Page 81 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

080 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

Reading is not only a basic means of knowledge acquisition, but also a significant way of
recreation. Public reading has a prominent function of leisure value. For teenagers, leisure reading
can enhance their reading fluency and comprehension (Torppa et al., 2019). For adults, leisure
reading has a public role to play in promoting self and others’ awareness, learning about the culture
and history of one’s own country and other countries, enriching one’s leisure life, and acquiring
and shaping diverse viewpoints (Moyer, 2007). For most rural residents, reading is usually a kind
of recreational behavior in leisure time outside agricultural production, and most of them do leisure
reading. As a kind of leisure entertainment, leisure reading has been vied and substituted by many
cultural entertainment products in the social culture and technological environment for nearly half
a century. Knulst’s study of trends in leisure reading between 1955 and 1995 found that the time
spent in reading by Dutch fell by about half, especially in the initial stage of TV development
(1955-1975), indicating that competition from television is the main reason (Knulst & Kraaykamp,
1998). In the current Internet era, the emergence of various online cultural products and services
makes leisure reading further marginalized.
In the relatively established leisure time, there is an uneven relationship between reading
and other basic cultural interests such as watching TV, listening to radio, appreciating public
culture, participating in public cultural and sport activities, as well as between reading and other
private cultural activities such as fishing, surfing the Internet, playing cards and square dancing.
The increasing enrichment of rural recreational and sport activities increases the diversity and
possibility of farmers’ choices in leisure time, but discourages their internal force in participating
in public reading.
Since the new century, with the support of national policies, rural areas have implemented
cultural projects to benefit the people, such as the “ten thousand village library”, the farmers’
reading room, the television poverty alleviation, newspapers to the countryside, “hand in hand”,
the digital library promotion, the radio and television in every village, the comprehensive cultural
center project of tens of thousands of villages in a hundred counties, the national fitness path and
“bringing plays to the countryside”. These cultural projects, together with private cultural activities
and folk activities of rural grassroots, enrich the cultural, sport, entertaining and leisure activities
in rural areas, and reading can only be one of the less important options. According to the survey
data, among the leisure and entertaining activities of the villagers surveyed, the top five were
watching TV (59.3%), chatting and gathering (47.1%), surfing the Internet and playing games
(33.4%), playing cards and mahjong (28.1%) and reading books and newspapers (27.7%). Reading
behaviors only ranked the fifth among cultural and leisure activities. Interviews with residents also
reflected this situation. A resident said, “I have attended a calligraphy training class held by the
residents’ committee. I go there when there’re classes while don’t go when there’s not. I don’t want
to read books, and I can gain a sense of achievement from calligraphy and it is more interesting.”
Another villager said, “It’s not that I don’t like reading. I think reading is still a bit tiring for me.
I like to go out and dance in the square when I have free time, and it’s fun to be with everyone.”