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Statistics mislead on low readership of books in China
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THAT statistics often belie our daily life is not news — Mark Twain famously said: “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” What is news is that our news reporters still take statistics for granted, after Mark Twain (1835-1910) passed away more than one hundred years ago.
According to 2013 survey results published by the China Academy of Press and Publication, the average Chinese read 6.74 printed books and e-books in 2012. However, Koreans get through 10 books annually, and the number stands as high as 20 among Russians, Xinhua reported last week.
Who is this “average Chinese?” If a Chinese professor reads 20 books while a barber reads one book a year, or vice versa, if a Chinese barber readers 20 books while a professor reads one book a year, will you say an “average Chinese” reads 10.5 books a year?
Even though there is a human being called the “average Chinese” and books can be separated in terms of decimal points, statistics on reading habits, as on other issues, depend on subjective answers from the people being polled and they cannot be verified or disproved. For example, if you ask me how many books I read and I say 20. How do you know I’m telling the truth?
Premier Li Keqing was right to encourage our people to read when he delivered the annual government work report to the National People’s Congress last week. However, our news reporters were too quick to quote popular yet shallow statistics in an attempt to demonstrate that Chinese read less than Koreans, Russians and many other people.
Every year Chinese students go through the world’s most arduous college entrance exam. If they don’t read enough books, how can they be admitted? But strangely, pollsters generally don’t regard test-oriented books as real books that are really read.
As far as I know, there are many ancient classics, such as the Confucian canon, that a Chinese student must read and recite throughout his school years. Though not all test papers amount to reading, pollsters have erred in dismissing all test-oriented materials as not about reading.
Many educated Chinese recite and remember ancient classical poems and prose in their high school years when they are most arduously drilled for all kinds of tests.
Online reading
There is also a trend to dismiss online reading as inferior to traditional reading of printed books, as if only printed books qualify as true reading. Xinhua quoted an Indian engineer as saying: “On the flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai, I saw so many people holding iPads, but no one was reading a book. It seems that Chinese people today lack the patience to sit down and read a book.”
If what the engineer said was valid, how shall we judge our ancestors before paper was ever invented? Aristotle and Confucius did not read books?
Reading is good, generally speaking, but watch out for statistics.
Apart from averaging the number of books into meaningless decimal points, such statistics rarely ask a person which books he or she reads. Common sense tells us that quality often trumps quantity. It never follows that the more you read, the more enlightened you become. Nor does it follow that the more people you see reading books in a subway, on a bus, on a train or on an airplane, the more enlightened a certain nation is.
Many Chinese people like reading at home, in temples, and in mountains. The question is: Do we know them?
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