As a significant part of government public services, public cultural services are the sum of non-profit cultural institutions and services that guarantee people’s basic cultural rights and interests. An analytical framework and indicator system for evaluating the governance performance of public cultural services at the provincial level in China, which includes four major governance elements: governance subject, governance object, governance efficiency and governance environment under the perspective of holistic governance. The entropy value method is applied to determine the index weight, and the comprehensive development index is calculated based on provincial panel data for governance performance evaluation. The empirical results show that the development level of public cultural services in China presents a situation of regional imbalance in resource allocation, considerable regional differences in participation in cultural activities, noticeable problems in the short-plank provinces, and lagging matching among the governance elements. Finally, policy recommendations are put forward to improve the governance performance level of public cultural services at the provincial level in China.