China’s ‘library city’ helped shape a global tech empire

From unstaffed self-service book-lending kiosks open 24/7 to a large building that has robots fetching paperbacks from its multi-million-dollar collection of titles across nine floors, there’s a reason Shenzhen is known as China’s “library city.” Sure, this may sound a little boring, but the city in the southern province of Guangdong also just was named the country’s leader in wealthy entrepreneurs and is the beating heart of China’s tech and artificial intelligence industry.

Shenzhen was recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2013 as a world leader in promoting the value of reading. A decade earlier, in 2003, the city introduced key measures to give everyone (well, Chinese citizens and foreigners ages three and up) a unified library ID number that would give them access to hundreds of lending outlets already spread across the developing metropolis. This became known as the City of Libraries initiative.

This week, The Wall Street Journal was the latest media outlet to highlight the dismal readership statistics in the U.S. While, somewhat ironically, most people find it difficult to read this article because it is behind a paywall, it essentially echoes what The New York Times and The Atlantic have addressed in recent months: the displacement of the smartphone may be the first real sign of the “end of reading.”

Well, in some places.

Because in every subway station and train car, in restaurants, on park benches, in airport lounges and in the city’s huge shopping malls, Shenzhen residents also spend a lot of time staring at their small screens, without a book in sight. And you can also see a lot of scrolling from China’s TikTok, Douyin (抖音).

This important 2026 paper looking at American readers found that the number of people picking up a book (digital or not) has continued to decline each year for the past two decades. What’s more, plans to give Americans better access to libraries were repealed in 2025. Of the people sampled for this study, only 0.3% reported reading in a library on an average day in 2023, and 0.5% visited a library for any activity.

This is not a criticism of the United States nor a comparison between a city and a country (with far (more differences than the number of libraries per neighborhood), because there are many digital distractions competing for people’s attention in Shenzhen, a technologically advanced country. What is fascinating, however, is how the reading culture seems to have developed in tandem with the city’s geographic and economic growth.

Before 1979, Shenzhen was largely a patchwork of rural farming and fishing villages; It is now home to some of the tallest skyscrapers and most ambitious architectural projects you are likely to see in a city that has yet to celebrate 50 years of incredible reinvention.

As this translated account from the local government of Shenzhen details, it was at the moment when the seeds of the city of the future were planted that its residents seemed to see new potential on a personal level. In the 1980s, people were looking for textbooks (math, chemistry, physics) to study on their own, giving rise to a whole new learning industry. Very soon, reading (and libraries) were incorporated into the city’s development strategy.

“The ‘read more and read good books’ activity had created a reading craze among young Shenzhen employees in the 1980s,” according to the government site. “With the theme ‘China Rejuvenated’, it had four main characteristics. First, it had a wide scope. Second, it was diverse, lively and rich in content. Third, the participants had great enthusiasm and realized the transformation from ‘I have to learn’ to ‘I want to learn’. Fourth, it was practical and specific. English and finance classes were also created, which effectively improved the educational level of employees.”

In the most recent data collected, Shenzhen public libraries recorded 54.3 million visits and 29.5 million checkouts of physical books, according to city-level data compiled through 2026.

Recent Hong Kong-Shenzhen report on libraries and participation cited Xinhuawhich reported that adults in Shenzhen, on average, read 22 books in 2024. However, it is unclear which books. Either way, it’s putting my 2026 Goodreads count to shame.

That same report also noted that in the same year, Shenzhen had 322 24-hour self-service “book bars” that recorded 1.17 million loans (4.5% of total loans citywide). These spaces are usually staffed by volunteers to help visitors, but are otherwise unstaffed.

And in 2024, Shenzhen was home to 925 public libraries, some buildings housing millions of physical titles. These spaces, in addition to bookstores, house “68.3 million items.” Interestingly, although libraries have embraced the technology that Shenzhen is famous for, physical book loans increased by 12.4% in 2024 compared to the previous 12 months.

Obviously, the success of modern Shenzhen is not just because there are many places to borrow books; It has been just one aspect of the city’s development strategy.

But after visiting the disappointing viral “optical illusion” bookstore (essentially an Instagram background for thoughtful, “candid” photoshoots), I still have to thank it for taking me down the rabbit hole of a much more interesting story, one in which libraries and access to books helped shape Shenzhen, probably best known as the birthplace of Huawei, Tencent, DJI, BYD, just to name a few.

If nothing else, it serves as a good antidote to pessimistic stories about the rapidly approaching reading extinction event.

Source: Shenzhen Libraries,eyeshenzhen.com