In the face of growing government repression, many residents of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and various provinces of China have fled abroad to seek refuge. This fateful decision to uproot one’s life splits identity between a native...
Chinese authorities are continuing their efforts to Sinicize religious and ethnic minorities. Religious practices during Ramadan were stifled and censored this year, and many mosques across China have been stripped of their...
The Douban comment was not inflammatory. In fact, it didn’t even betray an overt opinion. But for censors, it was too much. “A note for posterity: this will be Inner Mongolia’s last Mongolian-language gaokao,” it read. Censors...
Chinese netizens have had a lot to say about economist Ma Jiantang’s prescription for adapting to the “era of longevity” by reclassifying workers between the ages of 60-70 as “the youthful elderly,” those between the ages of...
Xi Jinping’s New Era has inspired the creation of a host of “new chengyu”: idiomatic, often four-character, literary expressions that are the kernel of a larger tale. The following New Era chengyu are all references to infamous...
“It’s as if the words ‘layoffs’ and ‘unemployment’ are somehow disgraceful, so instead people insist on using euphemisms such as ‘flexible employment,’ ‘[workforce] optimization,’ ‘slow employment’ (also ‘delayed employment’),...
At times, parsing propaganda for deeper meaning is difficult. At others, the (unintentional) message is hidden in plain sight. In October 2018, one bus passenger in Guizhou’s Nayong County realized that a roadside billboard...
At The New York Times, writer and free speech advocate Murong Xuecun looks at the lasting effect...
The linguistic gymnastics used to evade censorship by China’s more politically inclined web...
Catch-22, the title and starring-rule of Joseph Heller’s 1961 satire of bureaucratic folly...
At Caixin, Yu Ge comments on recent criticism in People’s Daily of the adoption of English...
At China Real Time on Monday, Te-Ping Chen noted the relative lack of recent adoptions of Chinese...
In response to a Hong Kong Standard article which accused The South China Morning Post of...
Global Times reports instructions for TV and radio hosts to use more “proper...
While Shanghai strives to be an international city, locals are worried about the preservation of its cultural identity. After the 1990s, when Shanghai increased its efforts to become an international metropolis, the use of...
The Economist's Analects blog has a post about the recent television dramas about the Qing Dynasty, such as Palace, and suggests that the popular image of the Manchus is far from accurate:Actors in Chinese film and...
This photograph (via CDT Chinese) was taken in 2010 in Kangding city, in the Ganzi/Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of western Sichuan. The poster’s comment: “As I was out for a stroll, I happened to see a...
Worldcrunch translates an article from Die Welt on changes in the new eleventh edition of the Xinhua Zidian (New China Dictionary), and the social changes they reflect. From the very first edition in 1953, it has mirrored...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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