The recent explosion in the number of young tech-savvy Chinese has created a dynamic subculture of mainland “netizens” whose luminaries are neither pop idols nor movie stars, but a handful of popular bloggers. These superstar Chinese bloggers, with the support of popular blogging platforms like Sina and Sohu and their millions of netizens, enjoy not only a freedom of expression unavailable to many of the Chinese online community, but also celebrity status.  

 

The Bad Boy: Han Han
Link: http://blog.sina.com.cn/twocold
Blog byte: “Haibao's original two-dimensional design has created a really difficult problem for those tasked with making him three dimensional: what should his backside look like? Does he have a tail? Does he have a butt? Does he have a butt crack? These are all unknown.”

Han Han is without a doubt the most popular blogger among young Chinese netizens, and has even caused some overseas swooning after features in Time Magazine and the New York Times.  Essayist, rally driver, musician, novelist, singer, publisher and entrepreneur, the 27-year-old blogger dropped out of high school to race cars and write full time, publishing his first novel at the age of 17. His blog, which by some counts has collected over 200 million hits since 2006, is a collection of irreverent, shrewd and pithy quips and commentary about anything and everything, from hot social issues to the minutiae of his daily life. 

Han Han is a poster-child of what is known as the “post-80’s generation” of China, the rebellious, status-obsessed and money-hungry generation of Chinese born just as the country was beginning its tentative opening-up to the outside world. He is irreverent, arrogant and unapologetic, which, predictably, appeals to a disaffected young generation of Chinese netizens who find in Han Han’s voice echoes of their own.

The Dissident: Ai Weiwei
Link: blog currently closed

Blog byte: “If we all say the same thing, then I think the government has to listen. But because no one is saying it, I become singled out, even though what I’m saying is common sense.”

Although a visit to anti-establishment artist, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei’s Sina blog currently yields nothing more than an empty page and an ominous message noting that “this blog has been closed,” it will not be long before he reestablishes himself as an online presence. Continued government censorship of his opinions means that his blog and website simply disappear at times, but he always seems to find a way to work around it. 

Ai Weiwei always toes a dangerous line of dissidence. The son of two poets exiled during the Cultural Revolution, he originally found his voice as a filmmaker and avant-garde artist in the early 1980s. Ai was already a superstar of the Beijing art world when he started attracting the attention of the rest of the world with his blog, in which he wrote on social and political topics sensitive to the Chinese government. The last straw for government censors was Ai’s most recent human rights project, the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project. Ai used his blog to gain widespread public support for his investigations into the corrupt behavior of officials in Sichuan who siphoned funds away from infrastructure, resulting in unsafe “tofu” buildings that buckled during the catastrophic earthquake of 2008.  

Despite censorship and some violent run-ins with the police, Ai Wei Wei continues to appeal to a growing online audience thirsty for the point-of-view that will not appear in The China Daily.

The Ingénue: Xu Jinglei
Link: http://blog.sina.com.cn/xujinglei, translated into English at http://sino-angle.blogspot.com/
Blog byte: “These few days have been hard, one premiere after another, press meetings, too busy to go on the web. When I get back to my room I want to do nothing except sleep.”

The astonishing number of hits to actress Xu Jinglei’s blog resulted recently in her claiming the top spot on Technorati’s list of the most popular blogs in the world. She passed the 10 million visitor mark in 2005, when the blogging phenomenon was just beginning in China, and has increased in popularity ever since. Before internet stardom, the 36 year-old actress acted in popular films like Spicy Love Soup. She recently directed the hit film Go La La Go.

Her blog is basically a record of her daily life, a diary in which she comments on everything from movie premiers to the kittens her cat recently gave birth to in a train-of-thought flow that, while not sophisticated, is undeniably fascinating. It is Xu’s celebrity that gives her blog that special sparkle that propelled it to such astounding popularity. The opportunity to peek in on a star’s life is, after all, a guilty pleasure we all share.

These are only a few representatives of China’s vibrant and dynamic blogging elite. The world of Chinese blogging and its young, wired masses of followers is only growing in number and potency.
 

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Keywords: popular blogs China Chinese netizen idols Chinese blog idols Chinese bloggers