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...
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...
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...
“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...
“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”...
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...
At times, parsing propaganda for deeper meaning is difficult. At others, the (unintentional) message is hidden in plain sight. In October 2018, one bus passenger in Guizhou’s Nayong County realized that a roadside billboard...
This week, many Chinese netizens, like the rest of the world, have been fixating on a crisis-stricken Afghanistan. The Chinese government has reiterated that it would not “interfere with Afghanistan’s internal affairs,” and that...
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source. In accordance with unified...
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been...
The Panama Papers leaks unveiled on Sunday have implicated “family members of at least eight...
CDT has extensively documented the vibrant wordplay used to evade China’s online censors....
In 2009, a strange creature emerged on the Internet from China. It was the grass-mud horse, a...
At China Real Time on Monday, Te-Ping Chen noted the relative lack of recent adoptions of Chinese...
Global Times reports instructions for TV and radio hosts to use more “proper...
Originally an insult, the term diaosi (屌丝) has been appropriated by legions of tech-savvy Chinese youth to describe their experience living in a rapidly changing and often unjust society. After explaining the term’s...
AFP reports on the top Internet terms in China for 2010: Web users searched the definition of the term “microblog” more than three million times on Hudong.com this year, while they sought out the meaning of...
From the Southern Metropolis Weekly, 2009-12-25, translated by CDT’s E. Shih. Part I is here. [From the introduction to Part 1: This year, we announce the top ten neologisms in cooperation with “Baidu Encylopedia,” using...
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