These political conditions are growing out of poor soil. Before you can grow crops, first you have to plant grass to nourish the soil. As the soil’s fertility improves, you can cultivate better things. This is what Ruan Xiaohuan was doing."

— Statement by Bei Zhenying, wife of legendary blogger "program think" (aka Ruan Xiaohuan), after Shanghai’s High Court reaffirmed Ruan's seven-year prison sentence for "inciting subversion."

 

CDT Highlights

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Translations: Shanxi Woman’s 13-Year Ordeal Evokes Disturbing Parallels With Xiaohuamei Trafficking Case

Chinese social media has been filled with discussion of Bu Xiaohua, a woman in Shanxi province who was recently reunited with her father and other relatives 13 years after she went missing. Ms. Bu, who earned a Master’s degree in engineering in her youth, went missing from her hometown of Jinzhong in Shanxi in 2011, not long after undergoing in-patient treatment for schizophrenia. During the intervening years, she apparently lived with a man named Zhang Ruijun in a village about 100 miles distant from her hometown, and gave birth to a number of children. It is unclear, under China’s mental...

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Dam Construction in Tibet Threatens Local Communities and Environment

Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment.” The report includes an...

Dam Construction in Tibet Threatens Local Communities and Environment

Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment.” The report includes an...

Translations: Shanxi Woman’s 13-Year Ordeal Evokes Disturbing Parallels With Xiaohuamei Trafficking Case

Chinese social media has been filled with discussion of Bu Xiaohua, a woman in Shanxi province who was recently reunited with her father and other relatives 13 years after she went missing. Ms. Bu, who earned a Master’s degree in engineering in her youth, went missing from her hometown of Jinzhong in Shanxi in 2011, not long after undergoing in-patient treatment for schizophrenia. During the intervening years, she apparently lived with a man named Zhang Ruijun in a village about 100 miles distant from her hometown, and gave birth to a number of children. It is unclear, under China’s mental...

CCTV Hides Comments on Economic Data. “Open the Comments, Let Us Sing its Praises, Too!”

CDT’s year-end roundups of memorable quotes and censored terms have both highlighted public frustration with the state of the economy and the government’s efforts to enforce positive perceptions of it. The trend continued this week with a "rollover scene" or "propaganda train wreck" after National Bureau of Statistics spokesperson Fu Linghui announced economic data for November. Fu summed it up in a pithy 15 characters: “Production Up, Demand Up, Employment Stable, Markets Warming, Quality Excellent.” People’s Daily reported: The employment situation was...

Jimmy Lai Did Not Ask the U.S. to Nuke China

Pro-democracy Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai is currently standing trial for conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Amid mass protests in the city in 2019, Lai did travel to Washington to win support for the protesters’ cause from U.S. political figures including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and several senior senators. In his defense, Lai has said he stopped any such activities after the enactment of the 2020 security law on which the collusion charges are based. (The sedition charges come under an...

Translation: Chinese Universities Install Software to Identify and Punish Students Who Circumvent the Great Firewall

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 and portals. The post begins with a not-very-convincing exchange of WeChat messages between three students—identified as “student A,” “student B,” and “student C,” respectively—discussing their university’s use of the ABT Online Behavior Management System (安博通上网行为管理, Ānbótōng shàngwǎng xíngwéi guǎnlǐ) to identify and punish fellow students who circumvented the GFW to...

New eBook: China Digital Times Lexicon, 20th Anniversary Edition

On September 12, 2003, John Battelle published the first post on chinadigitaltimes.net: Here’s what a Google Search on “china weblog” yields, I’m looking forward to seeing ours at the top soon! China’s online population at the start of that year was nearly 60 million. Ten years later, it was fast approaching 600 million, and now, after 20, it is well over a billion. This new completely revised and hugely expanded update to our ebook series, formerly known as “the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon,” aims to capture something of the enormous explosion of online speech that accompanied this growth, with...

CCTV Hides Comments on Economic Data. “Open the Comments, Let Us Sing its Praises, Too!”

CDT’s year-end roundups of memorable quotes and censored terms have both highlighted public frustration with the state of the economy and the government’s efforts to enforce positive perceptions of it. The trend continued this week with a "rollover scene" or "propaganda train wreck" after National Bureau of Statistics spokesperson Fu Linghui announced economic data for November. Fu summed it up in a pithy 15 characters: “Production Up, Demand Up, Employment Stable, Markets Warming, Quality Excellent.” People’s Daily reported: The employment situation was...

