At the end of the year, per Chinese government decree, all provincial and state-run museums in China will be open to the public free of charge, reports the Global Times. This is a powerful gesture of national commitment to the arts from a party not exactly known for its cultural support — but the new ruling naturally also brings up questions surrounding the current health of Chinese art museums.

The amazing rise of Chinese contemporary artists, collectors, and auction houses points to a true renaissance for the native art world. Yet these hopeful phenomena have been achieved in the face of some long-term problems which continue to plague China's official art institutions — problems that will have to be confronted by the nation's major contemporary art museums if the local art scene is to rise to the international status to which it clearly aspires. (The small but growing group of serious institutions includes institutions like the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA) and Today Art Museum in Beijing, the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and the upcoming M+ in Hong Kong.)

Here, ARTINFO rounds up the short list of issues that may hold back China's rise in the arts.

1. The government is failing to support homegrown Chinese museumsadequately.

The distinction between public and private museums in China is hazy, unlike the clear-cut ecosystem of non-profits in the United States and elsewhere. Museums that successfully register with the government in order to find support are often subjected to censorship pressure and forced to show propaganda exhibitions, explains the Art Newspaper. Given this downside to “official” status, museums look elsewhere for funding, relying on sponsorship and gallery rentals. The Today Art Museum, one of Beijing’s largest non-foreign contemporary art museums, “relies on sponsors to cover 70 percent of their costs” (though they hope to begin working with art foundations to develop exhibitions).

2. China’s current generation art institutions are weak, and often compromised by business concerns.

Many of China’s contemporary art museums have been established not by art patrons but by “real estate entrepreneurs,” notes an Art Zine China essay, including the Today Art Museum, Square Art Museum, and the Shanghai Zhengda Modern Art Museum. Most museums “begin as showcase architecture and vanity projects,” agrees the Art Newspaper, serving to justify high prices for home sales to China’s growing upper class. Freshly minted Chinese museum patrons “open museums for socializing and for business, not for the art,” adds Ivan Lau, who runs the independent Nong Art Consultancy and was formerly a museum director in Suzhou. Having been opened more as vanity projects than cultural enterprises, these museums are ill-equipped to face logistical problems like hiring staff and turning over exhibitions. The Rockbund Art Museum is currently maintaining a high standard of programming, but its location, an art nouveau building just off Shanghai's glamorous Bund district, is also specifically designed as a play at creating a new, highly branded luxury neighborhood for city residents and stores.

3. Museums are mismanaged, and good managers and staff are scarce.

Integrity problems are compounded by the fact that China lacks a seasoned community of museum directors, curators, and administrative staffers, and those who remain in China are sought after by art institutions as well as the international commercial galleries that are opening offices in the country like Pace and James Cohan. “A comprehensive administrative system has not developed…. Without a clear management structure, efficiency or quality cannot be attained,” writes Kelly Chen in a School of the Art Institute of Chicago paper. Many museum directors and administrators “do not have basic knowledge in management,” Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum director Wang Huangsheng told the Global Times. High staff turnover, visible even at the Ullens, where American curator and editor Philip Tinari recently took over the director post from Jerome Sans, also hurts institutional stability.

4. The available quantity of museum-quality artwork is limited and competition is fierce for key pieces.

Collecting museums have a lot to worry about when it comes to stockpiling relevant objects to show, with competition from developed Western institutions as well as from private Chinese collectors who don’t necessarily plan to donate their purchases or are considering opening private museums of their own. "In the 1950s and 60s, art museums could purchase valuable artwork. This is no longer the case. The budget for most art museums is too limited to meet basic collection standards," Wang told Global Times. Iconic contemporary Chinese artists like Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang sell paintings for millions of dollars, while the market for high-quality Chinese antiquities is in a turbo-charged boom phase, with exemplary pieces netting over $10 million at auction. Unstable Chinese museums, private or public, are hard pressed to keep up with the white hot market.

5. The theoretical practice of curating and guidelines of institutional integrity aren’t wholly developed.

Contemporary Chinese art as we know it is a phenomenon that found its legs in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, coming into the international (i.e. Western) spotlight in the mid-2000s. The Chinese art world has adapted to Western norms of curation and museum management somewhat, but it is by no means fully integrated or standardized. In a useful essay called “Problems and Possibilities: Curators and Art Museums in China” by Zhang Zhaohui and Yang Yingshi published in the Web site China Gallery, the authors point out that “the mechanism of art museums in mainland China and Taiwan… is quite different from their Euro-American counterparts.” The difference is even linguistic: The terms to denote “gallery,” “museum,” and “curator” in Chinese are hazier than in Western art world discourse. Star curators do exist, Zhang and Yang note, including the likes of Leng Lin (now at Pace), Feng Boyi, and Huang Du, but these curators emerged as writers and critics rather than professional exhibition organizers. As China’s contemporary art community grows, these curators will be able to share their strategies and, one hopes, commit to growing strong institutions that will in turn be able to support their activities.