Recent public opinion polls from countries in the Global South point to a slight shift in attitudes vis-a-vis China and the U.S. By small but significant margins, a growing number of people in many of these countries...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
Back when I was on the village production team, we couldn’t switch shoulders while carrying wheat. One slip-up while switching shoulders and the grain would spill and thus be wasted. Nowadays, most food loss happens during mechanical harvesting. We must improve our machinery and focus on intensive agriculture.”
— Xi Jinping, waxing nostalgic while discussing food security in an interview with Chinese state news agency Xinhua. His words breathed new life into the "Xi shouldering 200 jin of wheat (and not switching shoulders)" meme.
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
In the days following former premier Li Keqiang’s death in late October of 2023, mourners left...
A recent donation from a medical non-governmental organization (NGO) to the Beijing municipal and...
In the wake of the Article 23 legislation passed two weeks ago in Hong Kong, further constricting...
Efforts by the Chinese state and its state-affiliated actors to engage with global media can be seen as part of a broader drive to enhance China’s soft power and shape narratives in the state’s favor. CDT has documented numerous examples, particularly in the Global South, whereby Chinese engagement, often through media forums and people-to-people exchanges, has not only promoted collaboration but also disseminated more Chinese state-media content to local audiences in order to burnish China’s image. Several recent studies shine light on this dynamic in Brazil. This week, Pablo Sebastian...
The atmosphere for media freedom in Hong Kong has become increasingly inhospitable since the 2020...
Film censorship has long plagued China’s creative arts industry and stifled foreign products...
On Tuesday, a suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan killed five Chinese engineers and their...
Xi Jinping’s efforts to point the way forward on China becoming a “major cyber-power” have met...
On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s legislature unanimously passed a new national security law that grants the...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
Israel’s war in Gaza has elicited increasing attention from the Sinophone world, as five months of...
On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s legislature unanimously passed a new national security law that grants the...
Many entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens welcomed the news that provincial prosecutors in Guizhou...
On the sidelines of the Two Sessions this week, Xinjiang Party Secretary Ma Xingrui declared that...
Hong Kong is set to pass a new domestic national security law that critics worry will further...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral over the weekend, thrilling some nationalists but perturbing other Chinese netizens. The video was later removed from Bilibili and Weibo, and netizen discussions of the clip were censored on Zhihu. The Hubei Communist Youth League posted a video to Bilibili featuring clips of People’s Liberation Army tanks firing, troops marching, missiles launching, ships cruising, and helicopters and fighter jets flying—standard albeit bellicose fare for a propaganda video. The video’s caption, however, was...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
In the days following former premier Li Keqiang’s death in late October of 2023, mourners left...
A recent donation from a medical non-governmental organization (NGO) to the Beijing municipal and...
In the wake of the Article 23 legislation passed two weeks ago in Hong Kong, further constricting...
According to reports on Hunan TV, Global Times, and related WeChat public accounts, the spouses of...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
In the days following former premier Li Keqiang’s death in late October of 2023, mourners left...
Efforts by the Chinese state and its state-affiliated actors to engage with global media can be...
A recent donation from a medical non-governmental organization (NGO) to the Beijing municipal and...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’...
In the wake of the Article 23 legislation passed two weeks ago in Hong Kong, further constricting...
The atmosphere for media freedom in Hong Kong has become increasingly inhospitable since the 2020...
Among Xi Jinping’s many Party-bestowed titles and hundreds of banned netizen nicknames is one that...
On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s legislature unanimously passed a new national security law that grants the...
A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long operation, held in Beijing and involving over 40 Ministry of Public Security computer specialists from around the country, to combat “overseas cyber forces” in the battle for public opinion. The apparently leaked internal instructions from the Ministry of Public Security are likely to be the result of an email breach. They include the names and locations of many of the computer-specialist officers, as well as the name and contact information of the individual in charge of the operation. At some...
Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration has issued a series of regulations intended to...
Popular online writer Shen Maohua, who writes under the pen name Wei Zhou, is known for his...
As citizens revolt against never-ending lockdowns and local governments “resolutely struggle...
On Thursday, the Canadian government announced that it will ban Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE...
On Monday of last week, Malaysian musician Namewee (Wee Meng Chee, 黃明志) learned that his YouTube...
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...
In 2014, Leta Hong Fincher published her first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender...
Starting in March 2008, Tibetans across the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), Qinghai, Gansu, and...
Surveys have shown that Xi Jinping’s hardline foreign policy is increasingly unpopular abroad....
Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of Government at Cornell University, joined CDT to discuss his...
