Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears in Tea Leaf Nation content partner Global Voices. Could the growth of Weixin, China’s hottest new social network, be in danger? Weixin, developed by Chinese Web giant Tencent and marketed globally as WeChat, is a free mobile communications app with about 300 million total users. It allows users to reach out to [...]

Whatever serious political signals that Xi Jinping’s first trip abroad as China’s new leader may have sent, Chinese Web users have recently focused on someone else: their new First Lady. Everything about Peng Liyuan seems to have fascinated users of Chinese social media, from Ms. Peng’s designed-in-China clothes and handbags to her mannerisms to her [...]

Lin Miaoke, a 13-year old child star, is no stranger to controversy. Lin, then 9, wowed billions of viewers around the world with her sweet face and angelic voice at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics with the patriotic tune “Ode to Motherland.” Except that the angelic voice did not belong to her. It was later [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. When the state-commissioned film The Beginning of a Great Revival was listed on social network site Douban in 2010, many people rushed to rate the film with one star out of five even though it had not even premiered. An alternative and [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Are you a “budget wife”? Despite its name, being a budget wife — or jingji shiyong nv in Chinese — is harder than it seems. According a list published by an anonymous Web user on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging platform, [...]

Today marked the long-awaited launch of the Smartisan OS, a mobile operating system, by Chinese company Hammer Technologies. Video, pictures, and reports on the event made a big splash among Chinese internet users, with related words accounting for three of the top five trending terms on Sina Weibo, a top Chinese social media platform. Luo [...]

As they made their debut, China’s new leadership laid out a promising vision of the future for the world’s second largest economy, but may face difficulties making that vision a reality. New Premier Li Keqiang unveiled a plan during a National People’s Congress press conference: 10 million rural residents will move to cities each year, [...]

China’s new leader Xi Jinping has been talking up the idea of the “Chinese dream” since his inauguration. While millions of Chinese may aspire to greater material wealth, what about the “Chinese dreams” of petitioners in Beijing, one of the most disadvantaged groups in China? These petitioners often hail from small towns or rural areas [...]

According to the latest figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, about 80% of the country’s more than 250 million migrant workers are between the ages of 21 and 50. More than 73% of them are married, but most live far away from their partners. Yet not many asked themselves beforehand how they would deal [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Hu Gaoyan, a farmer in Anshun village in Guangxi province, is thrilled that his daughter has found a husband. But he is also anxious about her wedding expenses. With limited savings and no access to bank credit, Hu turned to the only [...]

This is part of a Tea Leaf Nation series covering gender issues in today’s China. Gender has recently been in China’s social media spotlight. On March 13, a university professor named He Guangshun wrote on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging platform: This morning, I was talking about something important during my class: It’s really [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Real name registration has applied to Sina Weibo and many other popular microblogs in China for over a year now. But you wouldn’t know it. The rule requires Web users to register their real name and their national identification number with online [...]