As 2025 draws to a close, CDT editors are compiling a series of the most notable content (Chinese) from across the Chinese internet over the past year. Topics include this year’s most outstanding quotes, reports, podcasts and videos, sensitive words, censored articles and essays, “People of the Year,” and CDT’s “2025 Editors’ Picks.”

The following quotes were selected by CDT Chinese editors as the most enduring and resonant of 2025. In an introductory essay—translated in full in Part One—they explain that these examples reflect an online environment in which “official narratives and public perceptions now occupy completely separate continua. The public no longer believes government officials, no matter what they say; no matter how they frame a policy, the masses’ initial reaction is invariably skeptical. [… W]hile "Quotes of the Day" may just seem like playful banter, they’re actually a form of linguistic guerrilla warfare from a population under intense pressure, using absurdity to skewer the highbrow and dark humor to fight the propaganda slogans du jour. […] These voices pierce the fog of grand narratives to chronicle a year that was strange, but true.”

July 19: "What happened to the unrelenting pursuit of truth, responsibility, and accountability over Japanese nuclear wastewater discharge in past years? Where did that go?"

In late July, Hangzhou residents complained that their tap water had started to give off a putrid stench. Local water authorities initially dismissed the complaints, eventually conceding the issue and attributing it to elevated algae density caused by abnormal reservoir water temperatures. In the end, seven officials were reported, without further detail, to have been held "strictly accountable."

Online commentary highlighted the sharp disparity between the urgency with which authorities had acted to suppress information about the case—with numerous posts deleted and one man detained for spreading rumors—and their relatively sluggish handling of what might have been a serious public health threat. One comment, for example, read: "Those who monopolize information block reporting and investigation, and fail to explain things clearly, yet they blame the public for spreading rumors?"

Another contrast, noted in the quote above, lay between official media’s treatment of potential health hazards at home, where they can be aggressively stifled for the sake of stability maintenance, versus abroad, where they can be exaggerated for the sake of geopolitical one-upmanship. Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2023, though deemed to be in line with international safety standards by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, was met with a relentless barrage of fearmongering by Chinese authorities and official media, leading to boycotts, harassment, and panic-buying of salt. Countervailing arguments were, of course, censored. Following the Hangzhou water episode, one comment argued: "When there’s a crisis all the way over there in Japan, our media is a microscope, magnifying every tiny particle of risk. When it happens at our own faucets, our media becomes a filter, euphemising it as a harmless ‘natural phenomenon.’"

August 9: "A government that never took any interest in your work hours is suddenly deeply concerned about whether your employer paid social insurance."

A tax compliance campaign that launched in August has exacerbated existing anxieties about deteriorating economic conditions and reforms aimed at raising the retirement age. Sudden demands for payment to rectify decade-old discrepancies have proven particularly galling, given the perception of official laxity in enforcing labor laws when they benefit workers. From CDT Chinese editors:

The public viewed this sudden leap in administrative efficiency as both incongruous and ironic, in light of the central government’s years of lax labor-law enforcement.

Faced with the tech giants’ "996" culture of overwork and the widespread occurrence of pay arrears, government regulators have often maintained the tacit position that "if the people don’t complain, the authorities don’t investigate." But as soon as it comes to expropriations to make up for a deficit in the social insurance funds, the formerly absent "night watchman" instantly transforms into an eagle-eyed "tax collector."

More aggravating still to the public is the continued lack of substantial progress on dismantling the "dual-track pension system." Those inside the system, like civil servants and the employees of public institutions, have long enjoyed high pension replacement rates of as much as 80-90% [of working income], while the rate for private sector workers hovers around 40%. This highly stratified division of retirement income makes "mandatory contributions" a form of robbing the poor to give to the rich, benefitting those within the system.

This "selective concern" rips away the veil of modern China. It doesn’t really care whether you’re overworked, only whether your “surplus value” as an economic resource can be fully extracted. With public finances strained and domestic demand weak, the goal of enforcement is no longer justice, but extraction.

In a period of economic downturn, the true face of an "extractive regime" becomes clear: a two-track system for distributing benefits, and extreme efficiency in collecting them. [Chinese]

November 17: "Why is it that Chinese people are unsafe, no matter where they go?"

This theme parallels the double standard regarding public health issues at home versus abroad, as seen in the Hangzhou and Fukushima water safety cases mentioned above. Chinese official media have continued to hype the dangers facing Chinese travelers overseas throughout the year, from organ harvesting in Thailand to targeted discrimination in South Korea to broader warnings about the advisability of travel to Japan. Safety issues at home, on the other hand, are consistently minimized and, if they cannot be dismissed or suppressed entirely, treated as isolated incidents rather than parts of a broader pattern. (See the quote highlighted in Part One: "There were only two fuel-oil tankers transporting food in the whole country; there’s only one Liu Xiangfeng at Xiangya Hospital.")

CDT Chinese editors, noting the irony of proclaiming China as uniquely safe in the wake of a long string of indiscriminate “revenge on society” attacks and various other health and safety hazards, asked: "If a particular country’s citizens feel ‘unsafe’ wherever they go around the world, is it the outside world that’s the problem? Or does it stem from that country’s propagandistic narratives, and the victim complex they create?"

November 28: "I didn’t even have a chance to apologize in person before having to dismantle the stage with my own two hands."

Ayumi Hamasaki’s canceled concert in Shanghai in late November was an unusually high-profile casualty of sharpened Sino-Japanese tensions after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi expressed her willingness to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese naval blockade. The Chinese government’s habitual use of anti-Japanese sentiment as a convenient domestic binding agent has had more literal victims in the past. Hamasaki was unusual partly because she has 1.6 million Instagram followers with whom she could share an image of an apparent curtain call in the empty venue, describing it as "one of the most unforgettable show[s] ever to me." CDT Chinese editors commented:

The authorities want to exploit this kind of nationalist sentiment in order to maintain domestic cohesion, but they’re also afraid that any large-scale communal activity involving Japan might trigger "uncontrollable" public sentiment and spill into offline conflict.

So sacrificing a concert became the lowest-cost option for maintaining social stability. On one hand is the empty diplomatic expression of "willingness to strengthen communications with the Japanese side"; on the other is the forced dismantling of a physical stage. With this kind of schizophrenic governance mentality, so-called "Sino-Japanese friendship" exists only on paper.

We might say that this broken-down stage symbolizes the last point of human, apolitical contact between the two countries, loudly collapsing amid rising enmity. [Chinese]