KEY POINTS:
There is nothing steamy, or gratuitous, or catty about any of the posts on actress-turned-director Xu Jinglei's blog - the world's most widely read blogger, with 100 million page views in less than two years. Though she does like to write about her cats.
A trawl through some
of the postings shows her writing a travelogue, complete with pictures of her jumping up and down at the seaside. Another shows a formidable-looking tabby sitting under the table.
In a posting from last month, she shares her thoughts about life and about New York City. About the new Harry Potter. Or Google and YouTube. Her experiences as an actor and critically acclaimed director.
There are lots of photographs of Xu smiling and playing with her friends, but while it helps that she is strikingly beautiful, it is not just Xu's good looks that have transformed her blog into the world's number one. Her understated approach and her insistence that she is just a regular Beijing girl doing an interesting job has struck a chord with China's online community.
The blog is by no means a typical, self-serving celebrity site. There is a strong didactic element, in the way she tells of problems she had when she was a girl, or deciding on her career, and how she overcame these challenges. These have made the postings hugely popular among young people.
She seems surprised that her blog is such a success but reckons it's her ordinariness that makes it popular.
"In the past, actors seemed mysterious, as if they came out of nowhere. By writing about my daily life, it resonates with people that we are all alike," she said.
There is a certain irony that the world's most-read blogger established her critical reputation directing the movie Letter From An Unknown Woman. The movie won her best director in the 2004 San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain. She appeared in Confessions of Pain last year with Tony Leung and her next film sees her line up alongside martial arts star Jet Li in The Warlords.
The closest the blog gets to being steamy is when she responds to a rather bizarre painting by An Di which shows Xu with her back and bottom bared as she holds a human figure with the head of a green frog. Her response is balanced, even though she said she had been urged to sue by her advisers.
"Who is Xu Jinglei? She is a public figure. Some people like her and others don't. They can make fun of her in order to become more famous themselves and set up gossip topics. I don't mind," she wrote.
A look at the profile of China's webizens goes a long way to explaining Xu's success. The number of Chinese internet users has risen to 162 million, according to industry data released this week. Most of these webizens are under 30 and they spend hours online every day. According to recent figures, nearly 37 per cent of Chinese web users are students, who spend nearly 12 hours a week online. More than 17 per cent are online for more than 20 hours a week.
- INDEPENDENT