From the article below you may, without appreciable error, extrapolate to the idea that modern Chinese folks will be less likely to invest in gold, quite unlike their conservative compatriots of old who believe in the value of gold. Times have changed. Read on .........
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Decline of classics worries academics
Chinese are reading more books but are abandoning classic literature which holds key to cultural legacy and values
BEIJING - By the time he interviewed his fifth doctoral candidate, Professor Liu Mengxi was close to tears.
The director of the Chinese Cultural Research Institute had ended each interview with this question: Can you recite a Tang poem? Without fail, every student cited Li Bai's Before My Bed, The Moonlight Shines.
When he asked for other examples, his students drew a blank, prompting him to throw up his hands in frustration.
'Don't our students read any more?' Prof Liu asked a group of academics and writers from Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou at a forum yesterday after he described his teaching experience.
He was among 30 intellectuals who came together to review the state of reading and scholarship in China - the first time a group of thinkers has done so.
Among them were delegates of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the National People's Congress, who promised to raise the alarming trend next week when the legislature meets for its annual conference.
For 3 1/2 hours yesterday, they debated the need to get Chinese people to hit the books again. But they want them to read not magazines and self-help books, but the Chinese classics.
Their consensus: China's literary legacy is under threat because few have time for serious reading. The young, in particular, have succumbed to the television and video games.
Yet, official statistics show a growing interest in reading as the population of college graduates soars. People are also getting more free time to read as two-day weekends become the norm in the workplace.
The country has almost 50,000 bookstores - one for every 25,000 citizens. And each year, 100,000 titles are published, up from the fewer than 10,000 titles released in 1978 when China was just opening up, the Press and Publication Administration has revealed.
But scholars contended yesterday that the figures were misleading.
People now read functionally to retrieve the facts they need. They can recall few details later, and worse, they do not find reading a pleasurable activity.
The academics want readers to spend more time combing through tomes such as the Four Classics of ancient Chinese literature - Dream of The Red Chamber, Journey To The West, The Three Kingdoms and Tale Of Water Margin - and works by the late renowned writer Lu Xun.
These books were popular in the 1980s but have lost their influence in the past decade to more popular books on topics such as economics, computers, travel and lifestyle.
The solution? Get teachers and movie stars to inspire the young and old to read. With the right packaging, literary reading can be made hip and trendy, said author Deng Youmei.
'In China, many books you read in early life do not seem very important. But they prove useful in adult life when you need to talk about them in social circles or even in business,' he noted.
China's 12,000 public and research libraries should also clean up their act, Prof Liu noted. Dank and dark, many libraries make borrowing books a hassle by requiring readers to fill out a stack of forms.
Mr Cheng Duo, a popular documentary presenter, added: 'With books becoming more expensive, we need good libraries to attract readers.'
As a result of not imbibing the classics, the Chinese have lost important values such as how to treat their elders, said National People's Congress delegate Wu Xiaolan.
She said: 'As a country, we can't draw lessons on who we want to be from cartoons and video games. Nobody reads the classics these days. But for centuries, we learnt to be Chinese from those books.' |
