For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and...
New research documents the repressive effects of Hong Kong’s national security laws. This week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report titled “We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore,” detailing the decline in academic freedom and...
A recent WeChat post reveals that some Chinese schools and universities are using special software to identify and punish students who “scale the wall”—that is, circumvent China’s Great Firewall (GFW) to access overseas websites...
China’s Ministry of State Security has issued a warning to students seeking to study abroad: don’t cast yourself as a regime opponent in your college application essay. An article shared by the WeChat account of the Ministry of...
On Sunday, Renmin University Ph.D. candidate Wang Di publicly accused her doctoral supervisor Wang Guiyuan (no relation) of sexual harassment and assault in a video that went viral on Chinese social media. Her supervisor was...
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...
Transnational repression by Chinese state-affiliated actors has long targeted Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hongkongers, and members of the Chinese diaspora. One subset of these groups is Chinese overseas students, who are now the focus of...
Students from at least 174 colleges and universities across six continents have erected encampments in solidarity with Palestine. Their movement has sprouted over the past few weeks, as many administrators have rejected student...
In Peter Hessler’s latest piece for The New Yorker, “How Chinese Students Experience America,” he notes that “COVID, guns, anti-Asian violence, and diplomatic relations have complicated the ambitions of the some three hundred...
A fire in Xinyu, Jiangxi Province killed 39 people and injured nine more on Wednesday, January 24. It was the second deadly blaze to claim student lives in a single week: a fire in an elementary school in Henan killed 13...
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...
A photo of an American teacher introducing himself to a Chinese university class with a slide presentation proclaiming, “I am not a spy” has gone viral, eliciting much mirth online. It also highlights an increasingly tense...
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...
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”...
A recent incident illustrates what a minefield it has become to discuss anything, past or present, related to the Chinese military. This week, a history lecturer at Lanzhou University was accused by someone online of...
“Kong Yiji literature” emerged as a self-deprecating meme among young Chinese netizens who joke that their academic credentials have made them “unemployable,” too overeducated or overqualified for the jobs currently available....
In a rare instance of a legal challenge to restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights, two Tsinghua University students filed a lawsuit last week against the Chinese Ministry of Education for refusing to consider their appeal against...
On Tuesday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the country’s population had declined for the first time in 60 years. This marks a pivotal moment for what now may no longer be the world’s most populous country,...
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