A recent incident illustrates what a minefield it has become to discuss anything, past or present, related to the Chinese military. This week, a history lecturer at Lanzhou University was accused by someone online of...
If the lesson last week was “Don’t laugh about the PLA,” this week’s message seems to be, “Don’t even crack a smile.” First, stand-up comedian Li Haoshi (stage name “House”) was accused of defaming the People’s Liberation...
Would-be viewers of the long-delayed historical drama “A Love Never Lost” were left disappointed Monday when the show was pulled just two hours before its premiere. The broadcast was replaced with a rerun of a 2020 “poverty...
China’s Ministry of State Security is standardizing rewards for turning in spies. Would-be informants can earn up to $15,000 for a tip that has major implications for China’s national security or, in lieu of that, a “spiritual...
Ex-journalist Luo Changping has been sentenced to seven months in prison for a Weibo post that questioned the wisdom of Chinese military strategy during the Korean War and mocked troops that froze to death. Luo was detained in...
Several of China’s major social media companies have launched a campaign to clean up “historical nihilism” on their platforms. The push comes on the heels of an April 20 essay published in Study Times by the head of 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...
Li Tiantian, the pregnant Hunan elementary school teacher forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward after voicing support for a fired Shanghai professor, has been released from the hospital—and chosen self-exile. In December...
An end-of-year listicle created by China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, is a time capsule of the Chinese Communist Party’s view on Chinese digital culture—what it wants people to read, watch, and...
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...
A major Chinese Communist Party conclave on history has consecrated Xi’s place next to Mao in the pantheon of Party leadership. The Sixth Plenum of the 19th Party Congress ended on Thursday, November 11, with the passage of a...
Jiangsu Unicom, a subsidiary of state-owned conglomerate China Unicom, incurred online anger after posting, on two consecutive days, a recipe for egg fried rice with ginger on Weibo. The seemingly innocuous recipe landed the...
Former journalist and anti-corruption crusader Luo Changping was detained by police on Hainan Island on October 7, a day after his personal Weibo account was deleted over a post questioning the justification for China’s...
On July 1, the Chinese Communist Party will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. The Party was actually founded on July 23 but the mixup, although acknowledged, has never been rectified—perhaps because the date has a...
Life in Chinese academia is hard. Scholars are subject to twin pressures: politics and performance. Two recent cases—a professor’s lawsuit against Tsinghua University over wrongful dismissal connected to politically sensitive...
An essay by former Premier Wen Jiabao memorializing his late mother was censored this past week, but it was the essay’s content rather than its erasure that raised eyebrows. Wen wrote poignantly about his family’s suffering...
The term “historical nihilism”—which has long been used to label accounts that challenge Party-approved orthodoxy—is again back in headlines and official crosshairs with the launch of a hotline allowing people to report those...
Ahead of Tuesday’s showcase of homegrown military technology to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, NPR’s Emily Feng described the occasion’s symbolic importance, political...
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