Caving to online male backlash that included a threatened boycott, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com announced that it would scrap its November 11 “Singles Day” shopping festival collaboration with comedian Yang Li (杨笠, Yáng Lì)....
Chinese internet users are taking issue with a recent announcement that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and Ministry of Education are trying to standardize online speech by cracking down on the use of “irregular and...
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...
With hundreds of documented (and censored) online sobriquets, Xi Jinping is arguably the most nicknamed leader in recent Chinese history. To stay ahead of the censors, online Chinese have long resorted to using homophones,...
Sometimes, it’s the censors who imbue a joke with political power. Earlier this week, Weibo user @怪以德服人猫’s account was deleted for violating Weibo policy. Their likely violation? A joke, described by some netizens as “very...
Word(s) of the Week: Forge Exemplary Conduct, Fight to Win (作风优良，能打胜仗 zuòfēng yōuliáng, néngdǎ shèngzhàng) On Saturday at the Century Theater in Beijing, a stand up comic joked that his dogs’ pursuit of squirrels brought to mind...
In his landmark political report before the 20th Party Congress, Xi Jinping hailed China’s “tenacious pursuit” of its dynamic zero-COVID policy, an indication the policy is here to stay, despite consistent domestic criticism. At...
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...
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...
CDT has translated a selection of Chinese political jokes that have been making the rounds on social media. These jokes all poke fun at China’s so-called core socialist values, a set of 12 words used by the CCP to promote...
CDT has long celebrated irreverent online humor in China, commissioning and publishing cartoons,...
On January 22, the Politburo announced the establishment of the Central Commission for Integrated...
Last month, censors took note of a photo from the March, 2013 Chinese People’s Political and...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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