Tea Leaf Nation

When the New York Times reported yesterday that Chinese hackers had been attacking its computer system for months, one social media user in China asked, “Another glorious feat of Lanxiang Vocational School?” While Lanxiang was not mentioned in the Times‘ January 30 report, a New York Times article from 2010 named Lanxiang as one of two Chinese [...]

It is an unlikely match. One is a retired teacher living in bustling Beijing, and the other a laborer from rural China who delivers mineral water to his home. What makes this love affair more unusual, however, is the fact that they are both elderly men. On January 21, the couple posted a video with [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. After the New York Times published an article detailing the four months during which the venerated publication was the subject of hacking attacks traced to China, the news spread on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. Despite internal censorship measures and the blocking of [...]

Millions of Chinese migrant workers fail to get paid for their work each year, in spite of ongoing government efforts to increase official monitoring of labor relations in the country. For some, however, attracting media attention and sympathy from China’s online community has proven to be an effective method of pressuring errant employers into coughing [...]

The Chinese Web version of Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers, posted the following image on Sina Weibo, China’s most active microblogging platform: The screenshots shows two remarkably similar posts, the top from Sina’s Weibo platform, which has about 400 million users, the lower from Internet giant Tencent’s own Weibo platform, which, according to [...]

Chen Mei (alias) is a 23-year-old girl from Shaanxi province. Most days from 8 o’clock in the morning until 9 o’clock at night, she has worked at a factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu province. Chen had lived a relatively isolated existence bereft of outside activities, until a grassroots non-profit organization called Suzhou Migrant Workers’ Family built [...]

This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Beijingers are choking on their air — again. Just seventeen days after Chinese cyberspace erupted with complaints about pollution so bad that it was “beyond index,” denizens of the Chinese capital awoke once again to a city blanketed with smog. Over the past [...]

“As a Chinese citizen…I hereby officially announce that the Australian branch of the De Yun society has been established. The first overseas De Yun will be founded in Melbourne.” This post on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, came from Guo Degang (@郭德纲), a cross-talk performer who shot to fame around 2005, courtesy of China’s Internet. The [...]

Marcona is a small town located on the south-west shore of Peru. There sits the only operating iron mine in Peru, and one of China’s earliest overseas mining projects. Around 20 Chinese managers live there, running a mine that employs most of the town’s population. Although the Chinese staff here eat in their own separate [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. When the National Statistics Bureau announced China’s 2012 GINI coefficient – a measure of income inequality – on January 21, the figure caught everyone by surprise, like a genie out of a bottle. The reaction was as much about the number itself [...]

When Chinese news agency Xinhua announced the dismissal of Yi Junqing, head of the Communist Party’s Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, the story appeared to fall neatly into a pattern of corruption exposes that followed China’s 18th Party Congress, where the next generation of the country’s leaders was recently chosen. It has the mistress-money-power combination [...]

On Sina Weibo, China’s major Twitter-like platform, a user with the handle “this is America” (@这里是美国) shared the below image on January 23, two days after U.S. President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. The accompanying caption reads: “Who really changed America?” Obama’s second inaugural did not capture the same amount of attention on China’s social media [...]