Essays by Han Han, the Chinese Blogger and Media Superstar
By September 5, 2016
THE PROBLEM WITH ME
And Other Essays About Making Trouble in China Today
By Han Han
Edited and translated by Alice Xin Liu and Joel Martinsen
217 pp. Simon & Schuster. $24.
Han Han is a remarkable fellow. His first novel, “Triple Door,” was published in 2000, when he was only 17, and sold millions of copies. He has written several more novels since then, mostly about girls and racing cars. And he is a successful professional racecar driver, filmmaker, essayist and blogger, with millions of followers online.
Han Han is the Pied Piper of the post-Tiananmen generation. With the shaggy-haired looks of a teenybopper star and the cool sassiness of an intellectual punk rocker, he is an idol and a social media guru who has been compared with Lu Xun, the most famous Chinese satirical writer and essayist of the 20th century.
The success is indisputable. But judged by the essays published in this collection, the comparison with Lu Xun, perhaps the greatest stylist in modern Chinese, is silly. Han Han is not a great writer, nor a profound thinker. His philosophy, if that is what it is, can be summed up in one sentence, written in a blog in 2012: “Life as I know it means doing things you like and taking care of yourself and your family.”
No Jean-Paul Sartre, then. But this may not be an entirely bad thing. For what Han Han offers is not original thought, or indeed great prose, but attitude, perfectly attuned to blogs and tweets and other forms of social messaging. And his attitude is often attractive, even refreshing, in a blogosphere that is so full of cant and vitriol.
Han Han has interesting things to say about the importance in China of social media. He writes: “The little freedom and flexibility we’ve gained is actually convenience brought to us by technology; without it, I believe we’d still be mired in an era of alternating restrictions and relaxations.” Writings on the internet can be removed, but not instantly. Frequently, by the time an offending blog has been taken out of circulation, thousands will already have seen it.
On subjects that often put young Chinese into a senseless rage — Japan, for example — Han Han is downright reasonable. He doesn’t see the point of smashing Japanese products to attack a country for the horrors it inflicted in China more than 50 years ago, or over a petty territorial dispute. Instead, he writes with cutting grace, “I want to devote my first demonstration to a place that has bullied me and violated my rights more frequently.”
Han Han is also funny and shrewd about corrupt officials and the pleasures of unearned privilege. He describes going for a ride with a friend who has bought police placards and a siren, allowing him to imperiously push other traffic aside: “Yes, we despise privilege when we’re faced with it, but when we’re enjoying ‘fake’ privileges, we’re secretly happy.”
This self-deprecating tone is one of Han Han’s best assets. It stops him from being smug, which for a young media superstar barely out of his 20s is no mean feat.
The subtitle of this collection mentions “making trouble.” In fact, however, Han Han has been very careful to stay out of trouble. He is quite different from the dissidents who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, some of whom endured years of prison and torture for their activism. His writings also lack the earnest abstractions about democracy that were popular among students in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Han Han doesn’t believe that the Chinese are ready to vote for their top leaders. “Perfect democracy,” he says, “will not appear in China.” And he consciously avoids direct criticism of the Communist Party, and “sensitive” topics like Tibet and Taiwanese independence. Part of his attitude is a tendency to switch the subject from politics to culture.
He hates living in a country “where people were taught to be cruel and to go to war with each other during the first decades, and turned selfish and greedy in the decades that followed.” And in the same essay, written in 2012, after a visit to Taiwan, he thanks Hong Kong and Taiwan “for protecting Chinese culture, preserving the positive traits of the Chinese people and keeping many essential things free from disaster.”
But this is of course not really a comment about culture at all. The reason Chinese people in Hong Kong and Taiwan were able to protect a culture of civility and relative freedom is political. Chinese officials on the mainland are not greedy and corrupt because they are necessarily immoral or uncultured people, but because a one-party dictatorship encourages corrupting forms of patronage. If any people take care of their families, it is those powerful officials.
Han Han knows this very well. He hints at it in terms that any Chinese person would understand.
Even if a full democracy in China is not within reach, or even desirable, Han Han does think people should have the right to vote for powerful officials, such as city mayors. He writes: “We shouldn’t rely on the Propaganda Department for a stable society but should take a few steps forward.” And: “In a land full of unchecked power, no one is safe, including those in power.”
He is quite right, of course. But what is cool and sassy to say in China can be remarkably banal elsewhere. I can see why Han Han is popular with his cohort at home. I am less certain that he has very much to say to those who read him in English.
Ian Buruma is a professor at Bard College. His latest book is “Their Promised Land.”
