An explosion of poetry ... Lighting fireworks to celebrate the newly-recognised Dragon Boat festival in memory of Qu Yuan. Photograph: China Photos/Getty

I wasn't expecting many poetic encounters travelling through China on a tour bus of 40-odd. An assumption about as wrong as you can get. Poetry is so historically important in China that a brush with verse is inevitable.

In every garden we visited from the Yu Gardens in Shanghai to the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou, we found tablets, paintings, sculptures inscribed with poetry. As my boy pointed out with his nose stuck in Julia Lovell's The Great Wall, poetry had such status in ancient China that it became a crucial part of the civil service entrance exams: a skit written by a poet-bureaucrat in Chang'an on the rebel-bandit administration led to the execution of "everyone in the capital - for centuries, the centre to which the elite of China's poet civil servants had been drawn - who could write poetry".

Well, so much for the Tang dynasty, but what about poetry in China in 2008? What political significance does poetry in China have today - from interpretation of the classic poets to contemporary poetry? To bang a drum that has been well-thumped by myself, I think we are gravely mistaken when we confuse writing poetry with acting politically. But great poetry undoubtedly pricks and probes political consciousness, in its own time and in ours. This is no straightforward or uncomplicated matter in China - even setting aside questions of censorship - as the example of Qu Yuan in Beijing's Olympic year illustrates.

As we were driving back from visiting the Three Gorges Dam our guide quoted from Qu Yuan, in his words "the Chinese Shakespeare". As I learnt, we were in China during the first officially recognised Dragon Boat holiday, or Duanwu, on the mainland. The Dragon Boat festival commemorates Qu Yuan's suicide by drowning and the attempts by the villagers who loved him to stop his body being eaten by fish, banging boats and throwing rice dumplings or zongzhi into the river to distract the fishy fiends.

Qu Yuan is officially recognised as a "patriotic poet". The lines our guide quoted from Ode to an Orange Tree are also quoted on the official Three Gorges Dam website, the poem indicative of Qu Yuan's "loyalty and integrity" as well as illustrating the poet's ideal of the state as "independent, unselfish and unyielding".

When our guide quoted Qu Yuan's poetry I never felt for an instant that we were being fed poetic propaganda. I believe our guide was sincerely engaged with a poet he loved. What became apparent, however, is that contemporary appreciation of classic Chinese poetry is not just a matter of aesthetics. A group of Chinese scholars took the opportunity of the revived Duanwu festival to write an open letter that suggests replacing the omnipresent image of Chairman Mao on one of the yuan bills with that of Qu Yuan.

The presence of Qu Yuan on a 20 yuan note has as much to do with a nation's appreciation of literature as the presence of Dickens or Shakespeare on Bank of England notes. But that's not the point. The scholars' argument is not really about "reviving culture through the pocketbook" as one website dubbed the campaign. Their complaint is that the official "patriotic" valorisation of Qu Yuan and his poetry has devalued and dimmed this poet's dissenting voice: "his desire for freedom and his refusal to submit to tyranny, has been obscured and diluted".

What is being contested here is the cultural legacy of Qu Yuan: what does this 2,000-year-old poet mean to Chinese society right here and now? Culture and heritage are big in China at the moment: from the launch of the Cultural Heritage website in the last few weeks to the explosion of interest in western classical music. Literature, too, is being reclaimed and reworked - but how many Chinese poets today are taking up Liu Hongbin's challenge "to build a historical bridge between the glory of Chinese classical poetry and the ruins of modern Chinese language"?

If I had a better grasp (or let's face it any grasp at all) of Chinese calligraphy I might find the answer on one of the many contemporary poetry sites very much alive and kicking in China. This is an interesting and complicated time for poetry - contemporary and classical - in China. There are no easy answers. Yet wouldn't it be something if down the line we weren't just sitting up and taking notice of China's economic dynamism but of its poetic and political vibrancy as well?