This Generation (2 page)

Han Han, the author of
the essays that follow, has assumed a variety of roles in his career to date: a professional race car driver, novelist, and occasional singer and magazine editor. He is also China's best-known personal blogger. Born in 1982, Han Han may owe part of his appeal to his poster-boy good looks, but what has most impressed his peers is how successfully he has gone his own way in life, presenting a skeptical, irreverent take on contemporary society that resonates strongly with them. Although the originality and profundity of his ideas are sometimes questioned, the importance of his role in shaping opinion in China cannot be so easily discounted, given the immense size of his readership.

After an early childhood spent in the rural outskirts of Shanghai, Han Han was admitted to an urban high school, where he chafed under the weight of an inflexible curriculum. In 1999 his first-place finish in a national essay contest suggested an alternative to the conventional path of examination preparation and university entry, and soon he made the decision to quit school altogether and pursue a vocation as a creative writer. By that time he had already completed his debut novel,
Triple Door,
and the book was published when he was just eighteen. A witty and knowing account of rivalry and
romance among a group of Shanghai teenagers, it became an immediate sensation, and other bestsellers followed. In 2003 Han Han added car racing to his portfolio of activities, and since 2005, when he began to maintain a blog, his pungent commentaries on culture, society, and current affairs have won him countless fans.

As a blogger, Han Han has written several hundred posts; some have been deleted by the authorities (or “harmonized,” as their author might put it) within an hour of first appearing online. More often, however, Han Han has played his cards so deftly as to stay just within the range of what is officially acceptable. The pieces I have selected for inclusion in this book are designed to illustrate a range of Han Han's concerns and give the reader a sense of many (though by no means all) of the targets of his caustic wit, which include China's educational system, officialdom, corruption, inequality, censorship, and nationalism. The core of this anthology is drawn from the collection
Qingchun
(Youth), published in Taipei in October 2010, but it also contains a sprinkling of both older and more recent pieces. After the title essay and a variety of early posts, Han Han's commentaries are excerpted more fully beginning in 2008, the year when he really hit his stride and his blog commanded a larger and larger audience in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The anthology closes with Han Han's controversial cluster of essays posted in the final days of 2011. Their moderation, disappointing to some, reflects a view Han Han expressed in a recent interview, where he compared political commentary in China to motor racing: “My first point is ‘no push, no change,' but my second point is, if you push too hard, maybe your time will be slower. And maybe you push much too hard and crash.”
¹

Analogy, like sarcasm, is one of Han Han's standard tools of trade. While these two elements tend to come across rather well in English, a third aspect of Han Han's style—wordplay—poses a more difficult challenge to the translator. In some situations I have been
fortunate enough to find counterparts for the sly puns so characteristic of Han Han's writing, but in other cases a satisfactory solution has eluded me. So, while Han Han's distinctive voice can still be heard within these pages, its more mischievous qualities are not always fully on display. More than enough survives, however, to convey to the reader both the cut and thrust of Han Han's arguments and the scathing humor that accompanies them, features that mark him as a notable presence on the Internet in China today.

Allan H. Barr

February 5, 2008

A couple of days ago,
at an event commemorating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the magazine
Buds
, I talked about the clichéd issue of the younger generation. My feeling is, it's a mistake to talk about this generation and that generation, but if you insist that such divisions exist, then yes, there are things I can say.

From what I can see, this generation is really quite traditional. If their divorce rate is on the high side, that's because so many people simply marry someone in the target age-group or marry for an apartment—they don't marry someone they love. When they reach the age of twenty-five, everyone feels under pressure to tie the knot. But this point simply suggests there's no essential difference between this generation and those who came before.

Society at large, however, gives this generation plenty of negative labels. They're “self-oriented,” we're told, or they “don't care about politics.” This is unfair. To be self-oriented is actually not a bad thing, and many expressions of this focus on the self are a direct consequence of the one-child policy. I don't think that problems resulting from the births of so many only children can be
blamed on the youngsters who just happened to be born under that program.

As for charging them with not caring about politics, that's a ridiculous claim. In the current environment, politics isn't something one can't afford to care about. Those people in the past, they simply found themselves cared about
by
politics whether they liked it or not, and the roles they played were just that of small fry, hapless victims swept around in the political currents of the day. Being a victim is no decent topic of conversation, any more than being raped has a place in a proper range of sexual experiences. The era when one can care about politics has yet to arrive.

Meanwhile, so many dissatisfactions and discords of the age we live in—as well as so many of its successes and advances—really have nothing at all to do with this generation, but stem from actions taken by their seniors. China Central Television's loss of credibility, and with it the government's loss of credibility, have got nothing to do with them, either. This generation can find some scope for their talents only in the fields of sport and entertainment, and that's not going to make much impact on society at large. People born in the 1980s are now, at most, twenty-eight years old, and they exercise no real power to speak of, so the damage caused by abuses of power cannot be their fault. If you haven't wiped your ass properly, don't try to use the younger generation's baby hair as toilet paper.

