In recent weeks, two very familiar household names in China—Nobel prize-winning novelist Mo Yan and bottled water company Nongfu Spring—have come under fire from extreme Chinese nationalists, who have accused the pair of odd...
In recent weeks, both the Nobel prize-winning novelist Mo Yan and the Chinese bottled water company Nongfu Spring have come under fire from extreme Chinese nationalists, who have accused them of being insufficiently patriotic....
Popular science and current events blogger Xiang Dongliang’s musing on the Chinese Lunar New Year 2024 is CDT’s Quote of the Day: What struck me most about CCTV’s “Year of the Dragon” Spring Festival Gala? So many adverts. How...
Amid a market rout that brought Chinese stocks to a five-year low, a state media that continues to push blindly optimistic economic bromides, and a constricted online environment in which the Ministry of State Security has...
Saturday’s general election in Taiwan, in which the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its parliamentary majority but saw its presidential candidate Lai Ching-te elected with 40% of the vote, was closely watched in...
To round out 2023, CDT Chinese compiled a series of year-end articles on a number of special topics, including sensitive words (part one and part two), censored articles, “rollover scenes,” and notable reports. This post...
A recent trio of pronouncements by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) warning against expressions of pessimism about the Chinese economy have sparked worries among businesspeople, economists, and analysts who fear that...
Some recent restrictions placed on historical books, museum exhibits, and academic discourse have brought renewed attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to rewrite history, control the historical narrative, and...
A popular periodical featuring essays and nonfiction writing announced that it is suspending operations after 35 years. The announcement followed online chatter that the December cover was an oblique criticism of Xi Jinping. Xi...
Current affairs blogger Xiang Dongliang has had his Weibo account banned for reporting Hu Xijin, a nationalist blogger and retired editor-in-chief of the Global Times, for using a VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall of China...
As Chinese state media tone down their anti-U.S. rhetoric and promote the Weibo hashtag #感受中美民意暖流# (#Experience the Warm Current of Public Opinion on Sino-American Relations) in recognition of the Xi-Biden meeting on the...
A photo of an American teacher introducing himself to a Chinese university class with a slide presentation proclaiming, “I am not a spy” has gone viral, eliciting much mirth online. It also highlights an increasingly tense...
With hundreds of documented (and censored) online sobriquets, Xi Jinping is arguably the most nicknamed leader in recent Chinese history. To stay ahead of the censors, online Chinese have long resorted to using homophones,...
Sometimes, it’s the censors who imbue a joke with political power. Earlier this week, Weibo user @怪以德服人猫’s account was deleted for violating Weibo policy. Their likely violation? A joke, described by some netizens as “very...
In mainland China, August 1 is known as PLA Day or Army Day, and commemorates the establishment of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1927. This year, the celebration of the PLA’s 96th anniversary coincided with a...
“Four Won’t Youth” (四不青年, sì bù qīngnián) is the latest appellation for discontented youth, who in this case “won’t date, won’t marry, won’t buy a home, and won’t have kids.” Four Won’t Youth, like other similar terms...
Less than a month after the conclusion of China’s hypercompetitive annual university entrance examination (“gaokao”), a satirical meme about an imaginary university has been banned on Weibo. The meme and its censorship reveal...
Toys riffing on China’s hottest online idiom, “calling a rat a duck,” were yanked from online shelves this past week, a sign of the idiom’s continued political sensitivity. The tongue-in-cheek saying “calling a rat a duck”...
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