Mightier than the sword

So are the spirit of poetry and the materially successful and sophisticated country that China has become over the past 37 years inimical to one another?

China's thriving economy has made its inhabitants almost immeasurably better off, and the hundreds of millions who have been swept up by consumerism is epitomized no better than by online shopping carnivals such as the annual Singles Day on Nov 11, which has got into the habit of racking up sales records every single year, 254 billion yuan ($38.4 billion) being spent on online shopping in 24 hours this time around.

Social media, which supposedly enriches people by bringing them together, does so at the expense of hanging like a shadow over their fragment lives, leaving them with just scraps of time to read, talk and think. The latest Mary Meeker's Internet Report says the app WeChat, developed by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings, has 938 million active users, and Chinese people spent 900 million hours a day on it, which equates to about an hour a day each. That, of course, does not take into account the countless other times in a day when people are pushing buttons and swiping their phones as they fulfil the urge to check other bits of information on their mobile devices.

In such an atmosphere does anyone have the time, let alone the stomach, for poetry?

In first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and some second-tier cities such as Nanjing, high property prices and increasing living costs have placed many young people under heavy pressure. Some who work in the information technology industry in Beijing report working 12 hour a day and spending two hours commuting, leaving them with little energy to do anything for the rest of the time but sleep.