EVERY weekend morning, countless citizens line up outside the Shenzhen Library in order to get a seat after the library opens at 9 a.m., and within only half an hour, all of the seats are occupied.

Decades ago, people jokingly called Shenzhen a cultural desert, but now things are different. Reading has become a popular craze among Shenzheners. Every November there is a cultural carnival in Shenzhen. Shenzhen Reading Month has become the most widely participated in and long-term cultural festival nationwide.

Since the first Reading Month was held Nov. 1, 2000, there have been a total of over 6,600 activities held, with over 220 well-known scholars from both home and abroad being invited and 106 million participants involved in the Reading Month. The effort was recognized by UNESCO in 2013, when it awarded Shenzhen the title of “model city of global reading.”

Reading has changed the lives of citizens so much that many of them are willing to share their reading experience with others. Yuan Wenran was a migrant worker from a rural area but through reading she became an engineer in a biotech company. During a reading activity, she said that knowledge could change one’s life.

Li Di established a public welfare organization, the Clover Story Family, out of a love for reading in order to promote reading among other parents and children.

In Li’s eyes, the aim of parent-child reading not only lies in enabling children to read and write, but also in cultivating their reading habits and self-discipline. She said, “If every family could provide children with a good reading atmosphere, then reading would be much more popular in this city.”

Wu Yumin, director of the Media and Cultural Development Research Center at Shenzhen University, regards reading as a fashionable lifestyle or even a new custom in Shenzhen.

Wu discovered through research that in the hearts of citizens, reading represents a fashionable lifestyle. In Shenzhen, people attend reading activities to make friends, and sitting in a book bar is a symbol of a high-quality life.

Reading is key to the development of a human being, so it follows that a city’s cultural development, and its citizens’ enthusiasm for reading, would inject vitality into its sustainable development. (A Ding)