All of these individuals deserve to be seen—they should not be described as some faceless members of the 'general public.'”

— From the WeChat essay “Censorship Won’t Make Us Feel Safe,” which criticized a police statement about a recent school stabbing in Guangzhou for referring to two injured nine-year-old children as "members of the general public." Nor did the statement acknowledge the role of many bystanders in apprehending the perpetrator of the attack.

 

CDT Highlights

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Translation: In Open Letter to Xi Jinping, Ren Xinyi Pleads for Medical Parole for Her Father, Ren Zhiqiang

Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her father be released on compassionate medical parole. Ren Zhiqiang was an outspoken critic of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule and COVID pandemic policies. He was detained by Chinese Communist Party disciplinary authorities in March of 2020, soon after publishing a fiery essay in which he called Xi a “clown” and criticized Xi’s intolerance of dissent and his response to the...

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Michael Kovrig Describes “Psychological Torture” During 1,019-Day Detention

In a two-part podcast interview with The Economist’s Drum Tower, former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig has described the “nightmare Groundhog Day” of his 1,019-day detention in China. Kovrig was one of two Canadians held for nearly three years from December 2018 after Canada acted on an American extradition request against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, also the daughter of the firm’s founder. Chinese diplomats denied in public that the two Michaels—as the press soon dubbed them—were being held as hostages until Canada released Ms Meng. But in private, Chinese...

Translation: In Open Letter to Xi Jinping, Ren Xinyi Pleads for Medical Parole for Her Father, Ren Zhiqiang

Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her father be released on compassionate medical parole. Ren Zhiqiang was an outspoken critic of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule and COVID pandemic policies. He was detained by Chinese Communist Party disciplinary authorities in March of 2020, soon after publishing a fiery essay in which he called Xi a “clown” and criticized Xi’s intolerance of dissent and his response to the...

Translation: In Open Letter to Xi Jinping, Ren Xinyi Pleads for Medical Parole for Her Father, Ren Zhiqiang

Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her father be released on compassionate medical parole. Ren Zhiqiang was an outspoken critic of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule and COVID pandemic policies. He was detained by Chinese Communist Party disciplinary authorities in March of 2020, soon after publishing a fiery essay in which he called Xi a “clown” and criticized Xi’s intolerance of dissent and his response to the...

ASEAN Summit Reveals Divisions on Regional Conflict Management

Leaders of southeast Asian countries gathered in Laos this week for the annual ASEAN summit and the concurrent East Asia Summit attended by major global partners. China, represented by Premier Li Qiang, hailed the “substantial conclusion of negotiations” on an upgraded free-trade agreement with ASEAN member states, according to China Daily. But most of the discussions were dominated by concern over the ongoing civil war in Myanmar and rising tensions in the South China Sea. Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos used the platform to criticize China for its aggressive behavior and told Li, “you...

As PRC Outlasts Soviet Union, Xi Jinping Warns of “Stormy Waves”

The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary on Tuesday, October 1. The anniversary is both political spectacle and the advent of a week-long holiday marked by decidedly apolitical leisure travel. On the eve of the anniversary, Xi Jinping delivered a speech in front of 3,000 guests, both foreign and domestic, in the Great Hall of the People. At The Guardian, Helen Davidson wrote about the relatively muted political celebrations in Beijing:  “The road ahead will not be smooth, there will definitely be difficulties and obstacles, and we may encounter major tests such as...

Translation: Chinese Universities Install Software to Identify and Punish Students Who Circumvent the Great Firewall

A recent WeChat post reveals that some Chinese schools and universities are using special software to identify and punish students who “scale the wall”—that is, circumvent China’s Great Firewall (GFW) to access overseas websites and portals. The post begins with a not-very-convincing exchange of WeChat messages between three students—identified as “student A,” “student B,” and “student C,” respectively—discussing their university’s use of the ABT Online Behavior Management System (安博通上网行为管理, Ānbótōng shàngwǎng xíngwéi guǎnlǐ) to identify and punish fellow students who circumvented the GFW to...

New eBook: China Digital Times Lexicon, 20th Anniversary Edition

On September 12, 2003, John Battelle published the first post on chinadigitaltimes.net: Here’s what a Google Search on “china weblog” yields, I’m looking forward to seeing ours at the top soon! China’s online population at the start of that year was nearly 60 million. Ten years later, it was fast approaching 600 million, and now, after 20, it is well over a billion. This new completely revised and hugely expanded update to our ebook series, formerly known as “the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon,” aims to capture something of the enormous explosion of online speech that accompanied this growth, with...