Translations: Shanxi Woman’s 13-Year Ordeal Evokes Disturbing Parallels With Xiaohuamei Trafficking Case

Chinese social media has been filled with discussion of Bu Xiaohua, a woman in Shanxi province who was recently reunited with her father and other relatives 13 years after she went missing. Ms. Bu, who earned a Master’s degree in engineering in her youth, went missing from her hometown of Jinzhong in Shanxi in 2011, not long after undergoing in-patient treatment for schizophrenia. During the intervening years, she apparently lived with a man named Zhang Ruijun in a village about 100 miles distant from her hometown, and gave birth to a number of children. It is unclear, under China’s mental...

CDT 2024 Year-End Roundup: Sensitive Words

As 2024 draws to a close, CDT editors are compiling a series of the most notable content (Chinese) from across the Chinese internet over the past year. Topics include this year’s most outstanding quotes, reports, podcasts and videos, sensitive words, censored articles and essays, “People of the Year,” and CDT’s “2024 Editors’ Picks.” Another year gone by, another heap of terms censored from the Chinese internet. The following themes are not the “most censored” words of 2024, but rather a retrospective of topics, chosen by CDT Chinese editors, that the Party-state deemed too sensitive and...

Translations: Shanxi Woman’s 13-Year Ordeal Evokes Disturbing Parallels With Xiaohuamei Trafficking Case

Chinese social media has been filled with discussion of Bu Xiaohua, a woman in Shanxi province who was recently reunited with her father and other relatives 13 years after she went missing. Ms. Bu, who earned a Master’s degree in engineering in her youth, went missing from her hometown of Jinzhong in Shanxi in 2011, not long after undergoing in-patient treatment for schizophrenia. During the intervening years, she apparently lived with a man named Zhang Ruijun in a village about 100 miles distant from her hometown, and gave birth to a number of children. It is unclear, under China’s mental...

Quote of the Day: Official Disposable Income Figures Derided as “Today’s Daily Dose of Humor”

On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was off to a good start in 2024, with reported 5.3% year-on-year GDP growth in the first quarter of the year. The better-than-expected data was touted by various Chinese state media outlets online, although many of those news posts had comment filtering enabled, perhaps in anticipation of negative or skeptical reactions from social media users. Two items in particular seemed to strike netizens as overly optimistic: the reported “nationwide average per-capita disposable income” figure of 11,539 yuan...

Human Rights

Latest

Dam Construction in Tibet Threatens Local Communities and Environment

Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment.” The report includes an...

Politics

Latest

Two Years After Zero-COVID, A Rare White Paper Remembrance

A WeChat essay detailing the day that China’s “zero-COVID” policy ended has become a rare space for public remembrance of the 2022 White Paper Movement. Originally published as part of a 13-part series on the lockdowns, the essay reflects on the arbitrary imposition of lockdowns and their equally arbitrary removal. The brief essay is laden with the peculiar bureaucratic language of the pandemic, all of which, the author asserts now, “feels like a dream”: At 5:00 p.m. on December 7, 2022, China lifted its lockdown. The virus simply “disappeared,” and with it, the “zero-COVID” policy. Now two...

Society

Latest

Translations: Latest Consumer Backlash Takes Aim at Serious Quality Defects in Chinese Sanitary Pads

Revelations of serious quality defects in many Chinese brands of sanitary pads have sparked outrage, led to a run on imported menstrual products, and fueled an online campaign that has prompted regulators to vow reforms and forced some major pad manufacturers to apologize to consumers. The defects range from product mislabeling (such as overstating the length of pads, a common offense) to health-threatening contamination due to insect infestations, improper pH levels, or excessive use of plastics, formaldehyde, fluorescents, PFAS, phthalates, and other chemicals in the manufacturing process....

China & the World

Latest

Online Censorship About Lou Ye, Geng Jun Films Winning Awards at 61st Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival

A banner year for Chinese films and filmmakers at the 61st Taipei Golden Horse Awards has attracted much attention on Chinese social media, despite strict ongoing censorship of any topic connected to the awards. This year’s Golden Horse Award winners, announced on November 23, include Best Narrative Feature and Best Director for Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film,” a work of docu-fiction about a film crew caught up in the COVID pandemic lockdown of Wuhan; Best Leading Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and the Audience Choice Award for “Bel Ami,” Geng Jun’s LGBTQ+-themed black comedy; and...

