An essay tracing the evolution of Shanghai lockdown memes from giddy jests about Shanghai culture to gallows humor and gloomy meditations on the state of society was censored last week after going viral on Weibo. The essay,...
On April 19, a nine-and-a-half minute audio recording of a phone call between a German resident in Shanghai and a translator working for the local neighborhood committee went viral on Chinese and overseas social media. The...
On Monday of last week, Malaysian musician Namewee (Wee Meng Chee, 黃明志) learned that his YouTube account had been hacked and all of its content deleted. His account, created in 2006, had 3.27 million subscribers and over 1,000...
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...
Digital censorship in China, while algorithmic, vast, and multifarious, has a human element—which means the vagaries of individual censors’ moods have the potential to impact online punishments. Screenshots of one Weibo users’...
Editor’s Note: As we enter 2022, CDT has compiled a special series of features for our readers, offering a look back at the people, events, controversies, memes and sensitive words that defined the past year. Some of this...
Viral Content is a new CDT series introducing terms coined and used by Chinese netizens during the 2019-2020 COVID-19 outbreak. These terms include both subversive critiques and nationalistic support of government policies....
Viral Content is a new CDT series introducing terms coined and used by Chinese netizens during the 2019-2020 COVID-19 outbreak. These terms include both subversive critiques and nationalistic support of government policies....
Viral Content is a new CDT series introducing terms coined and used by Chinese netizens during the 2019-2020 COVID-19 outbreak. These terms include both subversive critiques of government policies and nationalistic support of...
Viral Content is a new CDT series introducing terms coined and used by Chinese netizens during the 2019-2020 COVID-19 outbreak. These terms include both subversive critiques of government policies and nationalistic support of...
Viral Content is a new CDT series introducing terms coined and used by Chinese netizens during the 2019-2020 COVID-19 outbreak. These terms include both subversive critiques of government policies and nationalistic support of...
Viral Content is a new CDT series introducing terms coined and used by Chinese netizens during the 2019-2020 COVID-19 outbreak. These terms include both subversive critiques of government policies and nationalistic support of...
The following term comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to...
The following term comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to...
Sensitive Words highlights keywords that are blocked from Sina Weibo search results. CDT independently tests the keywords before posting them, but some searches later become accessible again. We welcome readers to contribute to...
Wuhan, Hubei–the epicenter of the outbreak of novel coronavirus that has now been declared a global health emergency by the WHO–has been on lockdown for nearly a week. The “dramatic action” of quarantining a city of...
Amid an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China, nationalistic sentiment has been...
The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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