Essays by Han Han, the Chinese Blogger and Media Superstar

Elizabeth R. Cournoyer August 22, 2025

158 4 minutes read

THE Hassle WITH ME
Other Essays Approximately Making Hassles 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,” was published in 2000, when he became Best 17 and sold thousands of copies. Since then, he has written several novels, mostly about girls and racing motors. 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, could be summed up in a single sentence, written in a 2012 blog post: “Life as I understand it method doing things you like and looking after yourself and your own family.”

E-book Evaluation Newsletter

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

Han has interesting things to mention, such as the significance of social media in China. 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, but not instantly. By the time an offending weblog has been taken out of circulation, 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 more 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. He discusses 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 while we’re enjoying ‘faux‘ privileges, we’re secretly glad.”

Blogger

Related Articles :

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, is barely out of his 20s and is not any mean feat. The subtitle of this series mentions “Making Trouble.” In reality, 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.” 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 “where 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.” In 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, and it is 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 on the mainland aren’t grasping and corrupt because they’re always immoral or uncultured people; however, a one-Birthday celebration dictatorship encourages corrupting types of patronage. If any humans contend with their families, they are the ones who are 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 within 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 can see why Han is famous among his domestic cohort, and I am less certain that he has much to say to those who study him in English.