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 100mn 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 June, 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 certainly helps that she is strikingly beautiful, it is not just Xu's good looks that have transformed her blog into the world's No. 1. 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 as surprised as anyone 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 move 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, which also stars Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro.
As well as the blog, she also has an online magazine called Kaila, which she has done with the Beijing social network site hanzuo, similar to Facebook. She likes to update her blog before she goes to sleep but if the mood takes her, she will update the page more often, sometimes two or three times a day.
Visitors to the site hail her clear writing style and leave messages of support, as well as the usual spam. The closest the blog gets to being steamy is when she responds to a rather bizarre painting by An Di which shows Xu Jinglei 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.
The San Francisco blog search engine Technorati has said Xu's blog recorded last year the most incoming links of any on the Internet, according to the online edition of the China Daily . – The Independent