University opens new master's course

Leading Chinese universities have been using creative writing workshops to help nurture the country's literary talent for a few years now, although debate about whether writers can be trained has gone on at least since 2009.

Renmin University has taken this approach a step further by launching its first postgraduate course for creative writing earlier this month.

It has also used a special way to select candidates called "independent recruitment" to help find talent for the course.