Age of Ambition (26 page)

All websites are requested to delete without delay the essay entitled “Many Massively Corrupt High Officials Receive Stays of Execution.”

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All websites are requested to remove immediately the article entitled, “In China, 94% Unhappy with Wealth Disproportionately Concentrated at the Top.”

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Announcement: the Sunshine Yu Lin Golf Club is offering an unprecedented deal: “Buy One Business Membership, Get Two Free.”

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The Web was a clamor of new voices, and one of the first I noticed was that of Han Han, a twenty-six-year-old living in Shanghai. His blog had a teenybopper look to it, with a powder-blue background and a photograph of a yellow Lab puppy in the corner. But day after day, he lampooned the self-importance and hypocrisies of officialdom. Where an older generation had used euphemism and allegory to hint at the truth, Han asked directly why the government lowered the flags for the deaths of politicians but not for disasters that claimed large numbers of civilian lives. (“I have a Chinese-style solution,” he wrote. “Flagpoles should be doubled in height. This will satisfy all sides.”) He flicked around the edges of rumors that senior leaders had high-priced mistresses. (“If you spend a hundred yuan on a woman's intimate services, it's obscene; if you spend a million, it's refined.”) He mocked the Party strategy of trying to drum up support by plastering the Web with pro-government messages. (“Just because you see a crowd of people standing on a street corner eating shit doesn't make you want to elbow your way in for a bite.”)

Han Han was no dissident. On the spectrum of Chinese politics, he held a highly ambiguous position. At times his was one of China's most outspoken voices. “How many evil things has China Central Television done in the past? Replacing truth with lies, manipulating public opinion, desecrating culture, abusing facts, concealing wrongdoing, covering up problems, and creating fake images of harmony.” (That post, like many of his, was struck down by censors, though readers reached it first and circulated it broadly.) His criticism placed him in frequent combat with the “angry youth.” When Tang Jie and his friends were circulating nationalist videos in the spring of 2008, Han Han wrote, “How can our national self-respect be so fragile and shallow?… Somebody says you're a mob, so you curse him, attack him, and then you say, ‘We're not a mob.' This is as if someone says you're a fool, so you hold up a big sign in front of his girlfriend's brother's dog saying ‘I Am Not a Fool.' The message will get to him, but he'll still think you're a fool.” A pro-government website once listed Han Han among the “slaves of the West” and superimposed a noose on his picture. But he could also be calculatingly elliptical: when he needed to mention a sensitive word that was sure to trigger the Web's automatic filters, he wrote, “sensitive word,” and let his readers figure it out.

In September 2008, not long after the Olympics ended, he edged past a movie star to become China's most popular personal blogger, based on the total number of readers he had accumulated. He had attracted more than a quarter of a billion visitors since he began; only China's stock tip blogs were drawing more. I was going to be in Shanghai, and I asked Han Han if I could come by. He suggested I join him on the road. Once or twice a week, he left downtown Shanghai to return to the village where he grew up, in a farmhouse now occupied by his grandparents.

*   *   *

He picked me up in a black GMC van with tinted windows, driven by his friend Sun Qiang. Han had the van for long trips because he was afraid of flying. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed less than a hundred and thirty pounds. He had the high cheekbones of a Korean soap star and black eyes shaded by sheepdog bangs. He favored a uniform of grays and whites and denim—Chinese pop culture's prevailing aesthetic. His manicured, swaggering persona was a world apart from Liu Xiaobo and the rumpled archetype of the Chinese intellectual. Han Han had a look, and it owed equal debts to Kerouac and Timberlake. In person, he was warm and laconic, and he spoke through a smile that tended to camouflage the searing edge of his comments.

The Web had altered the course of Han Han's life. When he was in tenth grade, in 1998, he failed seven courses and dropped out. The next year, he sent a handwritten manuscript to a publisher; it was a novel called
Triple Door
, about a Chinese high school student slogging through “hours of endless emptiness,” copying lessons “from the blackboard to the notebook to the exam,” while his mother fed him pills intended to boost his IQ. Han compared China's school system to the manufacture of chopsticks—a system designed to yield products of “exactly the same length.” Another publisher had pronounced the novel gloomy and out of step with the times; successful books about Chinese youth were more often akin to
Harvard Girl
, with the ambitious Ivy Leaguer clenching ice cubes to build fortitude. But an editor was enthusiastic about Han's novel and printed thirty thousand copies. They sold out in three days. Another thirty thousand copies were printed, and they sold out, too.

In the global canon of teen-angst literature, the novel was tame, but in China it was unprecedented: a scathingly realistic satire of education and authority, written by a nobody. State television moved to tamp down the frenzy with an hour-long discussion on its national broadcast, but the strategy backfired. On TV, Han Han projected insolent glamour, with a boy-band shag haircut that swept down and across his left eye. When educators in tweeds and ties fulminated against “rebelliousness” that “might contribute to social instability,” Han smiled, cut them off, and said, “From the sound of it, your life experience has been even shallower than mine.” He was instantly famous—a seductive spokesman for a new brand of youthful defiance. The Chinese press proclaimed “Han Han fever.”

Triple Door
went on to sell more than two million copies, putting it among China's bestselling novels of the past two decades. In the next several years, Han published four more novels and several essay collections faithful to the subjects he knew best: teenagers, girls, and cars. They sold millions more, though even his publisher, Lu Jinbo, president of Guomai Culture and Media, did not hail them as literature. “His novels usually had a beginning but no end,” Lu told me. In 2006, Han Han started blogging, and his focus took an unmistakable turn toward some of China's most sensitive matters: party corruption, censorship, the exploitation of young workers, pollution, the gap between the rich and the poor. It was as if Stephenie Meyer, the teen-vampire author, had abandoned the
Twilight
series and started directing fans' attention to the misuse of public funds. Han Han was the patron saint of young strivers who saw in him a way to reconcile their dawning sense of skepticism with the material gratification they coveted. In his world, being political no longer meant being poor.

