jiang showed much interest in the displays. He also instructed the staff there to manage the achieves properly and play an active role in promoting the development of Chinese literature.

Li Lanqing, Vice-Premier and also a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, also joined Jiang in today's visit.