Dan Hansong, a professor of English language and literature at Nanjing University, has recently noticed a troubling trend among students in a discipline where reading and concentration should be embraced as basic skills.

Some English majors struggle to read long novels or handle large reading assignments. Even if it's only book excerpts or short stories by authors like Raymond Carver, the late American writer renowned for his minimalist style, he said.

"You can still sense a lack of patience among students," Dan said. "This is a pressing issue not just for teachers in China but also for those worldwide, including in the West."

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has permanently transformed higher education, and it's almost impossible for students to avoid relying on these new reading and writing technologies, he said.

The idea of sitting alone in a library for an entire afternoon to read a book like Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or his compatriot Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is almost unimaginable, Dan said.

"Even reading 100 or 200 pages has become extremely challenging for them," he said.

This trend has worried a lot of educators including Dan, who calls it "a matter of human evolution and survival".