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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Death of Red Guard, Bête Noir of Cultural Revolution, Sparks Reflection on Weibo

Sep 19, 2024

Song Binbin, perhaps the most infamous “Red Guard” of the Cultural Revolution, died at the age of 77 on Monday, September 16. Song, the daughter of one of the Party’s powerful “Eight Immortals,” was the leader of a Red Guard faction at her elite girls’ school in the summer of 1966, the advent of the Cultural Revolution. In early August of that year, a group of students beat the school’s vice-principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. Less than two weeks later, Song became famous all across China after state media published a photograph of her affixing a Red Guard armband around Mao’s arm...

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Sinopsis: How Pro-Russian Narratives Spread in Malaysian Chinese-language Facebook Circles

Sep 17, 2024

Prague-based Sinopsis has published a new investigation by Kuek Ser Kuang Keng, Chan Wei See, and Wong Kai Hui into the propagation of pro-Russian narratives about the invasion of Ukraine through Chinese state media and other official channels and into Chinese-language Malaysian communities on Facebook: Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, we have observed a flurry of pro-Russia disinformation presented in Chinese language circulating among the online communities of Chinese-speaking Malaysians. This disinformation aims to shape the audience’s views towards the...

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Essays on Colonialism and Indigeneity in and Beyond the P.R.C.

Sep 19, 2024

Uyghur villages have been Sinicized in Xinjiang. Local communities have been displaced for state-sponsored infrastructure projects in Tibet. News editors have been convicted of sedition in Hong Kong. National elections have been smeared by P.R.C.-backed influence operations in Taiwan. Connecting all of these geographies is a battle over who is considered indigenous to the land, or the colonial forces that imposed their own sovereignty. Recent essays show that various groups in and beyond the P.R.C. are not only reflecting on these issues through historical and structural lenses, but also...

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Death of Red Guard, Bête Noir of Cultural Revolution, Sparks Reflection on Weibo

Sep 19, 2024

Song Binbin, perhaps the most infamous “Red Guard” of the Cultural Revolution, died at the age of 77 on Monday, September 16. Song, the daughter of one of the Party’s powerful “Eight Immortals,” was the leader of a Red Guard faction at her elite girls’ school in the summer of 1966, the advent of the Cultural Revolution. In early August of that year, a group of students beat the school’s vice-principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. Less than two weeks later, Song became famous all across China after state media published a photograph of her affixing a Red Guard armband around Mao’s arm...

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Hong Kong Resident Gets 14 Months Imprisonment for “Seditious” T-Shirt

Sep 19, 2024

The first sentencing under Hong Kong’s new Article 23 national security law (officially called the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance) occurred this week, as a man was sentenced to 14 months imprisonment for wearing a “seditious” t-shirt. Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai-tak, handpicked by the government to handle national security cases, stressed that the protection of the country was the “fundamental,” “foremost,” and “essential” consideration in sentencing offenders for sedition. Critics, however, view this case as an excessive violation of free expression. James Lee from the Hong...

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Hong Kong Resident Gets 14 Months Imprisonment for “Seditious” T-Shirt

Sep 19, 2024

The first sentencing under Hong Kong’s new Article 23 national security law (officially called the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance) occurred this week, as a man was sentenced to 14 months imprisonment for wearing a “seditious” t-shirt. Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai-tak, handpicked by the government to handle national security cases, stressed that the protection of the country was the “fundamental,” “foremost,” and “essential” consideration in sentencing offenders for sedition. Critics, however, view this case as an excessive violation of free expression. James Lee from the Hong...

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

Sep 18, 2024

A recent WeChat post reveals some of the tools that 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...

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

Dec 28, 2023

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...

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China Raises Retirement Age In Response to Longevity Increases

Sep 17, 2024

Last week, the Chinese government announced that it will raise the retirement age. The long-expected move is deeply unpopular but, the government holds, necessary to relieve strain on China’s work force and pension funds. The phased changes will raise the retirement age for men from 60 to 63 in 2040. Women in white-collar jobs will be expected to work to 58, while women in blue-collar jobs will now be expected to work until 55. At The New York Times, Vivian Wang reported on the change:  The government most likely realized it had no more time to delay, said Alfred Wu, a professor of public...

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Death of Red Guard, Bête Noir of Cultural Revolution, Sparks Reflection on Weibo

Sep 19, 2024

Song Binbin, perhaps the most infamous “Red Guard” of the Cultural Revolution, died at the age of 77 on Monday, September 16. Song, the daughter of one of the Party’s powerful “Eight Immortals,” was the leader of a Red Guard faction at her elite girls’ school in the summer of 1966, the advent of the Cultural Revolution. In early August of that year, a group of students beat the school’s vice-principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. Less than two weeks later, Song became famous all across China after state media published a photograph of her affixing a Red Guard armband around Mao’s arm...