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...
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...
In the midst of a troubled economy and stock market rout, a People’s Daily Online article trumpeting a supposed nationwide “air of optimism” drew so many derisive comments last week that its related hashtag was censored on...
This week, a 2016 People’s Daily article predicting that China would enter the club of “high-income” nations by 2024 was reposted and widely shared online, attracting many sardonic comments before it was eventually deleted from...
CDT Chinese editors have compiled a series of year-end articles on special topics such as 2023’s most sensitive and oft-censored words (parts one and two), most notable reports, outstanding people of the year (stand-up...
The following themes, and the six covered in part two, are not the “most censored” words of 2023 but rather a retrospective of topics that the Party-state deemed unfit for Chinese eyes, selected by our Chinese team. While some...
Expectations were low going into this week’s meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping on the side of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in San Francisco. Since their last meeting in Bali one year ago,...
This week, Xi Jinping is visiting San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. It marks his first trip to the U.S. since April 2017, and his first meeting with Joe Biden since last year’s G20 summit in...
After being postponed for a year due to the 2022 COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown in nearby Shanghai, the 19th Asian Games are finally taking place in China’s eastern seaboard city of Hangzhou. For the Chinese government, the...
China’s Ministry of Public Security has initiated a new campaign against online rumors following Xi Jinping’s call for a “security barrier” around the Chinese internet. At The South China Morning Post, Kawala Xie reported on the...
China’s youth employment crisis is at least partly a matter of attitude, according to People’s Daily. In two recent editorials calling for youth to “establish a correct perspective on employment” and “seek out hardships,” the...
Word of the week: Westernized Lifestyle (生活西化 shēnghuó xīhuà) Chinese state media’s clumsy coverage of the Oscar-winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” has given birth to a new euphemism for homosexuality:...
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...
Two years and eight months after whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang’s death from COVID-19, the “Wailing Wall” that emerged in the comments under his last Weibo post continues to serve as a repository for the hopes, dreams, worries,...
A Party-controlled Weibo account’s attempt to shame a young woman for violating pandemic restrictions backfired this week after one netizen flipped the prompt on its head by blaming Xi Jinping for instituting the restrictions in...
At a press conference on September 13, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning fielded a reporter’s question about the Biden administration’s plans to expand restrictions on semiconductor exports to China with a fiery...
On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council over “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.” The vote was precipitated by reports of mass killings...
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