The (talk) show is over. Comedian Li Haoshi, who made a joke involving the People’s Liberation Army last weekend, has been detained by Beijing police according to a report from BBC’s Chinese news service. As of publication, no...
A WeChat essay on the “sore need” for a continuation of the May Fourth Movement’s legacy of “resistance against the powers that be,” published on the eve of the movement’s 104th anniversary, was taken down by censors. The essay,...
In a remarkable violation of Party discipline, an organization partially under the auspices of the Beijing Communist Youth League’s house organ posted a requiem for the 2022 “White Paper Movement” to WeChat. The name was...
China’s infamous urban management agents, known as chengguan, have a new rural equivalent, the nongguan (“rural management”). Nongguan is the unofficial name for a new corps of agricultural law-enforcement officers, “Rural...
The suppression of news about a Beijing hospital fire that killed 29 last week has inspired vigorous discussion of censorship on the Chinese internet. Just after noon on Tuesday, April 18, a fire broke out in southwestern...
Censors deleted an essay suggesting that Xi Jinping was responsible for the youth unemployment crisis that has given birth to the viral “Kong Yiji literature” genre. The “Kong Yiji” meme is a reference to a 1918 Lu Xun story of...
On March 10, China’s National People’s Congress, a rubber-stamp body that meets in full session once annually, re-elected Xi Jinping to a third five-year term as President. (His third term as General Secretary was already...
After reporting fewer than fifty coronavirus deaths since the end of the zero-COVID policy, Chinese health officials revised the death toll to 59,938 virus-related deaths in hospitals between December 8 and January 12. Experts...
Three months after a group of men assaulted four women at a restaurant in Tangshan, a district court in Hebei sentenced the men to prison for a number of crimes. Their sentencing comes after authorities and state media attempted...
Popular health-focused outlet DXY is the latest popular science outlet to run afoul of China’s censors and online nationalists. Five DXY Weibo accounts, with a combined total of more than 30 million followers, were...
Popular online writer Shen Maohua, who writes under the pen name Wei Zhou, is known for his trenchant and often humorous essays, lively social media comments sections, and occasional brushes with platform censors. In this...
The coronavirus pandemic has introduced a rash of new vocabulary into everyday life across the globe, but perhaps nowhere more so than in China, where the battle for “COVID zero” has spawned an epidemic of slogans. Political...
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...
China’s anti-war voices continue to suffer censorship as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine goes on. The dominant theme of online discourse is Russophilia, though at least some of that appears to have been orchestrated. The New...
A Bilibili content moderator’s death has renewed debate on China’s culture of overwork six months after the Supreme People’s Court ruled “996” working schedules illegal, and just a year after a young tech worker died in similar...
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’...
“20021” may look like a random string of numbers or a mangled date, but many Weibo users know it as a sign that they are being blocked from posting “sensitive” content. Telegram user @cybergraveyardcn (简中赛博坟场)...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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