Law

Latest

Translations: Shanxi Woman’s 13-Year Ordeal Evokes Disturbing Parallels With Xiaohuamei Trafficking Case

Chinese social media has been filled with discussion of Bu Xiaohua, a woman in Shanxi province who was recently reunited with her father and other relatives 13 years after she went missing. Ms. Bu, who earned a Master’s degree in engineering in her youth, went missing from her hometown of Jinzhong in Shanxi in 2011, not long after undergoing in-patient treatment for schizophrenia. During the intervening years, she apparently lived with a man named Zhang Ruijun in a village about 100 miles distant from her hometown, and gave birth to a number of children. It is unclear, under China’s mental...

Information Revolution

Latest

Canada Kicks Out Huawei, U.S. Weighs Further Sanctions on Hikvision, China Invests in Undermining Sanctions

On Thursday, the Canadian government announced that it will ban Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its 5G networks. The move comes as the Biden administration debates imposing further sanctions on Hikvision, a Chinese surveillance camera company, for supplying and operating equipment in Xinjiang mass detention camps. Both of these developments bring renewed attention to the role of Chinese technology companies in problematic surveillance activities and the role of sanctions in combating their alleged abuses. Catharine Tunney and Richard Raycraft from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...

Culture & the Arts

Latest

CDT 2024 Year-End Roundup: Quotes of the Year (Part 2)

As 2024 draws to a close, CDT editors are compiling a series of the most notable content (Chinese) from across the Chinese internet over the past year. Topics include this year’s most outstanding quotes, reports, podcasts and videos, sensitive words, censored articles and essays, “People of the Year,” and CDT’s “2024 Editors’ Picks.” CDT’s “Quotes of the Year” are a mirror of China’s national mood in ten comments. The five quotes selected in Part One reflected displeasure with coerced rosy perspectives on China’s economy; despair over senseless deaths observed in silence; the enduring...

The Great Divide

Latest

Quote of the Day: Official Disposable Income Figures Derided as “Today’s Daily Dose of Humor”

On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was off to a good start in 2024, with reported 5.3% year-on-year GDP growth in the first quarter of the year. The better-than-expected data was touted by various Chinese state media outlets online, although many of those news posts had comment filtering enabled, perhaps in anticipation of negative or skeptical reactions from social media users. Two items in particular seemed to strike netizens as overly optimistic: the reported “nationwide average per-capita disposable income” figure of 11,539 yuan...

Sci-Tech

Latest

CDT 2024 Year-End Roundup: Sensitive Words

As 2024 draws to a close, CDT editors are compiling a series of the most notable content (Chinese) from across the Chinese internet over the past year. Topics include this year’s most outstanding quotes, reports, podcasts and videos, sensitive words, censored articles and essays, “People of the Year,” and CDT’s “2024 Editors’ Picks.” Another year gone by, another heap of terms censored from the Chinese internet. The following themes are not the “most censored” words of 2024, but rather a retrospective of topics, chosen by CDT Chinese editors, that the Party-state deemed too sensitive and...

Environment

Latest

Dam Construction in Tibet Threatens Local Communities and Environment

Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment.” The report includes an...

Hong Kong

Latest

Jimmy Lai Did Not Ask the U.S. to Nuke China

Pro-democracy Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai is currently standing trial for conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Amid mass protests in the city in 2019, Lai did travel to Washington to win support for the protesters’ cause from U.S. political figures including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and several senior senators. In his defense, Lai has said he stopped any such activities after the enactment of the 2020 security law on which the collusion charges are based. (The sedition charges come under an...

Taiwan

Latest

Independent Bookstores Under Pressure; Taiwanese Books Shut Out

At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent bookstores and other cultural channels and venues: Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China, swept up in the ruling Communist Party’s crackdown on dissent and free expression. The Associated Press found that at least a dozen bookstores in the world’s second-largest economy have been shuttered or targeted for closure in the last few months alone, squeezing the already tight space for press freedom. One bookstore owner was arrested over four months ago. The crackdown has had...

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