When the result of a sporting match becomes a foregone conclusion and lesser players are subbed in to run out the clock, announcers often term it “garbage time.” The latest term to sweep the Chinese internet holds that nations,...
Tuesday is the ninth anniversary of the 2015 “709” or “Black Friday” crackdown on Chinese rights lawyers. The following account of the episode, its legacy, and the censorship that surrounded it is the...
On Chinese social media, the phrase “weak spot” (软肋, ruǎn lèi) is often used metaphorically to refer to family members—particularly children—used as leverage by public security, state security, or government authorities to...
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...
This year’s recently concluded “Two Sessions,” the annual gatherings of China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress (NPC) and advisory Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), were more Party-scripted and...
Many entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens welcomed the news that provincial prosecutors in Guizhou are investigating a local government for arresting businesswoman Ma Yijiayi and her lawyers and accusing them of “picking...
Last month, an otherwise innocuous report at Sixth Tone on cloning of Tibetan cattle referred to the region only by its Chinese name, Xizang, falling in line with a recent push by Chinese authorities. For some, this symbolized a...
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...
This month, there have been a number of incidents—some major and some minor—that illustrate the “U-lock” mentality, a phrase that is sometimes used as shorthand to describe vitriolic xenophobic (particularly anti-Japanese)...
Open displays of rejoicing and Schadenfreude on Chinese social media after a destructive magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck western Japan on New Year’s Day have been followed by two new (and far sillier) incidents of xenophobic or...
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”...
Having “ulterior motives” (别有用心, bié yǒu yòng xīn), an accusation often lobbed at critics of the Party-state, is sometimes deployed in tandem with the term “foreign hostile forces” (境外势力, jìngwài shìli). Such...
“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”...
The sight of a lone man standing before a row of tanks in Beijing is perhaps the most enduring image to emerge from the Tiananmen Protests of 1989. Photographs taken on June 5 of that year—one day after PLA troops crushed the...
“Zero-COVID nail houses” (防疫钉子户, fángyì dīngzihù) are people who still adhere to strict virus prevention measures despite the end of the national zero-COVID policy. It is often used self-deprecatingly by “nail houses” themselves...
China’s infamous urban management agents, known as chengguan, have a new rural equivalent, the nongguan (“rural management”). Nongguan is the unofficial name for a new corps of agricultural law-enforcement officers, “Rural...
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:...
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