By CGTN’s Sun Ye and Dong Hailin
It's the weekend, but third grader Lin Ziheng gets up early and rides 20 kilometers from home, for reading.
He reads Chinese classics with his father and other book lovers, in a club called YANWUJIQUE.
He says he loves it.
The group read and re-read the classics, copy in traditional calligraphy style, compare notes... and help each other decipher the texts.
Lin's father, Lin Yi says it's good for the boy. And the club has been good for him too. It helped him get through the Four Great Chinese Classics, which he believes all Chinese people should know.
Lin father and son read together. /CGTN Photo
Lin says: “These books -- they use different characters and all have different meanings from now, so getting through them is difficult. It's as hard as scaling the Himalayas. You can't possibly do this alone, right? You have to have company.“
And that's how the reading club started in 2008, with just a handful of enthusiasts in a tea house.
It has more than 50 members now.
The morning CGTN met the Lin father and son, the club had two other reading sessions going on elsewhere in Beijing, so that each one runs efficiently.
The club founder Han Song says: “We have this name because we want to revive the ancient Chinese tradition, where gentlemen meet, read together and improve themselves. It's what Confucius preaches. To have a better character through reading, it's still our goal.”
Han Song, the reading club founder. /CGTN Photo
Han says he couldn't live without the club now.
And thousands of people in China's bigger cities would agree. According to an unofficial tally, there are 200 mid-scale book clubs in Beijing and Shanghai each.
And Chinese are reading more.
The latest national survey says Chinese people are reading about eight books on average each year, with some 80 percent of the entire population taking up the activity. That's a steady climb since China started to promote reading in a nationwide campaign almost a decade ago.
On top of this, the same survey says 66 percent of Chinese readers want to enroll in some kind of group activity.
So for books and book clubs, the more, the merrier.
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