Chinese actress, director, camerawoman and blogger Xu Jinglei will release a biweekly electronic magazine online named Kai Ba in the coming April. Xu will be the chief editor and writer for the e-magazine. Kai Ba will cover stories on entertainment, fashion and politics, with the initial issue of the e-magazine in April to be themed as "The Youth-related Days."

"If I had dreams in my childhood, issuing a magazine is one," Xu admitted. She wanted to start a magazine for a long time but finally chose the Internet as the magazine's medium because of all the restrictions on print magazines. Xu's Kai Ba (which literally means "to open up" or "blossom") echoes the name of her company - Flourishing Flower. Xu said that the e-magazine is made to reflect her unique styles, something different from her blogs; she plans for it to have "real-life content, creative writing, perfect layout and wide readership."

Xu will be editor in chief and a reporter. Using her extensive contacts in the writing industry, Xu also plans to invite good writers to write for Kai Ba, which will be a comprehensive magazine issued every two weeks, involving not only culture and amusement, fashion and prominent figures but also politics and economy. Popular Chinese writers such as Wang Shuo and Han Han have signed on for contributing feature articles to Xu's e-magazine.

The celebrity blogger also runs a website at www.kaile.com.cn. The e-magazine will be free to download, with revenue coming from advertising. It is estimated that the initial readership of her e-magazine will exceed one million. Xu Jinglei became a mega-popular Chinese blogger in the past year. With more than 50 million clicks, her weblog topped the "Technorati" billboard, a leading weblog search engine.

A survey by Baidu.com showed there were 16 million bloggers writing in Chinese in 2006, with a total of 36.82 million weblogs. Xu Jinglei was one of the first celebrities that the largest Chinese portal website Sina.com invited to open blogs last year.

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