As for the other labels—dissolute, promiscuous, confused, substance-abusing, vacuous, depressed, and so on and so forth—I agree that these are tendencies that began with the generation of people born in the 1970s. But I don't think these are so awful. Faith is a fine thing, no doubt, but what matters most is where faith leads us. If faith simply drives us into the ditch, then we'd do better to stay put on solid ground and watch the clouds go by.

On the other hand, we can happily note that this generation has initiated improvements in general standards of conduct: basic things like not littering, spitting, or cutting in line have been habits gradually established by those born after the Cultural Revolution.
It's our elders' glorious tradition that we have to thank for those vices and antisocial behaviors.

This generation certainly has its shortcomings, but I believe that's mainly a matter of individual limitations. Even if this generation has a multitude of faults, to talk about them at this point is wholly premature. That's because the mistakes that we can see at present are the work of other people entirely: this generation's mistakes have not yet begun, and this generation's crooks and jerks have yet to show their faces. I don't doubt there are plenty of fools among them, but that is true of all the generations that have ever lived.

April 14, 2006

Today I heard about a
traffic accident in which two people died in a single vehicle; the compensation paid out to their families, however, differed enormously: four hundred thousand yuan in one case and less than half that in the other. I've read many such stories about how victims' families get radically different payouts—for the sole reason that one is registered with the authorities as an urban resident and the other as a rural resident.

Of the laws that have emerged in China in recent years, many have been conceived with an eye to protecting the people's interests—like the new consumer tax, even if there are some humorous aspects to its provisions. From an early age I was told that it's essential to have urban registration, for that way it's much easier to get an education—or to make a living. The whole idea of residence registration strikes me as rather comical, and since my cultural level is not very high it's not clear to me why a household registration booklet has to stipulate that Person A can live in the city whereas Person B has to live in a village. From the vantage point of low-level diploma-holders like myself, this is simply bound to cause trouble
in romance and marriage. Later on, I got involved in the culture industry and made a nice bundle by squeezing money out of city people, and now it's others who want to borrow money from me, so that they can purchase urban registration. For whether it's a matter of getting medical treatment, or finding work, or qualifying for benefits, or attracting girls who don't have urban residence but wish they did, or getting smashed to pieces in a car wreck or burned to a crisp by a bolt of lightning, you have a big advantage if you are classified as an urbanite. It may take a big investment to secure urban registration, but the dividends are generous.

Once, during a visit to the place where I grew up, one of the locals was run over—no, it wasn't me driving. The family was even more heartbroken than one would expect them to be, and eventually I found out why: The victim was just on the verge of getting approval for his urban registration application, so the timing could not have been worse.

After my early years in the village, my country-boy physical assets and athletic prowess won me admission to a good urban high school, but disadvantages in other areas led me eventually to drop out, which is why the only diploma I have is from middle school. Later, when I realized that you don't need a diploma to race cars, I drew on my experience as a youngster operating a two-wheel tractor to begin competitive driving. When I went back home, I would find that the fields where I used to steal watermelons had been sold off by the local township—leaders need saunas, after all, and chemical plants need land. I noticed how the houses where my little playmates once lived had been demolished by the township for a measly compensation of a few hundred yuan per square meter and an urban registration. In my village, everyone all of a sudden had become an urbanite and had the chance to be killed in a traffic accident.

For peasants, tax avoidance is tricky, since the land and the harvest are visible to all. Things are looking up a bit with the elimination
of the agricultural tax
²
—although, of course, where I used to live it wouldn't make much difference even if they retained the agricultural tax, because hardly anyone tills the land anymore, since there's hardly any land left to till. How much money can you make, in any case, from a small plot of rice? Much more satisfying just to sell the land off. So let's mark out a development zone, bring in some cheap little factories and line them up along the river. The poisoning of fish and shrimp will be the principal and the ruining of the surrounding land will be our bottom line. Professional achievement and banqueting at public expense both require adequate funding, after all!

Our township's basic development trend is as follows:

Year 1: Sell off parcels of land in rotation.

Year 2: Enjoy the fruits of wealth creation.

Year 3: Full steam ahead toward urbanization.

Year 4: Drive an Audi on every occasion.

Year 5: Now sit back and admire the mutation.

Quite scientific, really. Take the creek outside my old home, for instance: It appears in seven different colors through the course of a week—just a quick look, and you can tell right away whether it's Monday or Friday. Our local plant life is increasingly distinctive, with stems free of leaves and branches unencumbered by fruit, so we see excellent prospects for the future growth of the bonsai industry. And it's surely just a matter of time before our native crayfish mutate into Australian lobsters.