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...
A murderous rampage in Zhuhai, Guangdong that left 35 dead and scores wounded was met with a now all-too-familiar refrain on the Chinese internet: “Xianzhong” is back. Zhang Xianzhong (张献忠, Zhāng Xiànzhōng), a Ming-era peasant...
The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, Halloween revelry has been marred by strict police curfews, the detention of costume-clad partygoers, and bans on organized...
The following themes, and the six covered in part two, are not the “most censored” words of 2023 but rather a retrospective of topics that the Party-state deemed unfit for Chinese eyes, selected by our Chinese team. While some...
Halloween celebrations in Shanghai doubled as an outlet for mild political “gags,” spooking censors and delighting audiences online. Photographs of party-goers dressed as Winnie the Pooh, livestreamer Li Jiaqi, Lu Xun, “big...
Censors took down a Zhihu question-and-answer that asked, “Why don’t young people watch Xinwen Lianbo anymore?” Xinwen Lianbo, China Central Television’s flagship evening news program since 1978, is among the most watched...
“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...
China’s not-so-new culture cops, now colloquially referred to as wenguan, have gone viral on Weibo amidst concerns over the perceived expansion of China’s police state. Earlier this year, the nationwide establishment of...
On March 25th, Guangdong-based rapper Liu Wanli, better known as Vyan (pronounced “vee-yen”) was invited to appear on “One Seat,” a lecture program that has been called “China’s TED Talks.” In his...
Every movement needs its anthem. In the now-censored musical parody “Sunny Side Kong Yiji,” the emergent “Kong Yiji literature” wave seems to have found one of its own. “Kong Yiji literature” is a genre of self-deprecating...
Life has not gotten easier for China’s LGBTQ+ communities. A looming demographic crisis has inspired calls to strengthen traditional family structures and produce more children, while rising nationalism and xenophobia have...
On June 1, the WeChat account 功不唐捐的孤岛 (“Island of Efforts Paying Off”) posted a folk song titled “Don’t Drink the Celebratory Toast.” The video for the song features lyrics, in white subtitles against a black background, urging...
Editor’s Note: As we enter 2022, CDT has compiled a special series of features for our readers, offering a look back at the people, events, controversies, memes and sensitive words that defined the past year. Some of this...
Following a recent national edict requiring Chinese TV to be kept free from “sissy boys,” a sneering term for men with styles unbound by traditional conceptions of masculinity, the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau...
The following censorship instructions, issued to the media and internet companies by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source. Hello...
Youths in their teens and early twenties make up a significant proportion of the protesters in Hong Kong. Living regular lives on weekdays and donning protest gear to attend rallies on weekends has become the new routine for the...
The Chinese government has always made painstaking efforts to keep popular ideology in line with...
China’s population of internet users broke 700 million this year, and government reports...
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