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...
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...
The new word “humineral” (人矿 rén kuàng) has taken the Chinese internet by storm and is now a sensitive word subject to censorship. First introduced in a now-censored Zhihu post on January 2, 2023, “humineral”—a portmanteau of 人...
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 term comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to...
The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by...
The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by...
CDT is expanding its wiki beyond the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon to include short biographies of...
The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by...
The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by...
The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by...
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