The public cultural service system is a foundational project for building a strong socialist cultural nation. An objective evaluation of its impact on cultural consumption is conducive to fully understanding the spillover effects of the public cultural service system, stimulating the vitality of cultural consumption, and promoting the coordinated development of cultural affairs and industries. Taking the implementation of the national public cultural service system demonstration area policy as a quasi-natural experiment, and using the Differences-in-Differences (DID) to conduct an empirical analysis of the panel data of 81 prefecture-level cities in six eastern provinces, the paper examines the causality in the level of public cultural services and residents’ cultural consumption. The results indicate that the construction of the public cultural service system can enhance the level of cultural consumption among urban residents, with effects increasing over time, where residents' income and expenditure play a mediating role. However, the cultural consumption of rural residents has not been significantly affected by the policy. This result reveals how public cultural services can activate cultural consumption and empower cultural industries on the basis of safeguarding people's basic cultural rights and interests.