Han Han, one of China’s most popular bloggers and certainly its most popular author-slash-race-car-driver, has posted a new article to Sina Weibo. This is such an unusual event that it has become a trending topic (“Han Han Speaks!”) on weibo, and the article itself — a piece commemorating pop singer Leslie Cheung, who died on April 1, 2003 — has been forwarded nearly 300,000 times.
This is notable mostly because Han Han hasn’t previously been active on weibo. In fact, he wrote a lengthy post last year about exactly why he doesn’t use microblogs. In yesterday’s post, he didn’t exactly explain why he has suddenly chosen to make use of his long-dormant weibo account, but he did imply that in the future, he may post additional articles to weibo. The article was also available on his blog, as usual.
On weibo, Han Han posted the lengthy article as an image. This allowed him to circumvent weibo’s character limit, but it’s worth noting that text-in-images is also much more difficult to censor since it can’t be scanned by machines. Although Han Han’s latest article isn’t political, he’s well known for addressing sensitive topics on his blog, where articles are frequently deleted. His use of images on weibo to spread articles could make them much more difficult for censors to find and delete.
Han Han has certainly chosen an interesting time to return to Weibo, given the recent government crackdown that has led to a temporary ban on comments on the site and the general uncertainty about what exactly is happening with Sina’s real-name regulations.
[Image via Shanghaiist]
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