Changes in literature and art in the last five years

Over the last five years, performing arts shows around the country grew annually from 2.3 million in 2016 to 2.96 million in 2019. Audiences increased from 1.18 billion people in 2016 to 1.23 billion in 2019. Due to COVID-19, in 2020, the number of shows dropped to 2.25 million, and the number of audience members to 890 million.

Apart from the improvements in quality, over the past five years, just like A Tang Dynasty Banquet, more artists have drawn essence and power from Chinese culture to create classic works to inspire people.

The top trending phrase online for 2021, recently released by the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center, is juexing niandai (the age of awakening). It refers to the popular TV drama, which aired in February. Based on events from 1915 to 1921, a critical period for the founding of the Communist Party of China, the show has been rated 9.3 points out of 10 by more than 380,000 users on review platform Douban.

The perseverance and courage of revolutionary pioneers like Li Dazhao, as well as the story of renowned writer Lu Xun, inspired many young people.

In the last five years, more artists have created works about the lives, voices and emotion of the people that created history.

As Lu Xun wrote: "The world afar and millions of people, they are all related to me." It is a tradition for Chinese writers to care about the most ordinary people and to write about their lives.

At the start of 2018, writer Zhao Defa went to villages in Shandong province and created the novel Jing Shanhai (through mountains and seas). The novel, telling a story about poverty alleviation and the revival of the rural areas in a town by the Yellow Sea, won the Wugeyi (literally meaning "best works in five areas") Project award. A TV adaptation aired earlier this year.

"How lucky I am to witness Chinese people eradicate absolute poverty. It is a human wonder. I felt such a sense of history while I was creating the novel," he says.