A tea company is in hot water after Shenzhen police deemed its latest marketing campaign to be “borderline” illegal. Hey Tea (喜茶, xǐ chá), a popular national beverage chain, recently partnered with the Jingdezhen China...
A Weibo user who works as a computer programmer in Chengde, Hebei province, has reported that he was fined and had three years of income confiscated by the local public security bureau for using a virtual private network (VPN)...
Word(s) of the Week: “It is a bit ridiculous, but you must obey.” (是有点搞笑，但是你要服从, Shì yǒudiǎn gǎoxiào, dànshì nǐ yào fúcóng.) A policeman admitting that a traffic restriction “is a bit ridiculous, but you must obey”...
The sudden and unexplained closure of a number of WeChat accounts dedicated to gay, trans, asexual, and feminist issues marks the latest setback for LGBTQ+ and women’s speech rights in China. The mass account closures happened...
Mourning continues for eleven people—a coach and ten members of a girls’ volleyball team in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang province—who perished when the roof of their junior high school gymnasium caved in on Sunday. Recent photos,...
“I don’t raise pigs” (我不养猪 wǒ bù yǎng zhū), a Hunan police station’s nonsensical comment on the death of a woman in their custody, is the latest incidence of “gobsmacking rhetoric” (léi yǔ 雷语) to go viral. “Gobsmacking rhetoric”...
A stand-off between residents of a Sichuan city and chengguan, notorious street-level law enforcement officers, over the beating of an egg vendor marks the latest national controversy over the ubiquitous state agents. In recent...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo amidst concerns over the perceived expansion of China’s police state. Earlier this year, the nationwide establishment of...
The culprits behind the beating of a reporter in Guizhou that scandalized China have been identified: a local vice-police chief and two auxiliary officers perpetrated the assault. On May 30, Jimu News reporter Li Xiancheng...
The partial demolition of a historic mosque in rural Yunnan this past weekend ignited conflict between local Hui Muslim residents and armed police. The clashes in Najiaying, a village in Yuxi, China, began when residents...
Exactly one year ago, a consortium of media outlets released the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of tens of thousands of files showing images of Uyghur detainees in Xinjiang’s concentration camps and manuals for enforcing their...
The full report can be read in PDF form here. Below is a brief introduction. A CDT investigation details the efforts of police and other departments across China to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to enhance and...
The “White-haired Movement” (白发运动, Báifà Yùndòng) refers to protests led by elderly and retired workers in Wuhan and Dalian in February 2023, and in Guangzhou in January 2023. The protesters were objecting to medical insurance...
On February 15, just weeks before the opening of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) legislative session in Beijing, thousands of Chinese retirees in the cities of Wuhan and Dalian held large demonstrations against...
A shaky video of chengguan, street-level urban management enforcers, ripping down decorative Spring Festival couplets in Jiangsu’s Pei County went viral this past week. The controversy metastasized after the freelance journalist...
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 in the United States, or find local resources in the International Suicide Prevention Wiki. The discovery of...
Surveillance in Chinese cities is ubiquitous, with highly visible security cameras trained on most every intersection, public space, and building, but over the past decade, it has been seeping into the countryside as well. In an...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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