China Treads Cautiously on Expanding Trade and Investment with the Taliban

Three years after the Chinese government’s cautiously supportive stance toward the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan led to Chinese netizens blasting their government for being “Taliban in spirit,” China has maintained its friendly relationship with the Taliban, and numerous diplomatic and investment deals demonstrate their growing cooperation. While most other countries have criticized the Taliban’s severe suppression of women’s most basic human rights, China has used its leverage to instead legitimize the new de-facto government. Several recent articles discuss how Beijing’s priorities lie...

Translation: After Guangzhou School Stabbing, “Censorship Won’t Make Us Feel Safe”

An October 8 stabbing outside an elementary school in Guangzhou, in which two nine-year-old students and an adult woman were injured, has drawn renewed attention to the phenomenon of indiscriminate knife attacks by people seeking “revenge on society.” All three victims received medical treatment and are reportedly out of danger. The perpetrator, a 60-year-old man surnamed Zhao who served over six years in prison for a previous stabbing attack on a girlfriend, was arrested by local police, but the official police statement about the incident and arrest was very short on details. The Guangzhou...

Marie Holzman: Thoughts on Ilham Tohti’s Arrest in 2014

To mark the tenth anniversary on Monday of his sentencing to life in prison, Marie Holzman writes at the online human-rights journal Diyin on Ilham Tohti’s case and its enduring significance. The essay, which is also available in Chinese and is reproduced here in full with the author’s permission, includes a selection of Ilham Tohti’s writings that starkly illustrates the gulf between his own words and the charges against him. Ilham Tohti is the most renowned Uyghur public intellectual in the People’s Republic of China. For over two decades he has worked tirelessly to...

Translation: In Open Letter to Xi Jinping, Ren Xinyi Pleads for Medical Parole for Her Father, Ren Zhiqiang

Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her father be released on compassionate medical parole. Ren Zhiqiang was an outspoken critic of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule and COVID pandemic policies. He was detained by Chinese Communist Party disciplinary authorities in March of 2020, soon after publishing a fiery essay in which he called Xi a “clown” and criticized Xi’s intolerance of dissent and his response to the...

Quote of the Day: Official Disposable Income Figures Derided as “Today’s Daily Dose of Humor”

On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was off to a good start in 2024, with reported 5.3% year-on-year GDP growth in the first quarter of the year. The better-than-expected data was touted by various Chinese state media outlets online, although many of those news posts had comment filtering enabled, perhaps in anticipation of negative or skeptical reactions from social media users. Two items in particular seemed to strike netizens as overly optimistic: the reported “nationwide average per-capita disposable income” figure of 11,539 yuan...

Human Rights

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Translation: In Open Letter to Xi Jinping, Ren Xinyi Pleads for Medical Parole for Her Father, Ren Zhiqiang

Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her father be released on compassionate medical parole. Ren Zhiqiang was an outspoken critic of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule and COVID pandemic policies. He was detained by Chinese Communist Party disciplinary authorities in March of 2020, soon after publishing a fiery essay in which he called Xi a “clown” and criticized Xi’s intolerance of dissent and his response to the...

Politics

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Sympathy, Soul-Searching, and Censorship Follow Fatal Stabbing of Japanese Boy in Shenzhen

Amid state-media silence and Chinese Foreign Ministry insistence that two fatal anti-Japanese attacks in Shenzhen and Suzhou were “isolated incidents” that could happen in any country, Chinese bloggers, citizen journalists, and everyday netizens continue to publish soul-searching, thoughtful essays, articles, and comments on topics such as the role of the CCP in promoting anti-Japanese propaganda, the proliferation of xenophobic content online, and the “teaching of hatred” in school classrooms. Over the last ten days, CDT Chinese editors have archived over three dozen such essays and...

Society

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Netizen Voices on Shenzhen Stabbing: “People Care More About Political Posturing, Nationality, History, and Hatred Than They Do About Human Life”

Wednesday’s fatal stabbing of a Japanese fifth-grader as he walked to his school in the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen—just months after a similar fatal stabbing at a Japanese school bus-stop in Suzhou—has prompted an outpouring of Chinese-language articles and commentary reflecting on the role of nationalist propaganda, “patriotic education,” and xenophobic online sentiment in fueling such attacks. There has also been extensive censorship of such articles on Chinese social media, as well as widespread comment deletion under posts about the stabbing. Many commenters have expressed...

China & the World

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Translations: Olympics Showed How “Strict Government Controls Are Breeding Media Mediocrities” (2)

While China’s athletes won glory in Paris at this year’s Olympics and Paralympics, there was widespread agreement on Chinese social media that the country’s reporters did not. Bloggers and athletes alike rolled their eyes at the inanity of the Chinese press corps’ questions to competitors. One particular flashpoint was a comment by Nanfang Daily’s Zhu Xiaolong, who questioned 17-year-old diving gold-medalist Quan Hongchan’s educational level and emotional maturity during a livestream. But the storm over Zhu’s comments was a microcosm of broader discussion about the...

