Society moves online in brave new world

Fang Zhouzi vs Han Han

In the beginning of 2012, the hot topic was not Spring Festival, but the fierce online clash between writer and racecar driver Han Han and fraud fighter Fang Zhouzi.

The dispute was triggered by a popular blogger, Mai Tian (his online name), who wrote on Jan 15 that Han's works may have been written by his father, the writer Han Renjun, and his publisher Lu Jinbo, and suggested there was a team of ghostwriters behind Han.

Han Han responded the next day, offering 20 million yuan ($3.21 million) to anyone who could prove his works were ghostwritten. Mai apologized to Han on Jan 18, admitting he didn't have sufficient evidence.

Fang, however, started to post a series of blogs analyzing Han's articles sentence by sentence, and suggested Han Renjun was the ghostwriter.

Han Han responded on his blog and said he would publish the manuscript of his early work Triple Door, which brought him to fame in 2000. The manuscript came out in April.

In May, Fang said on Sina Weibo, a popular micro-blogging platform, that Han was only 164 cm in sneakers and had lied about his height. Fang's calculation was based on a photo of Han and the famous pool player Pan Xiaoting in which Han held a vertical pool cue in his hand.

Online attention shifted to Han's height, with some Internet celebrities taking bets on his height — the highest wager was 10 million yuan. Writer Liu Liu later posted a photo of Han standing against the wall and said he was 171.5 cm barefooted. Some netizens still have doubts.

Interest gradually faded and Han stopped responding to Fang's continuous attacks.

WeChat

WeChat is a new social networking application for cellphone users, which allows people to send texts, images, videos and voice messages, and get in touch with other users within 1 kilometer's distance.

Tencent, the company behind the popular instant messaging service QQ, introduced the application in January 2011 and promoted it to the international market three months later.

A college student joins an activity to raise awareness of AIDS prevention in Wuhan, Hubei province, holding the popular online slang “Yuanfang, what do you think of it?”. SUN XINMING / FOR CHINA DAILY