An exciting new chapter opens in Beijing

Writers supported

Beijing is not just providing more and better bookstores for the public, it is making great efforts to offer improved content and a better literary environment.

Last month, Du Feijin, a member of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Committee of the Communist Party of China, said at the opening ceremony of the third October Literature Month, "Creating the best work is at the writers' core."

In recent years, Beijing has supported authors by setting up a special cultural fund to help them produce high-quality works, of which several have won national literature awards, Du said.

Based on this, the Beijing government plans to set up two more funds－the October Literature Fund and the Network Literature Development Fund－to guide and promote the integrated development of both serious and online literature, he added.

"Meanwhile, the municipal government is facilitating the strategic cooperation between Beijing's cultural brand－October Literature－and the Alibaba Group, which will bring social and private investment into literary creation," he said. "We've been working to keep Beijing's literary world lively and fresh."

In October 2016, the October Literature Academy was formed at Yongding, a park in the south of the city, and the first October Literature Month was held.

In October last year, when the second literature month was held, the authorities, together with the Beijing Publishing Group, many bookstores and related groups held dozens of events such as literary forums, lectures, poetry readings, meetings between writers and readers, and book shows, which attracted more than 500,000 people.

Online and offline activities involved more than 190 million people, according to the municipal government.

Since then, "October", as the name of both the month and a magazine that has been published in Beijing for more than 40 years, has become a strong literary theme for cultural life in the capital.

Last year, Zhang Luyi, a 10-year-old primary school student, attended a lecture at the academy given by A Lai, chairman of the Writers Association of Sichuan province, on the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The boy quizzed A Lai during a question-and-answer session after the lecture, saying that his parents took him to such lectures regularly and he had read the book twice, gaining much inspiration from it. A Lai and other adults at the lecture were surprised that the boy had read this book at such an age, but the youngster said he loved reading and the city had provided him with many places to do so and with many reading activities since he started to learn Chinese characters. "In the Chaoyang district library in my community, there are rooms especially for children to read books that are selected by the staff members, and the library holds a group book-reading session twice a day for children," the boy said.