Margaret Hillenbrand, professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, joined CDT to discuss her two latest books: “On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China” (2023) and “Negative Exposures: Knowing...
Some recent restrictions placed on historical books, museum exhibits, and academic discourse have brought renewed attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to rewrite history, control the historical narrative, and...
Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s son, was killed by American bombers on November 25, 1950 while fighting in the Korean War. A persistent, unfounded, rumor (officially tagged as “historically nihilist”) holds that the younger Mao gave...
A new draft patriotic education law submitted last week to the National People’s Congress Standing Committee is spurring spirited online debate. Broad in scope, the draft law includes provisions for the role of Chinese...
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...
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