Chinese Investment in Africa Under Scrutiny During FOCAC 2024

The ninth edition of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) concluded last week in Beijing. This triennial summit attracted leaders from more than 50 African countries for a diplomatic fanfare of lavish state...

Hyping the censorship of other accounts will also trigger censorship."
"Hilarious: censored for discussing censorship."
"Next they’ll be censoring anyone who 'hypes' the 'censorship hypers.'”

— Quotes from Weibo users mocking Weibo's recent suspension of accounts that mentioned—or "hyped"—the suspension of other accounts for violating Weibo’s numerous but unwritten political taboos.

 

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Accused Tiananmen Informant’s Silence Reveals Enduring “Public Secrecy” Around 1989

The violent repression of the 1989 student protests scarred Chinese society. The campaign to purge “two-faced” protest sympathizers that followed was similarly painful. Yet some of the greatest unresolved anguish from that tumultuous year stems from the realization among those who served prison sentences that dear friends and trusted colleagues informed on them—or even framed them.  Just such a case has re-entered the public eye 35 years after the fact due to the reporting of the investigative journalist Chai Jing, creator of the 2015 air pollution documentary “Under the...

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Chinese Electric Vehicles Encounter Pushback From Western Governments

China dominates the global electric vehicle (EV) industry. Last year, China accounted for approximately 60 percent of global registrations of new electric vehicles, and China’s EV stock was over 4.5 times greater than that of the U.S. But while EVs promise to wean the world off harmful fossil fuels, China’s outbound investments along the EV value chain have fueled a political backlash in many Western countries anxious about Chinese dominance in their own markets. Ian Austen from The New York Times reported on the latest example this week, when Canada imposed 100 percent tariffs on Chinese...

Ongoing Deletion of Investigative Reports on Corpse-Trafficking Scandal

The Chinese public has been transfixed and outraged by news of a decade-long scheme involving the theft and illegal sale of thousands of corpses for use as bone-graft raw material in dental procedures. A document leaked last week by Beijing-based lawyer Yi Shenghua (in a now-deleted Weibo post) revealed that authorities in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, were investigating 75 suspects from numerous companies, hospitals, and funeral homes spanning at least seven provinces and nearly a dozen localities. As of yesterday, Yi was reportedly ousted as director of the law firm he founded,...

Quote of the Day: “They’ll Stoop to Anything to Reduce the Divorce Rate”

The Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs has unveiled a revised draft law that would make it simpler to register marriages and potentially more difficult to divorce. The proposed changes, billed as helping to create a “family friendly society,” are generally viewed as an attempt to address a looming demographic crisis partly fueled by the nation’s plummeting birth rate. The draft law, which is open for public comment until September 11, has attracted intense public interest and a flood of online commentary, much of it anxious or skeptical. The draft maintains the existing minimum 30-day...

Accused Tiananmen Informant’s Silence Reveals Enduring “Public Secrecy” Around 1989

The violent repression of the 1989 student protests scarred Chinese society. The campaign to purge “two-faced” protest sympathizers that followed was similarly painful. Yet some of the greatest unresolved anguish from that tumultuous year stems from the realization among those who served prison sentences that dear friends and trusted colleagues informed on them—or even framed them.  Just such a case has re-entered the public eye 35 years after the fact due to the reporting of the investigative journalist Chai Jing, creator of the 2015 air pollution documentary “Under the...

Stand News Editors Convicted of Sedition in Latest Blow to Hong Kong Press Freedom

The Hong Kong government dealt yet another blow to the city’s press freedom on Thursday when two former editors of local independent media outlet Stand News were found guilty of sedition. The judge, handpicked by Hong Kong’s chief executive, ruled against the editors, who had spent over 300 days in pre-trial detention and were the first journalists to be convicted in decades. Jessie Pang and James Pomfret from Reuters reported on the conviction: A Hong Kong court on Thursday found two editors of the now-defunct Stand News media outlet guilty of conspiring to publish seditious articles in a...

Critics of China’s Proposed National Internet ID System Hit With Online Bans, Censorship, Harassment

In the two weeks since the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China published a draft law proposing an ostensibly voluntary national Internet ID program and opened it up for public comment, there has been intense platform censorship of online discussion and articles about the proposal. By last week, Weibo was already blocking numerous related search terms (“national Internet ID,” “government plans to issue Internet ID numbers to all users,” “WeChat, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, others begin beta-testing national Internet ID system,” among many others) and most verified...

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...

Chinese Investment in Africa Under Scrutiny During FOCAC 2024

The ninth edition of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) concluded last week in Beijing. This triennial summit attracted leaders from more than 50 African countries for a diplomatic fanfare of lavish state dinners, deal signings, and photo-ops meant to showcase the strength of China’s relationship with the African continent. Like the last edition of FOCAC in 2021, this one took place against the backdrop of economic slowdown in China, rising U.S.-China geopolitical tension, and a ballooning debt problem in Africa. Laurie Chen and Joe Cash from Reuters reported on the...

Accused Tiananmen Informant’s Silence Reveals Enduring “Public Secrecy” Around 1989

The violent repression of the 1989 student protests scarred Chinese society. The campaign to purge “two-faced” protest sympathizers that followed was similarly painful. Yet some of the greatest unresolved anguish from that tumultuous year stems from the realization among those who served prison sentences that dear friends and trusted colleagues informed on them—or even framed them.  Just such a case has re-entered the public eye 35 years after the fact due to the reporting of the investigative journalist Chai Jing, creator of the 2015 air pollution documentary “Under the...