One in 1.3 Billion: The Phenomenon of China’s Han Han

Publishing Perspectives

Race car-driving author Han Han is seen as the voice of China’s young generation and read by 300 million people, but will what he represents be lost in translation?

Han Han, famous in China for both writing and race car driving, is fast becoming a sensation outside China — even though little of his work has been translated for foreign audiences. The New Yorker magazine profiled him earlier this month, calling him “a youth culture idol,” and the New York Times has enlisted him to write editorials for the paper over the coming months.
His writing uses word play, idiom and structure in Chinese that may be difficult to translate, but it is something that is fully appreciated by his extensive audience. His blog readers number in the hundreds of millions and his novels sell in the tens of millions, which are the sorts of gigantic numbers that attract western notice.


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