Evidence of human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang has...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, after their boat capsized along a route often used by migrants attempting to reach the U.S. This is the latest example of an ongoing wave of Chinese emigration, and it highlights the perilous conditions that Chinese migrants face in pursuit of a better life in the U.S. Reporting on the incident for RFA, Jing Wei described the dangers of taking various migration routes through Central America: “I heard that one of these boats had capsized and people had drowned,” [migrant Li Kai] said...
Efforts by the Chinese state and its state-affiliated actors to engage with global media can be...
Weibo censors deleted an essay blaming China’s stagnating economic growth on “a failure of...
On Tuesday, a suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan killed five Chinese engineers and their...
The use of the standard Party formulation of Xi Jinping “pointing the way forward” on various...
Among Xi Jinping’s many Party-bestowed titles and hundreds of banned netizen nicknames is one that...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) described how authorities used COVID prevention measures to “strangle” foreign news bureaus’ China coverage. This year’s edition of the report, released on Monday and titled “Masks Off, Barriers Remain,” demonstrates that while conditions over the past year have improved slightly due to the lifting of China’s zero-COVID policies, the government has continued to engage in heavy-handed surveillance, obstruction, and intimidation of foreign correspondents: No respondents said...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
In the days following former premier Li Keqiang’s death in late October of 2023, mourners left...
Efforts by the Chinese state and its state-affiliated actors to engage with global media can be...
A recent donation from a medical non-governmental organization (NGO) to the Beijing municipal and...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral over the weekend, thrilling some nationalists but perturbing other Chinese netizens. The video was later removed from Bilibili and Weibo, and netizen discussions of the clip were censored on Zhihu. The Hubei Communist Youth League posted a video to Bilibili featuring clips of People’s Liberation Army tanks firing, troops marching, missiles launching, ships cruising, and helicopters and fighter jets flying—standard albeit bellicose fare for a propaganda video. The video’s caption, however, was...
Chinese social media has been awash with interest in Netflix’s new series “3 Body Problem,” an...
Film censorship has long plagued China’s creative arts industry and stifled foreign products...
Xi Jinping’s efforts to point the way forward on China becoming a “major cyber-power” have met...
Among Xi Jinping’s many Party-bestowed titles and hundreds of banned netizen nicknames is one that...
TikTok, the popular social media platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has been under...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
A recent donation from a medical non-governmental organization (NGO) to the Beijing municipal and...
In the wake of the Article 23 legislation passed two weeks ago in Hong Kong, further constricting...
According to reports on Hunan TV, Global Times, and related WeChat public accounts, the spouses of...
Even before the lifting of China’s long-standing “zero-COVID” policy in early December of last year, there were signs of a surge in Omicron cases nationwide. Since then, China has experienced a tsunami of infections—first in larger cities, and then in the countryside—amid concerns about shortages of needed medications, the increasing risk of medical debt, and unreliable official data on the numbers of infections and deaths. Despite the recent Lunar New Year celebration in which hundreds of millions of residents went traveling and returned to their hometowns, there are signs that the wave of...
After conducting nucleic acid testing on its 26 million residents this week, Shanghai remains...
Evergrande offices across China have been beset by protesting retail investors and homeowners...
Anyone who has boarded an airplane in the last 20 years knows what stands between arrival at the...
This spring, while nationalist fervor to “support Xinjiang cotton” swelled online,...
In early December, President Xi Jinping declared that China had eliminated absolute poverty. His...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
Israel’s war in Gaza has elicited increasing attention from the Sinophone world, as five months of...
On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s legislature unanimously passed a new national security law that grants the...
Explaining a meme often takes the wind out of a joke’s sails. Not so in this case. A recent Xi Jinping quote published by Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, has breathed new life into a long-running meme mocking the General Secretary’s braggadocio. A 2017 CCTV report on Xi Jinping’s time as a sent-down youth featured an old clip of Xi boasting: “I’d carry 200 jin of wheat on a ten-li mountain road without even switching shoulders.” The claim beggared belief. Two hundred jin is equivalent to approximately 220 pounds, and 10 li to approximately three miles. Netizens...
A middle school literature exam in Chengdu has triggered the latest outburst of anti-Japanese...
The nationalist blogger who attempted to sue Nobel-Prize winning author Mo Yan for 1.5 billion...
A recent altercation captured on video shows an off-duty, uniformed toll-booth employee in Yulin, Shaanxi province, berating a truck driver at a restaurant and trying to force him to eat food from a garbage can. The disturbing video has provoked much discussion online about the perceived impunity of individuals in uniform, the abuse of petty authority, and how the problem of school bullying may be a reflection of the prevalence of bullying behavior in society at large. An official statement, issued on March 23 by the Yuwu Branch of the Shaanxi Transportation Authority, confirmed that the...
A number of recent events have brought renewed attention to the diminishing role of investigative...
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at...
