Police in Yingtan, Jiangxi province, have become the object of derision online after announcing that they had punished four men for evading a pandemic lockdown to attend the funeral of an elderly family member. The phrase used...
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...
Dandong has been under intermittent lockdown (“static management” in the municipal government’s preferred euphemism) since April 25 of this year. The northeast city bordering North Korea is but the latest frontier town to bear...
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...
The past weekend has brought more bad news for many Chinese students who have found themselves at the whim of the government’s aggressive and sustained zero-COVID policies. On Saturday, Shanghai officials announced that the...
Several of China’s largest social media companies including Weibo, Douyin, Toutiao, Zhihu, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu have announced that they will display users’ IP addresses. The measure, which will affect the majority of...
An essay tracing the evolution of Shanghai lockdown memes from giddy jests about Shanghai culture to gallows humor and gloomy meditations on the state of society was censored last week after going viral on Weibo. The essay,...
A collection of 40 jokes about China’s “zero-COVID policy” and its enforcers was posted by @丁逸峰 on Zhihu, the popular Chinese question-and-answer site. Many are styled in the grand tradition of “Soviet Jokes,” which have, at...
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...
There’s a Chinese joke about lawyers that goes like this: “You know you broke the law, right?” “Which law?” “Why, teaching the law is illegal!” [Editor’s note: It reads better in the original Chinese] The joke became reality...
A performance art piece by a student who sat in a cage to protest a draconian lockdown of the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) recently went viral, and was censored just as quickly. Like many other Chinese citizens, university...
Chinese internet users have just scored a rare win against censorship. On September 3, the swear word shǎbī 傻逼, politely translated as “dumbass,” was banned from Baidu’s messaging forum Tieba. In the aughts, a mythical creature...
CDT has long celebrated irreverent online humor in China, commissioning and publishing cartoons,...
At the Wall Street Journal, Te-Ping Chen reports that the State Administration of Press,...
Yesterday, the state-run People’s Daily Online ran the story Kim Jong-un Named The Onion’s...
Zhang Yimou, director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, is now in hot water over his...
Conquer Space, Suppress the Cosmos 征服太空 镇压宇宙 Nothing is impossible 没有不可能完成的任务 Attend...
Yuzhe Ziyu, a netizen living in Chongqing, posted a call for tales of censorship on his Google+ profile on February 3. Below are the responses he received. Read the original here. Translated by Deng Bolun. Yuzhe Ziyu: Tell...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
CDT is a non-profit media site, and we need your support. Your contribution will help us provide more translations, breaking news, and other content you love.
