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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Minitrue Plus Five: January 9, 2020 – Liu He in Washington, Taiwan Election, Dismissal of Wang Zhimin

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

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Chinese Diaspora in the U.S. Braces for Trump’s Second Term

Like other marginalized groups in the U.S., Chinese migrants and students are anxiously preparing for the policy changes under a second presidential term of Donald Trump. The president-elect has promised to implement mass deportation that would target millions of people, and top figures in his orbit have backed plans, targeting China, to purge “un-American” elements from the body politic. Many in the Chinese diaspora, facing pressure from both the American and Chinese governments, question whether they can be safe at home in the U.S. Among the Chinese migrants that are particularly...

Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear...

Minitrue Plus Five: January 9, 2020 – Liu He in Washington, Taiwan Election, Dismissal of Wang Zhimin

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

Minitrue Plus Five: January 9, 2020 – Liu He in Washington, Taiwan Election, Dismissal of Wang Zhimin

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

Minitrue Plus Five: January 9, 2020 – Liu He in Washington, Taiwan Election, Dismissal of Wang Zhimin

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

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...

Minitrue Plus Five: January 9, 2020 – Liu He in Washington, Taiwan Election, Dismissal of Wang Zhimin

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

Massive Earthquake Shakes Tibet, Reveals Danger of Proposed Hydropower Dam

On Tuesday morning, a county in Tibet experienced one of its strongest earthquakes in years. According to official figures, at least 126 people were killed and 188 others injured, and rescue efforts are ongoing amidst freezing temperatures. China’s earthquake center recorded a magnitude of 6.8 (the U.S. Geological Survey measured a magnitude of 7.1) at the epicenter in Dingri County, about 80 kilometers north of Mount Everest. Since then, a series of other earthquakes have struck the region, including a magnitude 5.5 quake in Qinghai Province and a magnitude 3.1 tremblor in Sichuan. These...

CDT 2024 Year-End Roundup: Reports of the Year

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 Chinese publishes a column called CDT Reports, which collects external reports from think tanks, academic journals, NGOs, the media, and other sources on topics related to various human rights issues in China. This year, CDT Chinese published 150 of these...

Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear...

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

Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear...

Politics

Latest

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...

Society

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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...

China & the World

Latest

Censors Remove Reflections on Democracy Inspired by Korean Crisis

Korea’s political crisis has spurred a host of commentary and reflection in China despite censorship. While state broadcaster CCTV issued minute-by-minute updates on the crisis, censors have taken down translations of articles from The Atlantic and The Guardian that were published to WeChat. “South Korea’s Warning for Washington,” by Bryan Klass in The Atlantic and “Democracy Isn’t Supposed to Work Like This” by Raphael Rashid in The Guardian have both been censored on WeChat. The former argues “one person—a power-hungry politician or a self-serving general—could destroy decades of progress...

Law

Latest

Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear...

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

Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear...

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: Reports of the Year

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 Chinese publishes a column called CDT Reports, which collects external reports from think tanks, academic journals, NGOs, the media, and other sources on topics related to various human rights issues in China. This year, CDT Chinese published 150 of these...

Environment

Latest

Massive Earthquake Shakes Tibet, Reveals Danger of Proposed Hydropower Dam

On Tuesday morning, a county in Tibet experienced one of its strongest earthquakes in years. According to official figures, at least 126 people were killed and 188 others injured, and rescue efforts are ongoing amidst freezing temperatures. China’s earthquake center recorded a magnitude of 6.8 (the U.S. Geological Survey measured a magnitude of 7.1) at the epicenter in Dingri County, about 80 kilometers north of Mount Everest. Since then, a series of other earthquakes have struck the region, including a magnitude 5.5 quake in Qinghai Province and a magnitude 3.1 tremblor in Sichuan. These...

Hong Kong

Latest

Minitrue Plus Five: January 9, 2020 – Liu He in Washington, Taiwan Election, Dismissal of Wang Zhimin

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

Taiwan

Latest

Minitrue Plus Five: January 6, 2020 – Taiwan Election, Mystery Pneumonia, U.S. Trade Deal

In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...

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