Well, not really... trends are contagious. Awards are often given in alignment with the most current trends. Therefore young writers try to emulate them, and you'll witness a "talent drain", drawing authors away from writing literature of your preference.
Forcing an entire peoples to bend to some arbitrary semantics system is social engineering of the worst sort. Who knows what kind of ugliness has been unleashed onto the world- well, we already know. China is a perfect example of an entire culture completely obliterated once its language system was seized, and rewritten to suit the new regime's ends.
With this detachment from their history, their tradition has been rewritten completely. There's now no real reference point to illustrate how things were; how they've changed.
It's no similar to hoe American school-children are taught a watered-down "unbiased" (only the facts) versions of history. This ends with a failure to understand what the American culture really is, and its tradition is lost on the masses.
What's left is a public that can only comprehend the surface-level meanings, much less understand or create new words and concepts to rebel against their authorities.
It's not that hard to learn Traditional Chinese using Simplified Chinese either.
The bigger problem with Chinese is that it's often ambiguous, so semantic shift is inevitable.
At any rate, the Cultural Revolution did far more to make people less acquainted with their past.
Personally I don't ever see myself reading a present-tense novel for pleasure. As a reader it makes me feel put-upon, as if the book is angrily demanding I approach it in a particular way. I tend to start reading faster and faster, subconsciously thinking I can outrun the narrator and get to a place where I can calm down.