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...
Two years after Peng Lifa’s courageous one-man protest on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge against Xi Jinping and the CCP’s autocratic rule, his whereabouts are still unknown, although it is widely presumed that he remains under...
Xi Jinping’s New Era has inspired the creation of a host of “new chengyu”: idiomatic, often four-character, literary expressions that are the kernel of a larger tale. New Era chengyu are references to infamous incidents that...
Acclaimed writer Peter Hessler is selling his car in Chengdu, after leaving China in 2021 when his teaching contract was abruptly terminated. Online, the sale of his Honda CRV has spurred a series of reflections on Hessler’s...
As the one-year anniversary of the lifting of China’s “zero-COVID” policy approaches, residents in many provinces in China have been dismayed and alarmed by the apparent return of mobile phone app-based health codes. Screenshots...
Halloween celebrations in Shanghai doubled as an outlet for mild political “gags,” spooking censors and delighting audiences online. Photographs of party-goers dressed as Winnie the Pooh, livestreamer Li Jiaqi, Lu Xun, “big...
A year after his protest against Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party atop Beijing’s Sitong Bridge, netizens continue to ask: where is Peng Lifa? On October 13, 2022, Peng hung two banners from Sitong Bridge that read: “We...
Word(s) of the Week: “It is a bit ridiculous, but you must obey.” (是有点搞笑，但是你要服从, Shì yǒudiǎn gǎoxiào, dànshì nǐ yào fúcóng.) A policeman admitting that a traffic restriction “is a bit ridiculous, but you must obey”...
A Singapore paper’s publication of a blistering opinion piece criticizing Xi Jinping did not escape notice on Weibo, where netizens surreptitiously praised it. Titled “The Economy Is The Problem, Its Root Is Politics,” the...
A quickly retracted Zhejiang report on provincial cremation statistics has shed new light on China’s coronavirus death toll. The chaotic end of China’s zero-COVID policy in late 2022 led to a surge in infections and deaths...
The accounts of Health Insights (@八点健闻), a health and science-oriented digital news outlet, have been suspended across all Chinese social media platforms, notably WeChat and Weibo. Since coming online in 2019, the outlet had...
“Zero-COVID nail houses” (防疫钉子户, fángyì dīngzihù) are people who still adhere to strict virus prevention measures despite the end of the national zero-COVID policy. It is often used self-deprecatingly by “nail houses” themselves...
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...
The Foreign Correspondent Club of China’s 2022 media freedoms report, an annual assessment of the country’s reporting climate over the previous year, found that COVID prevention measures had “strangled” already diminished...
A news article lauding the police work behind the arrest of a 64-year-old construction worker in Shanghai’s Pudong district instead drew attention to the financial insecurity experienced by China’s elderly workers. The...
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...
China’s recent COVID-19 wave has left patients and their families struggling with medical debt. A Peking University study estimated that as of January 11, 900 million people in China had been infected with COVID-19, and China’s...
The ten censored essays collected below are a first draft of an unauthorized history of the extraordinary year 2022, compiled by CDT Chinese editors. Toward the end of the year, discontent over the zero-COVID policy burgeoned...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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