Two incidents this month highlight the ways in which local governments’ action on public health and safety measures are often geared more toward shielding authorities from accountability or financial costs rather than supporting...
While the CCP swept away many remnants of China’s imperial past, one prominent feature has endured: the existence of an elevated official class, to which fiercely contested examinations offer an entryway. A pair of recent essays...
Last week, Chinese state media reported that Wu Yingjie, the former Party chief of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), pleaded guilty to bribery charges during a trial in Beijing. Wu joins a long and growing list of officials...
Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for corruption and other offenses—recently published an open letter to Xi Jinping, urging that her...
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. New Era chengyu are references to infamous incidents that...
An undergraduate’s video mimicking official “inspection” tours has become a flashpoint of discussion over cadres’ imperious attitudes and the reflexive deference shown to them in society. Shot on the campus of Yunnan State Land...
After 200 days, the long-running “Arctic Catfish” scandal has reached a conclusion, dissatisfying and anticlimactic as it may be. It began after social media user “Arctic Catfish” (北极鲶鱼, Běijí Niányú), a young Chinese woman...
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”...
The following article addresses “central government policymakers” and poses ten direct questions about China’s long-running “zero-COVID” policy, which was in effect until a sudden policy shift on December 7, 2022. Its form and...
An investigation by China’s State Council has found that Henan officials covered up the death toll caused by severe flooding in July 2021. In August, local officials reported 302 confirmed deaths and 50 people still missing—the...
This week, CDT finished publishing a Chinese translation of “The Architecture of Repression,” a recent report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on the bureaucratic, legal, and rhetorical foundations of mass...
China’s economic planners have wrested control over climate policy from bureaucrats in the environmental department, potentially jeopardizing efforts to meet emissions pledges made by Xi Jinping before the United Nation’s...
On September 1, 2008, retired CCP cadre Liu Tiancheng published an essay on his personal blog about a trip to the southern part of Xinjiang decades earlier. The essay appeared as a special column in China News Digest (华夏文摘) the...
An undated photograph circulating on the internet in China appears to show a slide from a presentation at the Guangdong Province Party Committee School’s Institute of Public Administration, listing the “Ten Commandments...
On Twitter, Radio Free Asia Chinese has posted an ad shared by the 301 Hospital, a Beijing institution catering to PLA officers and top officials, for a project aimed at maintaining the health and and extending the longevity of...
Over the past several months, dozens of Chinese Twitter users within China have reportedly been...
CDT is expanding its wiki beyond the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon to include short...
In 2013, former deputy director of Xinhua News Agency Lu Wei was appointed head of the State...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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