Law

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Translation: In Open Letter to Xi Jinping, Ren Xinyi Pleads for Medical Parole for Her Father, Ren Zhiqiang

Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her father be released on compassionate medical parole. Ren Zhiqiang was an outspoken critic of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule and COVID pandemic policies. He was detained by Chinese Communist Party disciplinary authorities in March of 2020, soon after publishing a fiery essay in which he called Xi a “clown” and criticized Xi’s intolerance of dissent and his response to the...

Information Revolution

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Canada Kicks Out Huawei, U.S. Weighs Further Sanctions on Hikvision, China Invests in Undermining Sanctions

On Thursday, the Canadian government announced that it will ban Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its 5G networks. The move comes as the Biden administration debates imposing further sanctions on Hikvision, a Chinese surveillance camera company, for supplying and operating equipment in Xinjiang mass detention camps. Both of these developments bring renewed attention to the role of Chinese technology companies in problematic surveillance activities and the role of sanctions in combating their alleged abuses. Catharine Tunney and Richard Raycraft from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...

Culture & the Arts

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Passport Restrictions on Public Employees, and China’s “New Cultural Emigres” 

Several recent reports and articles highlight the experience of those in China who seek to leave the country in search of better opportunities or greater freedom abroad. On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center published a report detailing why Asian immigrants come to the U.S. and how they view life in the States. According to survey results, 75 percent of Chinese immigrants cited the absence of state censorship as a benefit of life in the U.S. versus China, and 71 percent said that conditions for raising children were better in the U.S. than in China. In a piece published on Tuesday titled...

The Great Divide

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Quote of the Day: Official Disposable Income Figures Derided as “Today’s Daily Dose of Humor”

On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was off to a good start in 2024, with reported 5.3% year-on-year GDP growth in the first quarter of the year. The better-than-expected data was touted by various Chinese state media outlets online, although many of those news posts had comment filtering enabled, perhaps in anticipation of negative or skeptical reactions from social media users. Two items in particular seemed to strike netizens as overly optimistic: the reported “nationwide average per-capita disposable income” figure of 11,539 yuan...

Sci-Tech

Latest

Marie Holzman: Thoughts on Ilham Tohti’s Arrest in 2014

To mark the tenth anniversary on Monday of his sentencing to life in prison, Marie Holzman writes at the online human-rights journal Diyin on Ilham Tohti’s case and its enduring significance. The essay, which is also available in Chinese and is reproduced here in full with the author’s permission, includes a selection of Ilham Tohti’s writings that starkly illustrates the gulf between his own words and the charges against him. Ilham Tohti is the most renowned Uyghur public intellectual in the People’s Republic of China. For over two decades he has worked tirelessly to...

Environment

Latest

Reports Detail Forced Displacement and Violent Reprisals Against Protest in Tibet

Two research reports published this week underscore how authorities in Tibet have displaced local communities to impose state-sponsored projects, undermining environmental protection and human rights. The collaborative research network Turquoise Roof published the first report, “Occupying Tibet’s rivers: China’s hydropower ‘battlefield’ in Tibet.” The report details how violent paramilitary reprisals have stifled protests against the construction of the planned Kamtok hydropower dam along the Drichu (Yangtze) river, threatening the displacement of villages and Buddhist monasteries: The...

Hong Kong

Latest

As PRC Outlasts Soviet Union, Xi Jinping Warns of “Stormy Waves”

The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary on Tuesday, October 1. The anniversary is both political spectacle and the advent of a week-long holiday marked by decidedly apolitical leisure travel. On the eve of the anniversary, Xi Jinping delivered a speech in front of 3,000 guests, both foreign and domestic, in the Great Hall of the People. At The Guardian, Helen Davidson wrote about the relatively muted political celebrations in Beijing:  “The road ahead will not be smooth, there will definitely be difficulties and obstacles, and we may encounter major tests such as...

Taiwan

Latest

35th Tiananmen Anniversary Commemorated Around the World

While the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre was massively censored within mainland China and Hong Kong, people elsewhere around the world made tributes in order to highlight the incident and reflect on its significance in the present era. The Hongkonger compiled an inexhaustive list of commemorative events that took place in 18 cities across four continents. The Hong Kong Free Press reported on commemorations in Canada and the U.K., among other countries: On June 4, over 300 people joined an assembly in front of the Chinese Embassy in Britain to share and hear memories of the...

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