As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her...
Censors deleted a Zhihu answer about growing up in Xinjiang that touched on the underexplored outcomes of the One Child Policy and the region’s racial politics. One user posted to Zhihu, a...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
I think they will blindly inflict suffering. [...] We’ve all seen what happens when control is tightened—death. In the past when culture was allowed to flourish, as during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, there were no security risks, and no social unrest, either.”
— Jiangsu commentator Zhang Jianping, expressing concern about the expansion of the police state via "culture cops" (wenguan)
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
The following instructions have been leaked and distributed online. For June 3rd, 4th, 5th: all...
A performance video of “Red Child’s Eighteen Wins,” a January 2023 song by the folk-rock band Slap...
The culprits behind the beating of a reporter in Guizhou that scandalized China have been...
China and India’s geopolitical rivalry has reached a nadir, with both countries all but barring the other’s journalists from working in their respective territories. Inflamed by an ongoing military conflict along the China-India border, the journalism spat reflects politically-motivated intolerance of foreign press rationalized on the grounds of national security. Keith Zhai from The Wall Street Journal first reported on China and India’s mutual expulsion of journalists: New Delhi denied visa renewals this month to the last two remaining Chinese state media journalists in the country, from...
This week, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) released...
The partial demolition of a historic mosque in rural Yunnan this past weekend ignited conflict...
This week, a set of reports emerged alleging that Chinese state-backed actors perpetrated...
Exactly one year ago, a consortium of media outlets released the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of...
Tensions rose in the wake of the G7 summit last weekend, as China weathered accusations of being...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
The following instructions have been leaked and distributed online. For June 3rd, 4th, 5th: all...
This week, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) released...
The partial demolition of a historic mosque in rural Yunnan this past weekend ignited conflict...
Censors deleted a Zhihu answer about growing up in Xinjiang that touched on the underexplored outcomes of the One Child Policy and the region’s racial politics. One user posted to Zhihu, a popular question and answer site, asking, “What is your impression of people from Xinjiang?”: Question: What is your impression of people from Xinjiang? People often ask me whether I am really from Xinjiang, because I am Han. In the interior [Xinjiang residents’ term for eastern regions of China], most are under the impression that people from Xinjiang are all ethnic minorities with high noses and...
The following instructions have been leaked and distributed online. For June 3rd, 4th, 5th: all...
A performance video of “Red Child’s Eighteen Wins,” a January 2023 song by the folk-rock band Slap...
A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long...
A recent incident illustrates what a minefield it has become to discuss anything, past or present,...
If the lesson last week was “Don’t laugh about the PLA,” this week’s message seems to be, “Don’t...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
Censors deleted a Zhihu answer about growing up in Xinjiang that touched on the underexplored...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
The following instructions have been leaked and distributed online. For June 3rd, 4th, 5th: all...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign of the city’s political trajectory over the past several years, authorities stifled the formerly traditional public and private commemorations. The National Security Law (NSL) has empowered the pro-Beijing government to criminalize any speech deemed threatening to national security, severely restricting the space for commemorations that challenge the CCP’s official interpretation of the events surrounding the crackdown. In place of the candlelit vigil in Victoria Park that took place every...
Local media outlets in Hong Kong report that hundreds of books on political topics including the...
World Press Freedom Day, on May 3, has rarely been a time for celebration in China, where...
This week, a long-expected national security trial of 47 Hong Kong pro-democracy figures began....
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been...
On Saturday, a Hong Kong court sentenced pro-democracy figure and former Apple Daily owner Jimmy...
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...
Surveys have shown that Xi Jinping’s hardline foreign policy is increasingly unpopular abroad. Given the CCP’s mixed success using soft power to repair China’s image, party propagandists have increasingly resorted to sharper global-influence operations, often via foreign media. Pro-CCP narratives are propagated through the media, particularly on sensitive topics such as former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. These narratives reveal that the media is a major component of China’s influence operations abroad. Understanding how the...
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...
China’s soft power initiatives are often derided by Western observers as ineffective or...
This is the full transcript, edited lightly for grammar and clarity, of an interview with Jeremy...
Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell China’s story well” accelerated an existing trend of Chinese...
Exactly one year ago, a consortium of media outlets released the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of tens of thousands of files showing images of Uyghur detainees in Xinjiang’s concentration camps and manuals for enforcing their subjugation. In the year since then, despite multiple high-level U.N. reports documenting forced labor and “serious human rights violations” in Xinjiang that “may constitute […] crimes against humanity,” the CCP has continued to enforce coercive policies in the region with impunity. Recent articles and reports document a new phase of repression in Xinjiang, one marked...
Tensions rose in the wake of the G7 summit last weekend, as China weathered accusations of being...
On May 18, a social media post (archived here) announced the impending closure and demolition of a...
In recent weeks, Chinese authorities have raided foreign firms, imposed exit bans, restricted...
China’s infamous urban management agents, known as chengguan, have a new rural equivalent, the...
The following instructions were posted online. To all provincial, autonomous regional, and...
