Children practice calligraphy at a cultural center in Wenxian county, Henan Province on July 19, 2011. Photo: CFP

Cong Qiang owns a small school supplies store in the port city of Tianjin. While one day preparing to renovate his store, Cong began cleaning up his storehouse and discovered several writing brushes in a dusty bag.

"Students used to buy these brushes from me all the time," Cong recalled. "But now everyone is either playing the piano or practicing taekwondo. Nobody sits down and writes calligraphy anymore," he said.

As a traditional way of recording things and more so as an art form, calligraphy has long been viewed as a priceless asset of Chinese culture, revered by people for centuries. However, the art form is gradually losing its appeal in a modern era in which computer and other technologies dominate communication.

"The government involvement in calligraphy education has been absent until now," said Yu Jianshi, an associate professor of Chinese painting at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

To revive this grand tradition, China's top education authority issued a notice last week requiring primary schools to offer a calligraphy class once a week for students between the third and sixth grades.

As calligraphy enthusiasts applaud the Ministry of Education's decision, education experts doubted whether the new regulation could be successfully implemented in an exam-oriented education system.

'Bean sprout class'

According to the ministry's notice, which is expected to take effect once the new semester starts this week, senior high schools will now be required to offer calligraphy as an optional course.

The notice said that widespread keyboard use has cramped the penmanship of young elementary school students, and urged students to be trained in developing correct writing habits, including posture, while also including instruction on how to use hard and soft brushes.

"I am not very optimistic with the implementation of this new policy," Xiong Bingqi, a renowned education expert with Shanghai Jiaotong University, told the Global Times.

"It either ends up as a ‘bean sprout class' or some schools may add this course temporarily just to meet the requirement," he said, using a metaphor that is widely used to describe unimportant classes, as a sprout is considered weak and unable to grow.

Xiong said that the disintegration of hand writing skills among students is not so much a result of using computers but more of a manifestation of too much homework and a poor academic curriculum, which leaves zero room for other courses and only space for those that will be tested during gaokao, or the college entrance exam.

"The appreciation of the Chinese character's aesthetic side has devalued within the elementary and high school education system. Many students simply consider the character a tool to finish the tests, and in most cases, students have to scribble to finish the intense homework load," Xiong added.

Beautiful writing

The Chinese word for calligraphy is shufa, which literally means the law or method of writing. Calligraphy comes from the Greek word for "beautiful writing."
Every flick, swish and dot has a name, and they all must be written in the right order. Teachers have said that Chinese calligraphy is a fusion of energy and motion, a simple brush loaded with black ink producing a work of art.

"It really helps me a lot with shaping my personality," Ren Ting, a sophomore in Wuhan who has just finished two weeks of calligraphy class in college, told the Global Times. "It taught me to be calm and focused, good qualities that I believe can be utilized in other tasks that I do."

Despite its good nature, the number of young students taking part in calligraphy courses has decreased in recent years.

During China's first national youth calligraphy and painting competition in 2000, the organizer received over 80,000 calligraphy pieces while the number dropped in the following years with some 60,000 pieces submitted for the last competition in 2008, according to the Chinese Institute of Calligraphy Research.

The decrease is not limited to the number of calligraphy students but to the handwriting skills needed to write the characters. In May the State Language Commission said in a report that 30 percent of the college students tested in Beijing failed a Chinese character writing test, while 70 percent barely passed.

"Qualified calligraphy teachers are very scarce now," said a Zibo primary school teacher surnamed Li, in Shandong Province, who also teaches private calligraphy classes. He told the Global Times that teachers who understand calligraphy are retired or have become school leaders, making it difficult to offer such a class.

Traditional culture

In contrast, calligraphy has long been taught as a mandatory subject in the Japanese elementary school system. Ironically enough, Japanese calligraphy originated and developed in China with its own characteristics.

In one case, education officials in Japan required six elementary schools in Hokkaido, located in the country's northernmost island, to teach calligraphy classes to all grades beginning in March, last year, according to jnocnews.jp, a Tokyo-based Chinese-language news website.

"We are 100 years behind Japan in terms of realizing the importance of protecting traditional culture," said Yu Jianshi, who lived in Japan for 10 years as a visiting scholar.

China has stepped up the protection work of its intangible heritage in recent years, but critics say government support is still lagging behind. It bothered many Chinese people when Korea's Duanwu made the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List six years ago, a festival many claim originated in China. China did not register the festival for the same list until 2009.

"I am very pleased to see such a new policy," Yu said, "but we have yet to see its outcome."