Party, a new edgy magazine with contributions from film directors, artists and novelists has been indefinitely shelved because no publisher was willing to run it, confirmed founder and chief editor Han Han on his blog.

Han, best-selling novelist, bad boy, popular blogger and rally driver, wrote on a post headlined: “We’ll Meet Again Some Day” that “It is impossible to publish the second and all future editions of Party, so I hereby announce the disbanding of the [magazine’s] team.”

The 28-year-old added that he could not definitively blame any particular government department for the failure of the magazine.

“So, specifically I don’t know why this happened,” he wrote on his blog. “I don’t know whom I have offended. I am in the open, and you are in the shadows… if one day we meet, then I don’t bear you any grudge, but please tell me what happened.”

The first edition was published last July in book format as a way to bypass strict magazine censorship, although reportedly that was delayed by about six months because of government controls. For the second edition, Han tried to switch to a magazine format, supposedly to gain legitimacy. The original plan was to make Party a bi-monthly literary magazine of around 120 pages.

The propaganda departments needn’t have been so nervous. According to Jeremy Goldkorn, a longtime commentator on Chinese media and the founder of Danwei.org, Party’s first edition was not even that controversial. “It got an anti-establishment attitude, a kind of rebellious feel to it, but there was nothing explicitly anti-government,” Goldkorn told CNN. It included poems, essays and even an extract from Han’s new novel, “I want to talk to the world.”

Even so, it looked like it rattled some in the government since state press poured scorn on the first edition back in July. “Youths mock Han Han’s new magazine,” said the Global Times, an English-language newspaper run by the state-owned People’s Daily. It quoted other young authors as saying Party was “filled with affected and weakly written literature.” However, Han’s magazine proved very popular, selling 1.5m copies in the first few months.

The magazine’s popularity is no doubt due in part to Han’s own celebrity status. He is one of China’s most popular bloggers, clocking up hundreds of millions of views and is famous for his boyish good looks, his books which appeal to China’s youth, and while no dissident, he has won many followers for his sarcastic social commentary.