In December 2008, the Beijing-based People's Daily, together with its website people.com.cn, launched a campaign to select Chinese citizens who had remarkable achievements in the cultural field in 2008. Based on the opinions of nearly 40,000 netizens and a jury, eight people were selected:

Jia Pingwa

In November 2008, Jia Pingwa, 57, won the Seventh Mao Dun Literature Prize for his 12th saga novel Qin Qiang (a kind of folk opera popular in northwest China), making him a laureate of the most honorable novel prize in China. Through its exquisite depiction of stories of town people who live in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, the novel reflects the changes in the countryside against the social transformation of China. It is believed by most critics to be an epic work about the status quo of China's rural area. His other representative works include Bai Ye (White Night) and Fei Du (The Abandoned Capital).

The results of a survey on public reading released by the Chinese Institute of Publishing Science in July 2008 showed that Jia was among the top 10 most popular book writers in China, together with such big names as Lu Xun (1881-1936), Ba Jin (1904-2005), Lao She (1899-1966) and Louis Cha (1924-).