“As soon as I started making money from writing, I started buying sports cars” and racing, he told me, as we inched through rush-hour traffic. “Other drivers looked down on me, because they thought, ‘You're a writer; you're supposed to be driving into walls,'” he said.

For nearly a decade, Han had maintained a parallel career as a race car driver with a respectable record in circuit competition for Shanghai's Volkswagen team and in off-road rally races for Subaru. It was a world of sponsorships and champagne showers, disorientingly at odds with his writing life. By and large, his readers cared nothing for auto racing, but the overlapping identities yielded a singular celebrity: he was on the covers of style magazines while independent websites—Han Han Digest, Danwei, ChinaGeeks—translated and analyzed his utterances. He once began a television interview by saying, “If you speak Chinese, you know who I am”—a boast not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

He was the only government critic with corporate sponsorship, and he was an enthusiastic pitchman attuned to Bobo sensibilities. A low-cost clothing chain called Vancl put his face on ads with the slogan “I am Vancl.” Johnnie Walker paired his picture with the line “Dreaming is realizing every idea that flashes through one's mind.” He had lent his name to a one-of-a-kind luxury Swiss watch by Hublot, which was auctioned for charity and inscribed, in English, “For Freedom.”

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Approaching his hometown, Tinglin, we branched off onto smaller roads until we confronted a creek spanned by a concrete bridge that was only inches wider than the van. At the wheel, Sun Qiang hesitated. Han peered through the gap between the front seats and adopted a mock-serious tone: “This bridge is the test!” We crossed intact. “I've had mishaps there many times,” Han said.

The fringe of Shanghai was a steadily eroding ring of small farms and factories a short drive from staggering wealth. Mist hung over fallow fields crisscrossed by footpaths. We reached a two-story brick farmhouse fronted by a narrow plot. Han's grandparents—small, swaddled in padded cotton clothes—ambled out to greet us. A golden retriever went berserk. We passed through a living room that contained the cold damp of the countryside, and reemerged in a small courtyard, where Han smiled and indicated for me to climb through a window into his wing of the house. “A small design flaw,” he said. “We didn't put a door on this side.”

Within was a rural Chinese teenager's fantasy lair: a beat-up Yamaha motorcycle leaned against one wall, a mammoth television screen graced another. A second giant screen was accessorized with a steering wheel and pedals set up for driving games. In the center of the room was a pool table, and Han racked up the balls and broke. He was in constant, restless motion. To indicate his rare and full attention, he turned both his phones facedown as they buzzed and bleated in protest. On the pool table, I made a shot, then flubbed the second. He sank the rest.

The transformation of his hometown figured prominently in Han's view of China. He pointed out an industrial compound in the distance, a chemical manufacturer, which he blamed for fouling the stream where he used to hunt for crawfish. On his blog, he wrote:

My grandfather can identify the day of the week by the color of the water. The stench is everywhere. The Environmental Protection Bureau says the water quality is normal, though the river is full of dead fish … At various points, my hometown has planned to build Asia's largest industrial harbor, and Asia's largest outdoor sculpture garden, and Asia's largest electronics shopping center. So far, all it has produced is thousands of acres of rubble, unfinished and wasted.

Han was often described as a symbol of China's youth, which was not meant entirely as a compliment. He hailed from the first generation born after the death of Mao and the start of the one-child policy—the
baling hou
, or “post-eighty generation”—which served as a reference point in Chinese discussions of values and the national character much the way baby boomers did for Americans: a generation that came of age amid radical social transformations that alienated its members from their parents and left them either newly self-aware or self-indulgent, depending on who was talking.

In his writings, Han jabbed at the official truth about China's rise, urging workers not to cheer headlines of new prosperity when their “low-wage labor adds up to nothing but a single screw in the boss's Rolls-Royce.” After a forty-seven-year-old woman burned herself to death to stop a crew that was trying to demolish her home, he wrote, “If you have not burned yourself to ashes … if all your family members are alive, that's the standard of a happy life.”

We wandered outside into the cold, and I mentioned that his criticism seemed to underplay the benefits of the most prosperous period in Chinese history. He gave me a dubious sideways look. He said the scale of China's growth obscured the details of how the spoils were being divided. “For rally races we travel widely, because they're on dirt roads, often in small, poor places. Young people there don't care about literature or art or film or freedom or democracy, but they know they need one thing: justice. What they see around them is unfair.”

To illustrate his point, he mentioned a news clip he'd seen recently about a seventeen-year-old migrant worker who stood in the aisle of a train for sixty-two hours to get home. It was the kind of ordeal that Chinese papers had always featured as portraits of fortitude. But Han had a different view of the man's experience of standing on the train for two and a half days. “The guy had to wear adult diapers,” Han said, appalled. It became the basis of his next blog post. Young Chinese, he wrote, were increasingly being “used by the process of urbanization.” He laid out the deal that the boom was offering his generation: “Work for a whole year, stand in line for a whole day, buy a full-price ticket, wear diapers, and stand the whole way home—how dignified!”

*   *   *

On the days that Han was writing, he slept until midday and usually worked, fast and alone, into the predawn hours. He was married to Lily Jin, a high school friend who served as his assistant and gatekeeper. “Han Han trusts people very easily, almost credulously,” she told me. “In the past, he's been cheated by publishers, and lost money because of it.” When they had a daughter, the event was greeted by the Chinese gossip magazines with all the ceremony of a royal siring (“Han Han Becomes a Father, Talks for First Time about Daughter”).