Spring has arrived in this millennium-old agricultural land and farmers in the south should be plowing their fields for a new round of seeding. In Zhongnanhai, Premier Wen Jiabao must be busier than ever deliberating on issues. As he told the press recently, "I do my job as diligently as a farmer tends to his field. I have it on my mind day and night."

From my academic vantage point as a culture observer, what's weighing on my mind, however, is the dire need to cultivate the nation's cultural soil.

Speaking of the word culture, many may find themselves full of narcissistic pride. They may, as a rule, pay glowing tribute to the nation's five-thousand-year-old civilization or rattle off iconic names such as Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, and Li Bai. It is absolutely understandable for them to do so because traditional Chinese culture deserves whatever eulogy one can think of. However, although cultural traditions are important to a nation like ours, we cannot always make a self-sufficient living on them. Instead, we should take on our share of responsibility to build on them, to renovate them, to develop and enrich them within contemporary China.

Recognizing this point, it may be safe to assume that a nation too obsessed with its legendary past may have already ceased to develop, at least intellectually. Therefore, while valuing cultural traditions, we should increasingly pay attention to the shaping of our national culture in the present because it is the reality that holds primacy over history, and a nation's culture is judged primarily on its current reality than its glorious past.

Some people would take a more realistic perspective on culture. They may associate culture with its more visible forms of representation, such as the Peking Opera and those particular forms of singing and dancing that celebrate our time and our lives. Such things are part of our general culture and may carry precious cultural elements. But primarily, they are performing arts designed to entertain, educate or motivate, and are sometimes heavily charged with ideological significance. Therefore, they may not be the truthful representations of our national culture since they tend to give prominence to artistic or didactic effect. For some other people, the word culture may remind them of ancient Chinese pottery, porcelain, or paintings. However, considering their unbridgeable temporal-spatial distance from contemporary society, it's best to categorize them as cultural specimens of our nation's glorious past.

Culture should always be seen in actualities. The true meaning lies not in its loftiness and inaccessibility but in its everyday existence. To put it in simple terms, culture is implied in the way common people speak and behave.