China is leading the global trend towards cyber sovereignty, a norm based on the use of technology to control what sort of information can be accessed and exchanged within a national boundary and by whom. Several recent reports...
A murderous rampage in Zhuhai, Guangdong that left 35 dead and scores wounded was met with a now all-too-familiar refrain on the Chinese internet: “Xianzhong” is back. Zhang Xianzhong (张献忠, Zhāng Xiànzhōng), a Ming-era peasant...
The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, Halloween revelry has been marred by strict police curfews, the detention of costume-clad partygoers, and bans on organized...
Domestic critics of the Chinese Communist Party sometimes compare it to a mafia; that was literally the case recently in Harbin, the capital of the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. A public request for tips on a criminal...
In a remarkable interview, a censor for one of China’s biggest search engines described what gets deleted from the Chinese internet and how—as well as their perspective on the morality of their work. The interview was...
WeChat has censored an article on a trending question on Douyin: “Why are jails packed this year?” The article, a short synthesis of a viral genre of short video, claimed that detention centers are overfilled due to China’s...
Yesterday, police in Xi’an announced the arrest of a 33-year-old woman for rumor mongering. Her crime? Posting a video claiming that it was snowing in Xi’an, when in fact it was not. In a notice posted to WeChat, local police...
A recent WeChat post reveals that some Chinese schools and universities are using special software to identify and punish students who “scale the wall”—that is, circumvent China’s Great Firewall (GFW) to access overseas websites...
Last week, the Chinese government announced that it will raise the retirement age. The long-expected move is deeply unpopular but, the government holds, necessary to relieve strain on China’s work force and pension funds. The...
Microblogging platform Weibo is cracking down on speech about crackdowns on speech. In a weekly “safety” digest published to an official Weibo administrators’ account, the platform announced that it had...
The Chinese public has been transfixed and outraged by news of a decade-long scheme involving the theft and illegal sale of thousands of corpses for use as bone-graft raw material in dental procedures. A document leaked last...
The reported theft and illegal sale of thousands of human corpses for use as raw material in bone graft procedures has shocked the Chinese public and sparked a breathtaking wave of censorship online. Last Thursday, a Beijing...
In the two weeks since the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China published a draft law proposing an ostensibly voluntary national Internet ID program and opened it up for public comment, there...
Hu Xijin has seemingly been banned from posting to Chinese social media platforms. Hu, formerly the editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid Global Times, appears to have run into trouble for “misconstruing” the...
When the result of a sporting match becomes a foregone conclusion and lesser players are subbed in to run out the clock, announcers often term it “garbage time.” The latest term to sweep the Chinese internet holds that nations,...
CCTV commentators covering the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics fell silent during a skit hinting at a ménage à trois, a scene inspired by the great French writer Victor Hugo’s line, “The freedom to love is no less...
News of plans to raise China’s retirement age, found in documents issued after the recently concluded Third Plenum, have ignited a social media firestorm. The text of the plenum’s “resolution,” published to Xinhua, held:...
American politics have trended on the Chinese internet this week. While censors seem to consider discussion of the near-assassination of Donald Trump fair game, the intraparty push to have President Joe Biden cede his position...
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