For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and...
The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) boasting that WeChat automatically records user activity and shares it with law enforcement. The short video skit...
A recent WeChat post reveals that some 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...
Sunday, July 21 was the world’s hottest day on record, a title it held for only 24 hours. While current record temperatures are fueled by many coinciding factors—an El Niño climate pattern, high solar output, and even,...
Late last month, a WeChat article about the “collapse of the Chinese-language internet” attracted tens of thousands of views and spurred an enthusiastic response before it was eventually censored. Written by He Jiayan, a blogger...
As the Chinese economy continues to recover from the long pandemic (and post-pandemic) slowdown,...
After a decades-long infrastructure spending spree, many of China’s local governments now find themselves saddled with unsustainable levels of debt and a surplus of vastly ambitious but often underutilized infrastructure...
Weibo censors deleted an essay blaming China’s stagnating economic growth on “a failure of political reform” that also compared the Party-state to gangsters and “underworld bosses.” The essay by popular blogger “Mr. Liu Dake”...
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...
Four years after the death from COVID of Dr. Li Wenliang, the young Wuhan ophthalmologist who alerted colleagues to the emerging novel coronavirus, tributes to the widely admired doctor continue to pour in, despite some online...
In this poetic essay, first published in Matters, author Lola muses on the various types of walls that restrict our freedom of speech, thought, movement, and association: I cannot fight the wall I only dream I could (from...
A brief, fiery essay excoriating totalitarianism has been censored on WeChat, and appears to have precipitated the closure of a Jiangxi-based current- and legal-affairs blog. First posted on the public WeChat account 法制江西 (Fǎzhì...
In mainland China, August 1 is known as PLA Day or Army Day, and commemorates the establishment of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1927. This year, the celebration of the PLA’s 96th anniversary coincided with a...
On May 18, 2023, blogger and activist Wu Gan was released from prison after serving an eight-year sentence for “subversion of state power.” Active in rights defense cases since 2009, Wu Gan (whose screen name was “Super Vulgar...
On March 25th, Guangdong-based rapper Liu Wanli, better known as Vyan (pronounced “vee-yen”) was invited to appear on “One Seat,” a lecture program that has been called “China’s TED Talks.” In his...
Nearly three years and two months after whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang’s death from COVID-19, the “Wailing Wall” that emerged in the comments section under his last Weibo post continues to serve as a repository for the hopes,...
Every movement needs its anthem. In the now-censored musical parody “Sunny Side Kong Yiji,” the emergent “Kong Yiji literature” wave seems to have found one of its own. “Kong Yiji literature” is a genre of self-deprecating...
This year, the United Nations’ theme for March 8 International Women’s Day was “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.” In China, people marked the holiday with a variety of thought-provoking and creative...
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