If the lesson last week was “Don’t laugh about the PLA,” this week’s message seems to be, “Don’t even crack a smile.” First, stand-up comedian Li Haoshi (stage name “House”) was accused of defaming the People’s Liberation...
On March 10, China’s National People’s Congress, a rubber-stamp body that meets in full session once annually, re-elected Xi Jinping to a third five-year term as President. (His third term as General Secretary was already...
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...
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...
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...
The below essay is a translation of WeChat blogger “Brother Lou’s” account of being invited to “drink tea” after sending a Weibo post questioning the integrity of a local Zhejiang police department. The essay was censored by...
On Saturday, October 22, Xi Jinping’s predecessor Hu Jintao was unceremoniously escorted out of the closing of the 20th Party Congress in front of the domestic and international press. Hu’s highly unusual exit, a major departure...
A solitary protestor hung two banners calling for Xi Jinping to be removed from office and exhorting the populace to “Be citizens, not slaves,” an extremely rare act of overt political defiance on the eve of the 20th Party...
Three months after a group of men assaulted four women at a restaurant in Tangshan, a district court in Hebei sentenced the men to prison for a number of crimes. Their sentencing comes after authorities and state media attempted...
Following the deadly bus crash in Guizhou that killed 27 people, injured 20, and triggered fierce debate about China’s zero-COVID policy, two performance artists in Hebei successfully opted out of mandatory testing requirements...
Late last week, censors wiped Weibo clean of posts documenting the chaos of pandemic control measures in Lhasa, Tibet. In mid-August, Tibet began reporting thousands of new cases in the region’s first documented outbreak...
27 people died after a bus transporting close contacts of coronavirus patients crashed outside of Guiyang at 2:40 a.m. on Sunday. The close contacts were being shipped to a remote county 155 miles outside of Guizhou’s provincial...
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. @Everyone Notice from the Public Security Internet Monitoring Department: Effective immediately, no...
The following instructions have been leaked and distributed online. Yili Super Topic #Yili Pandemic# @Everyone Notice: All internet commentary personnel are to open a campaign of comment flooding on this Weibo Super Topic in...
Popular health-focused outlet DXY is the latest popular science outlet to run afoul of China’s censors and online nationalists. Five DXY Weibo accounts, with a combined total of more than 30 million followers, were...
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and five other House Representatives landed in Taiwan on Tuesday evening as part of a tour of Asian democracies, details of which were leaked to the Financial Times in mid-July. Pelosi’s...
A Chinese government official’s Weibo post lecturing Japan about the danger of amending its constitution—standard nationalist fare on the microblogging site—turned into a forum for criticizing a 2018 Chinese constitutional...
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