Recent public opinion polls from countries in the Global South point to a slight shift in attitudes vis-a-vis China and the U.S. By small but significant margins, a growing number of people in many of these countries appear to favor China over the U.S. This appears due at least as much to perceptions that the U.S. government has been hypocritical over Israel’s war in Gaza and lacks a compelling global vision for the future as to China’s increasingly active diplomatic engagement around the world. To some, the surveys merely show a snapshot in time; for others, they reflect a deeper trend of...
Following Sunday’s carefully controlled and largely predetermined election, Russian President...
After an explosion caused by a gas leak destroyed a four-story building, killing seven and...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico,...
A group of students under the impression they had discovered a WeChat “bug” that hides the phrase “200 jin of dumplings” (roughly 220 pounds) had in fact stumbled upon an obscure insult for Xi Jinping that triggers automatic censorship. In the course of daily conversation, the students found that messages preceded by the term “200 jin of dumplings” (200斤饺子) were not received by their counterparts. Juvenile hilarity ensued. They sent each other curses and confessions: “200 jin of dumplings, you’re a stupid c***,” “200 jin of dumplings, you’re an idiot,” “200 jin of dumplings, piggy,” and...
This week saw the proliferation of COVID conspiracy theories on Chinese social media, the...
While the official position from Beijing is that China remains a neutral observer of the...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) described how authorities used COVID prevention measures to “strangle” foreign news bureaus’ China coverage. This year’s edition of the report, released on Monday and titled “Masks Off, Barriers Remain,” demonstrates that while conditions over the past year have improved slightly due to the lifting of China’s zero-COVID policies, the government has continued to engage in heavy-handed surveillance, obstruction, and intimidation of foreign correspondents: No respondents said...
In the wake of the Article 23 legislation passed two weeks ago in Hong Kong, further constricting...
Explaining a meme often takes the wind out of a joke’s sails. Not so in this case. A recent...
Even before the lifting of China’s long-standing “zero-COVID” policy in early December of last year, there were signs of a surge in Omicron cases nationwide. Since then, China has experienced a tsunami of infections—first in larger cities, and then in the countryside—amid concerns about shortages of needed medications, the increasing risk of medical debt, and unreliable official data on the numbers of infections and deaths. Despite the recent Lunar New Year celebration in which hundreds of millions of residents went traveling and returned to their hometowns, there are signs that the wave of...
After conducting nucleic acid testing on its 26 million residents this week, Shanghai remains...
Evergrande offices across China have been beset by protesting retail investors and homeowners...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral over the weekend, thrilling some nationalists but perturbing other Chinese netizens. The video was later removed from Bilibili and Weibo, and netizen discussions of the clip were censored on Zhihu. The Hubei Communist Youth League posted a video to Bilibili featuring clips of People’s Liberation Army tanks firing, troops marching, missiles launching, ships cruising, and helicopters and fighter jets flying—standard albeit bellicose fare for a propaganda video. The video’s caption, however, was...
Chinese social media has been awash with interest in Netflix’s new series “3 Body Problem,” an...
Film censorship has long plagued China’s creative arts industry and stifled foreign products...
At a recent summit in Ethiopia, the African Union (AU) decided to approve a 15-year continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their hides. Donkey hides are a key component of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ingredient known as ejiao (“donkey-hide gelatin”), whose demand in China has boomed over the past decade and decimated donkey populations in Africa. The Donkey Sanctuary, one of the world’s largest equine charity organizations, celebrated the announcement and described its significance This historic decision taken by the African Union recognises, at the highest level of...
This week in Dubai, after two weeks of negotiations among representatives from almost 200...
As the U.N. COP28 Climate Summit is underway in the United Arab Emirates, bringing together...
An incident on Wednesday, in which a representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was denied permission to enter Hong Kong to observe the national security trial of political and media figure Jimmy Lai, is yet another illustration of the precipitous decline of media freedom in that territory. Another RSF employee was allowed to enter. The episode comes on the heels of national security legislation related to Article 23, which threatens to further curtail civil liberties and press freedoms by criminalizing routine reporting, research, and advocacy work. The legislation was fast-tracked...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’...
In the wake of the Article 23 legislation passed two weeks ago in Hong Kong, further constricting...
Among Xi Jinping’s many Party-bestowed titles and hundreds of banned netizen nicknames is one that points to his penchant for claiming personal leadership over and insight into seemingly everything: “Compass-in-Chief.” The nickname derives from a standard Party formulation that holds that Xi has “pointed the way forward” on a vast array of policy issues. (For more on the phrase, see CDT’s 20th Anniversary Edition Lexicon.) The breadth of topics which Xi has claimed to “point the way forward” on, and the frequency of the formulation’s use, has turned the phrase into an object of...
Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its legislative majority in the country’s...
Over the weekend, discussions of Taiwan’s general election were both censored and drowned out on...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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