Censors deleted a Zhihu answer about growing up in Xinjiang that touched on the underexplored outcomes of the One Child Policy and the region’s racial politics. One user posted to Zhihu, a popular question and answer site, asking, “What is your impression of people from Xinjiang?”: Question: What is your impression of people from Xinjiang? People often ask me whether I am really from Xinjiang, because I am Han. In the interior [Xinjiang residents’ term for eastern regions of China], most are under the impression that people from Xinjiang are all ethnic minorities with high noses and...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
The following instructions have been leaked and distributed online. For June 3rd, 4th, 5th: all...
A performance video of “Red Child’s Eighteen Wins,” a January 2023 song by the folk-rock band Slap...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long...
Tensions rose in the wake of the G7 summit last weekend, as China weathered accusations of being...
May 10, 2023 marked the second anniversary of the detention of program-think (Biānchéng suíxiǎng,...
The full report can be read in PDF form here. Below is a brief introduction. A CDT investigation...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
The culprits behind the beating of a reporter in Guizhou that scandalized China have been...
This week, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) released...
Exactly one year ago, a consortium of media outlets released the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache 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...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
Chinese state media’s external-facing content has become increasingly known for its aggressive stance towards Western geopolitical rivals and its ideological consistency under centralized leadership. Recent reports about Chinese state media, as well as reports from Chinese state media, emphasize this trend and demonstrate how it plays into Beijing’s efforts to exert international discourse power. On Thursday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a report titled “America’s Coercive Diplomacy and Its Harm.” The report states that it “aims to expose the evil deeds of US coercive...
The (talk) show is over. Comedian Li Haoshi, who made a joke involving the People’s Liberation...
Word(s) of the Week: Forge Exemplary Conduct, Fight to Win (作风优良，能打胜仗 zuòfēng yōuliáng, néngdǎ...
The shuttering of the Beijing LGBT Center marks the latest setback for China’s queer community. In a terse statement published to WeChat, the Center offered no explanation for its sudden closure beyond force majeure. Founded in 2008, the Center had been a landmark initiative to provide community space, medical advice, and cultural programming for the capital’s sexual and gender minorities. The Center’s unexplained demise is further evidence of the state’s apparent turn against the LGBTQ+ community, following the censorship of queer media platforms, the disciplining of university...
Snow? In Hebei? In May? Don’t even joke about it.A young man in a small city in southern Hebei was...
On March 25th, Guangdong-based rapper Liu Wanli, better known as Vyan (pronounced “vee-yen”) was...
Heavy fighting between rival military groups in Sudan’s capital of Khartoum has put local and foreign civilians in peril. Over the past week, Chinese, American, and other governments implemented evacuation plans to escort their citizens to safety, traversing breakdowns in multiple ceasefires between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. China completed two rounds of large-scale maritime evacuations that carried over 1,300 of its citizens to safety. And while state media outlets celebrated the operation, which was particularly successfully compared to previous ones in...
On Wednesday, CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to...
Proposed regulations on the development of generative artificial intelligence models issued by...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign...
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...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo amidst concerns over the perceived expansion of China’s police state. Earlier this year, the nationwide establishment of so-called nongguan, rural officers charged with policing agriculture, sparked anxiety over those agents’ perceived similarity to chengguan, urban officers with a notorious penchant for harassing street vendors, businesses, and journalists. All the above officers (cultural, agricultural, and urban) are officially called Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement agents. They...
A performance video of “Red Child’s Eighteen Wins,” a January 2023 song by the folk-rock band Slap...
A recent incident illustrates what a minefield it has become to discuss anything, past or present,...
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...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account @ruanxiaohu32309, coming so soon after the politically sensitive June 4 anniversary and the news of her husband’s seven-year prison sentence for his online writings, has caused widespread concern for Ms. Bei’s safety among human rights organizations and other observers. Several days ago, the human rights organization Weiquanwang (维权网, Wéiquánwǎng) reported that in early June,...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring...
A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long...
At the halfway point of the COP27 international climate-change summit, there are encouraging signs that China and the U.S. may put aside geopolitical tensions in order to collectively stave off existential catastrophe for the world. However, both countries are currently falling short of the emission-reduction goals agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and small, developing nations most at risk of a warming planet are demanding greater efforts. Caixin summarized China’s engagement with the U.S. at COP27: China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said he met with his U.S. counterpart John Kerry...
A massive, months-long heat wave has scorched regions in central China. Intense droughts and...
This Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of floods in Henan on July 20, 2021, when historic...
Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign of the city’s political trajectory over the past several years, authorities stifled the formerly traditional public and private commemorations. The National Security Law (NSL) has empowered the pro-Beijing government to criminalize any speech deemed threatening to national security, severely restricting the space for commemorations that challenge the CCP’s official interpretation of the events surrounding the crackdown. In place of the candlelit vigil in Victoria Park that took place every...
Local media outlets in Hong Kong report that hundreds of books on political topics including the...
World Press Freedom Day, on May 3, has rarely been a time for celebration in China, where...
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping met on Monday in Bali for their first in-person meeting since Biden took office. Buoyed by their recent political victories at home, the two leaders sought to stabilize the deteriorating Sino-U.S. relationship and clarify their respective priorities. Some progress was made by renewing high-level talks on important issues such as climate change, but it remains to be seen whether this meeting provided a sustainable foundation for the fraught rivalry between the two countries. At The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Restuccia, Ken...
Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration has issued a series of regulations intended to...
On Sunday, another U.S. Congressional delegation traveled to Taiwan, less than two weeks after...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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