Love of books

Zhao recounted the story of a girl called Xin Ran, who is a senior student at Tsinghua University and is among the younger contributors to Readers. Xin Ran has a habit of reading five hours a day and only asks for books as birthday presents.

"She once fell for television programs at 9, and her father turned off the TV and handed her a book," Zhao said. "Reading benefits her a lot."

"So I suggest that you all put away your mobile phones, and read at least for 30 minutes every day," she added.

For seven consecutive years, since 2014, promoting reading has appeared in the Government Work Report, expressing a desire to "encourage reading" and "foster a love of reading", in 2019, to "champion a culture of reading", and this year, to "embrace a culture of reading".

Despite a lot of endeavor at different social levels, there are still many problems and challenges to be overcome before it will be possible to achieve that goal, Zhang stressed.

"Reading is still not one part of Chinese lifestyle," Zhang said. "Quality works are scarce compared with the large amount of titles published every year; reading is fragmented by many other distractions."

One prominent trend found in the 17th annual report on the Chinese people's reading habits by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication, released on April 20, was that while people read for fun and entertainment, watching videos continued to be an entertainment preference.

The report showed in 2019, adult Chinese read an average 4.65 printed books and 2.84 digital publications, whereas in 2018, those figures were 4.67 and 3.32, respectively. Both dropped slightly.

While most Chinese feel they're not satisfied with the amount of books they read in a year, only 11.1 percent read more than 10 printed tomes, while 7.6 percent consume more than 10 digital books.

As for children and young people under 17-year-old, "the result is more encouraging", according to the academy's director Wei Yushan, noting that, on average, they read 10.36 books a year, 1.45 more than in 2018.

The report found that their mobile phones were the preferred method of consuming written media among Chinese readers. On average, adults spent 100.41 minutes a day on their mobile phones, 15.54 minutes more than in 2018.

A closer look in the report found that people's priority when using the internet was to socialize (60.2 percent), followed by consuming news (59 percent) and enjoying video clips (56.9 percent).