Abstract: The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China putsforward the essential connotation and characteristics of Chinese modernization, which opens uptheoretical and practical space for promoting the construction of a socialist cultural power anda publishing power. This study focuses on the audience’s perspective, reveals the scientificconnotation of Chinese path to modernization of publishing industry from the audience’s subjectdimension, demand dimension and rights dimension, and then extracts the strategic objectivesof the modernization of the publishing industry from the audience’s perspective. They are themodernization of the reader’s value system oriented by the audience, the modernization of thepublishing market system oriented by the audience’s demand and the modernization of thepublishing public service system oriented by the audience’s rights and interests. On the basis ofanalyzing the realistic challenges faced by the modernization development of Chinese publishingindustry, this paper puts forward some modernization promotion paths, such as returning to theaudience standard to promote the value linkage of readers at different levels, driving the stockactivation and incremental development of publishing market by demand, and embedding theoptimization of publishing public services in social governance.