Essays by Han Han, the Chinese Blogger and Media Superstar

Elizabeth R. Cournoyer March 5, 2023

158 4 minutes read

THE Hassle WITH ME
And Other Essays Approximately Making Hassle in China Today
Through Han
Edited and translated By way of Alice Xin Liu and Joel Martinsen
217 pp. Simon & Schuster. $24.

Han is a top-notch fellow. His first novel, “Triple Door,” changed into posted in 2000, when he became best 17 and sold thousands and thousands of copies. He has written several greater novels because then, mostly About girls and racing motors. And he is a successful professional racecar driver, filmmaker, essayist, and blogger, with tens of millions of fans online.

Han is the Pied Piper of post-Tiananmen technology. With the shaggy-haired looks of a teenybopper superstar and the cool sassiness of an intellectual punk rocker, he’s an idol and a social media guru who has been compared to Lu Xun, the most well-known Chinese satirical creator and essayist of the twentieth century.

The success is undeniable. But judged With the aid of the essays posted in this collection, the comparison with Lu Xun, perhaps the finest stylist in the present day Chinese language, is silly. Han is not a super author nor a profound thinker. His philosophy, if that’s what it is, maybe summed up in a single sentence, written in a blog in 2012: “Life as I understand it method doing things you like and looking after yourself and your own family.”

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Sign up to acquire a preview of every Sunday’s E-book Evaluation, introduced on your inbox each Friday. No Jean-Paul Sartre, then. But this will no longer be a whole awful thing. For what Han offers isn’t unique though, or indeed terrific prose, But mindset, flawlessly attuned to blogs and tweets and Other kinds of social messaging. And his mindset is often appealing, even refreshing, in a blogosphere that is so complete of can’t and vitriol.

Han has interesting things to mention Approximately the significance in China of social media. He writes: “The little freedom and flexibility we’ve gained is really convenience delivered to us Using generation; without it, I accept as true with we’d nonetheless be mired in a technology of alternating regulations and relaxations.” Writings on the internet can be eliminated, however not instantly. Often, by the time an offending weblog has been taken out of circulating, thousands will already have seen it.

On subjects that regularly put younger Chinese language into a mindless rage — Japan, for instance — Han is downright affordable. He doesn’t see the factor of smashing Eastern merchandise to attack a country for the horrors it inflicted in China extra than 50 years ago or over a petty territorial dispute. Instead, he writes with reducing grace, “I need to dedicate my first demonstration to an area that has bullied me and violated my rights extra Regularly.”

Han is likewise humorous and clever Approximately corrupt officers and the pleasures of unearned privilege. He describes going for an experience with a pal who has sold police placards and a siren, allowing him to imperiously push Other traffic apart: “Yes, we despise privilege when we’re confronted with it, But whilst we’re enjoying ‘faux’ privileges, we’re secretly glad.”

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This self-deprecating tone is considered one of Han’s satisfactory assets. It stops him from being arrogant, which for a younger media movie star barely out of his 20s is not any mean feat. The subtitle of this series mentions “making Trouble.” In reality but, Han has been conscientious about living out of problems. He is pretty special from the dissidents who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, several of whom continued years of prison and torture for their activism. His writings also lack earnest abstractions. Approximately democracy was famous among students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Han doesn’t believe that the Chinese language is equipped to vote for their pinnacle leaders. “Best democracy,” he says, “will now not seem in China.” And he consciously avoids direct criticism of the Communist Birthday party and “touchy” topics like Tibet and Taiwanese independence.

Part of his attitude is a tendency to replace the challenge from politics to lifestyle. He hates residing in a country “in which people were taught to be merciless and to visit struggle with each Different at some point of the first decades, and turned selfish and grasping inside the decades that accompanied.” And inside the same essay, written in 2012, after a visit to Taiwan, he thanks Hong Kong and Taiwan “for shielding Chinese tradition, keeping the high-quality trends of the Chinese human beings and keeping many crucial things loose from disaster.”

However, that is off the path now, not actually a comment About the way of life in any respect.

The cause Chinese language human beings in Hong Kong and Taiwan have been capable of defending a tradition of civility and relative freedom is political. Chinese language officials at the mainland aren’t grasping and corrupt because they’re always immoral or uncultured people, However, because a one-Birthday celebration dictatorship encourages corrupting types of patronage. If any humans contend with their families, it is the ones, effective officials. Han is aware of this thoroughly, and the pointers at it in phrases that any Chinese language individual could understand.

Even though a complete democracy in China is not inside reach, or maybe suited, Han does think human beings should have the right to vote for powerful officials, including town mayors. He writes: “We shouldn’t rely on the Propaganda Branch for a strong society But should take some steps ahead.” And: “In a land complete of unchecked energy, no person is safe, consisting of those in power.” He’s pretty proper of the route. However, what’s cool and sassy to mention in China may be remarkably banal elsewhere. I’m able to see why Han is famous with his cohort at domestic, and I am less certain that he has very much to say to those who study him in English.