Nearly two decades ago, Li Cuili, a shopkeeper from Lishi Village, a small community in rural Henan province surrounded by fields of vegetables, cleared the shelves of her general store of liquor and other top-selling goods and stocked them with books. Li made the decision, she later told People’s Daily, after a traveling performance troupe visited the village and inspired local children to repeat crude jokes. Books, she felt, were the old-fashioned remedy — a way to restore what she called “civilized rural ways” (文明乡风). In the space she then called “Glimmer Bookhouse” (微光书苑), the books were free to borrow — no questions asked. By 2024, the collection had grown to more than 5,000 volumes, according to Legal Daily.

For nearly twenty years, Li has been lionized in official state media for her simple act of community spirit, becoming an enduring symbol trotted out whenever reading and literacy are highlighted as a national priority. In 2023, her story became the subject of a short film celebrating community-minded small shop owners across China. This week, Li’s story appeared once again — this time at the very top of the front page of Monday’s People’s Daily — as China launched its first official National Reading Week and held its fifth annual National Reading Conference in Nanchang, Jiangxi province.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping has attached great importance to promoting nationwide reading and building a society of readers, and has on many occasions explained the importance of reading,” the People’s Daily said.

As the Chinese Communist Party makes its latest push to build momentum on literacy with the help of a new reading promotion law that took effect earlier this year, Li and her “Glimmer Bookhouse” are again presented as a glimmer of hope for the printed page in China. But as Chinese turn increasingly away from the printed page and toward video and the mobile screen, the gap between these ambitions and reality has never been wider.

Too Little Too Late?

The latest literacy push has real institutional force behind it. The Regulations on the Promotion of Nationwide Reading (全民阅读促进条例), signed by Premier Li Qiang late last year and effective from February, mandate the setup of reading facilities in new residential developments, require schools at every level to build reading into the curriculum, and establish accessible formats for disabled readers. Explaining the recent push in the state media — including yesterday’s leading piece in the People’s Daily — Article 13 of the law designates the fourth week of April as the annual National Reading Week. Underscoring its political force, the law is administered by China’s National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), an office directly under the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department.

But the market, buffeted by forces the new law cannot easily legislate away, tells a more complicated story.

Writing recently on her Substack newsletter The Subtext Asia, Jo Lusby, former North Asia CEO of Penguin Random House, notes that China’s retail book market is now worth just 88 percent of its pre-pandemic 2019 peak, with sales falling 2.24 percent by value in 2025 alone. Short video and social commerce platforms — led by Douyin, the Chinese precursor to TikTok, and RedNote (小红书) — now command 40.53 percent of book sales by value, up more than 30 percent year on year, while physical bookstores hold a mere 13.65 percent of the market.

The broader picture is a downward trajectory for sales, with publishers doing their best to pivot. “The numbers overall paint a portrait of a sector struggling to find its way amid declining sales; yet there is an undeniable energy in certain sectors of the book market as publishers continue to go where the eyeballs are,” Lusby writes. She adds that while China’s publishing industry has “always occupied a special place in the Chinese official hierarchy,” reporting as it does directly to the Central Propaganda Department, official efforts are likely “too little too late.”

In the pages of the state-run media, however, there is hardly a glimmer of uncertainty. In its front-page tribute Monday to Li Cuili and the act of reading, the People’s Daily headlines the phrase “fragrance of books” (书香) — pointing to Xi’s vision of a “society of readers,” or literally, a “society fragrant with books” (书香社会). It is a quaint and evocative notion, invoking the scent of the printed page and shelves filled, like Li Cuili’s at “Glimmer Bookhouse,” with physical books to be borrowed and spirited away to some quiet corner.

The metaphor is wafting across the sector. Beijing Daily announced yesterday that the theme of the coming week would be “book-scented April days” (書香四月天), and that various organizers are giving away more than 10,000 books — everything from Chinese classics to children’s picture books. A special on China Central Television today profiles the historic Hoshwin Library (和顺图书馆) in Yunnan province, with its 130,000 volumes sealed away in display cases. The special was called: “Nothing carries one further than the scent of books” (最是书香能致远).

But the reality is that the glimmer for the book — and for reading — in China’s future will increasingly, irrevocably, be the glow of the screen.