The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) boasting that WeChat automatically records user activity and shares it with law enforcement. The short video skit...
On Tuesday, Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States. The election had been closely observed from China, by both the government and the populace. The Chinese government’s official response has so...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang newsletter, detailing the work and attitudes of some of China’s legions of low-paid, overworked online content reviewers....
Song Binbin, perhaps the most infamous “Red Guard” of the Cultural Revolution, died at the age of 77 on Monday, September 16. Song, the daughter of one of the Party’s powerful “Eight Immortals,” was the leader of a Red Guard...
The plight of China’s delivery drivers is front-of-mind for the Chinese public. In August, CDT translated an account of one courier’s death in the summer heat, while a viral photograph of a Meituan driver kneeling before a...
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...
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,...
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:...
On the Chinese internet, wall-to-wall state media coverage of the Chinese Olympic delegation’s departure for the 2024 Paris Games has been met with a shrug. With 405 Chinese athletes slated to compete across 236 events,...
The stabbing of four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College in a Jilin park has become the latest flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. A Chinese national who attempted to intervene in the attack was also stabbed. An official...
China’s hottest television show, HunanTV’s “Singer 2024,” has inspired nationalist angst after two foreign contestants took first and second place—easily besting a field that included legendary Chinese pop star Na Ying. The show...
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...
Hu Chenfeng, a Chinese content creator who first rose to fame making videos about poverty, has been suspended from Bilibili and Weibo after a livestream viewer asked him: “Do you think Xi Jinping is a dictator?” CDT a published...
Beijing’s half-marathon is under investigation after three runners from Kenya and Ethiopia appeared to allow a Chinese runner to win. The odd ending of the race saw Willy Mnangat and Robert Keter of Kenya and Dejene Hailu of...
One of the subtler ways Chinese internet users voice their displeasure with the status quo is through “pinkfishing” (粉红钓鱼, fěnhóng diàoyú), tricking nationalist “little pinks” into criticizing Party leaders—generally by quoting...
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...
The use of the standard Party formulation of Xi Jinping “pointing the way forward” on various policy issues has become so commonplace that the phrase has become an object of satire, a way of mocking Xi’s cult of personality and...
This month, there have been a number of incidents—some major and some minor—that illustrate the “U-lock” mentality, a phrase that is sometimes used as shorthand to describe vitriolic xenophobic (particularly anti-Japanese)...
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