Tea Leaf Nation

Has the music just stopped? Mere days ago, Tea Leaf Nation remarked upon the relatively unrestrained speech taking place on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platforms, even after the beginning of real-name registration. This speech included rumors of a high-level coup in Beijing. China’s government has just responded, and the results aren’t pretty. As party mouthpiece The People’s [...]

How would you feel about a long weekend that included Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday?  Would it change matters much if you were told that you had to work the preceding Saturday and Sunday to make up for this munificence?  This cruel and unusual realignment of the work week is precisely what workers in China are [...]

Ladies in China, lock up your men. The troubling phenomenon of men involving themselves in one (or more) mistresses, otherwise known as “little thirds” (小三), has again rocketed into the top ten topics on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. Ms. Zhang Xin, who writes under the pen name Liu Liu (@六六), is one of the best selling [...]

We all call it the Internet, but we see very different things. Given the existence of China’s Great Firewall (and the unique preferences of China’s netizens), some have said that China has an Intranet, not an Internet. If that’s true, what are the differences between American and Chinese social networking sites? What about the differences [...]

Presenting the richest city in China: Shanghai, of course! Oh no, wait. It’s Karamay, a city in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Shanghai didn’t even crack the top 20. China’s netizens are wondering aloud what standard could possibly have been used to determine the latest list of China’s richest cities, released on March 27 by [...]

Did Bo Guagua, the 24-year old son of Bo Xilai, inadvertently destroy his father’s career? Major international outlets have reported that the suspicious death of Neil Heywood, a Brit who had been described as Guagua’s English teacher, mentor, or “male nanny,” is a key element that contributed to Bo Xilai’s political downfall. As early as [...]

Netizens have been furiously tweeting and retweeting on Chinese microblogs about rumours that some have been able to access Youtube and possibly Twitter from inside China without having to scale the Great Firewall. Some netizens commented that they were able to access Youtube from inside the GFW simply by using “https” instead of “http” in their [...]

Let the music play on. It’s been just under two weeks since real-name registration began to go into effect for China’s microblogs, or Weibos. To be sure, two weeks is not a long time. Many cities have yet to implement real-name registration; this author is still able to tweet and re-tweet from his anonymous and [...]

Real-estate tycoon and well-known Sina Weibo microblogger Pan Shiyi (@潘石屹) recently tweeted this provocative question: “After finishing the day’s work, I’m thinking: If my Weibo account were blocked one day, how would my life change?” The question may not be an idle one. Pan recently penned tweets touching on highly incendiary rumors of a coup at the [...]

What do you regret most about love? Career? Kids? Life?  These are heavy questions, but over 1,400 Shanghaiers ventured an answer in a survey by Chinese-language Life Weekly magazine. Surprisingly, residents of this glistering and cosmopolitan city listed a failure to “explore the world” as their single greatest regret about life. On love and children, [...]

Xu Weihua (@徐卫华), a mobile Internet analyst, tweets: “I heard that Apple’s CEO Cook was very happy with his trip to China, because he saw a lot of people on the streets using iPhones. There are iPhone3, iPhone4, iPhone4S, as well as iPhone5 and iPhone6. There are [iPhones] with three-inch screens, four-inch screens, five-inch screens, single-screens [...]

Netizens have one word to describe their feelings about rising fuel prices: @#$%. On Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, public opinion about the largest hike in fuel prices in three years is perhaps best represented by a university student who has shot to (likely ephemeral) fame as “Brother Gas Price” (油价哥). This “brother’s” rise began after [...]