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...
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...
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,...
Students from at least 174 colleges and universities across six continents have erected encampments in solidarity with Palestine. Their movement has sprouted over the past few weeks, as many administrators have rejected student...
Explaining a meme often takes the wind out of a joke’s sails. Not so in this case. A recent Xi Jinping quote published by Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, has breathed new life into a long-running meme...
“Four Won’t Youth” (四不青年, sì bù qīngnián) is the latest appellation for discontented youth, who in this case “won’t date, won’t marry, won’t buy a home, and won’t have kids.” Four Won’t Youth, like other similar terms...
Less than a month after the conclusion of China’s hypercompetitive annual university entrance examination (“gaokao”), a satirical meme about an imaginary university has been banned on Weibo. The meme and its censorship reveal...
Toys riffing on China’s hottest online idiom, “calling a rat a duck,” were yanked from online shelves this past week, a sign of the idiom’s continued political sensitivity. The tongue-in-cheek saying “calling a rat a duck”...
There has been much discussion and dissection of the optics of the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Beijing, during which he met with Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Director of the CCP Central Foreign Affairs...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring image to emerge from the Tiananmen Protests of 1989. Photographs taken on June 5 of that year—one day after PLA troops crushed the...
Every movement needs its anthem. In the now-censored musical parody “Sunny Side Kong Yiji,” the emergent “Kong Yiji literature” wave seems to have found one of its own. “Kong Yiji literature” is a genre of self-deprecating...
“Kong Yiji literature” emerged as a self-deprecating meme among young Chinese netizens who joke that their academic credentials have made them “unemployable,” too overeducated or overqualified for the jobs currently available....
People’s Daily Online breathed new life into a stale meme this past week with an opinion piece titled “We Cannot Let Vulgar Online Slang Poison Our Children” that railed against online slang and vloggers. The piece singled out...
Recent year-end retrospectives and New Year’s messages published by various Chinese media outlets—including People’s Daily, Xinhua, Southern Weekly, and NetEase News—have offered vastly different interpretations of 2022, the...
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...
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,...
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...
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