Sunday marked the 34th anniversary of the 1989 June 4th crackdown. In Hong Kong, in a stark sign of the city’s political trajectory over the past several years, authorities stifled the formerly traditional public and...
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...
Word(s) of the Week: Forge Exemplary Conduct, Fight to Win (作风优良，能打胜仗 zuòfēng yōuliáng, néngdǎ shèngzhàng) On Saturday at the Century Theater in Beijing, a stand up comic joked that his dogs’ pursuit of squirrels brought to mind...
Local media outlets in Hong Kong report that hundreds of books on political topics including the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre are no longer available in the city’s public libraries, after the city’s Leisure and Cultural Services...
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...
Proposed regulations on the development of generative artificial intelligence models issued by China’s top internet regulator would require “AI-produced content [to] embody core socialist values.” The 12 core socialist values...
Jiang Yanyong, the military doctor who alerted the world to the real extent of the 2003 SARS outbreak, passed away in Beijing on March 11, 2023. Initially hailed as a national hero, Jiang was later imprisoned and then subject to...
The Wall Street Journal’s John D. McKinnon reported on Thursday that, following “a major shift in policy” from the Biden administration, short video platform TikTok could be forced to split from its Chinese...
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...
People’s Daily Online breathed new life into a stale meme this past week with an opinion piece titled “We Cannot Let Vulgar Online Slang Poison Our Children” that railed against online slang and vloggers. The piece singled out...
At times, parsing propaganda for deeper meaning is difficult. At others, the (unintentional) message is hidden in plain sight. In October 2018, one bus passenger in Guizhou’s Nayong County realized that a roadside billboard...
A shaky video of chengguan, street-level urban management enforcers, ripping down decorative Spring Festival couplets in Jiangsu’s Pei County went viral this past week. The controversy metastasized after the freelance journalist...
The new word “humineral” (人矿 rén kuàng) has taken the Chinese internet by storm and is now a sensitive word subject to censorship. First introduced in a now-censored Zhihu post on January 2, 2023, “humineral”—a portmanteau of 人...
A novel propaganda method—a “video call” from Xi Jinping delivering Lunar New Year’s well-wishes—inspired titters after China Central Television (CCTV) shared it on Weibo. The Weibo link sent users to a faux WeChat...
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