"It's time to largely boost cultural industries," Ye said, adding that China has a long history of traditional culture, which means there is huge potential in producing related products and making people from all nations interested and aware of it.

Cheng Siwei, former vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, attended the forum. He said that although China has made great progress in its economic development, its cultural industry is still lagging far behind.

Cheng said that in China, the cultural industry accounted for less than 3 percent of GDP in 2008, well below the percentages of 8 percent or 10 percent-plus in developed countries.

According to the Ministry of Culture, the government has set a target that by the end of 2015, cultural industries should account for more than 10 percent of GDP.

A series of sessions were held during the two-day forum, with topics ranging from the emerging sports industry in China, creative industry gardens, animation and online games – particularly in terms of promotion and the reform of the publishing and media industries.

All of the fields discussed are playing leading roles in Chinese cultural industries and have made huge achievements in recent years, said Chen Shaofeng, vice director of the Institute for Cultural Industries at Peking University.

China's online gaming industry made huge progress last year according to a report by iResearch,on website 178.com that estimated China's online gaming market income surpassed 27.06 billion yuan ($3.96 billion) in 2009, a 30.2 percent increase on the previous year.

"2010 will be a prosperous year for Chinese cultural industries and it will play an important role in economic growth," Chen said.

However, according to the experts, there are still many problems

to be resolved behind the industry's predicted prosperity.

"Although we have built hundreds of creative cultural industry gardens across the country, few are of use in boosting local creative industries," commented Wang Jici, professor at the Department of Urban and Economic Geography at Peking University.

The government also cited several concerns regarding the virtual world including violence, over-use of online platforms by young people, obscenities included in online games and conflicts arising from virtual property trades.

During the forum, officials said that the government would try their best to help solve these problems.

Liu Qiang, director of the Internet Culture Section of the Culture Market Department at the Ministry of Culture, said that the Ministry would strengthen administration and management of virtual currency and online game classifications, with the improvement of technology and contents censorship planned for 2010.

Yue Hongyan contributed to the story

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