Tea Leaf Nation

In Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich, John Osburg, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester, takes his readers into a shady underworld, where entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats mingle and forge the networks underpinning China’s socialist market economy.  Osburg’s informants include a cast of memorable characters, many of whom could just [...]

“Tibet is still a very sensitive topic, even if your story is about the environment and not politics,” said an editor, who prefers to remain unnamed, of the environmental section of Southern Weekly, a paper the New York Times has called the most influential liberal newspaper in China. In early April, several satellite images were [...]

In the past weeks, Chinese citizens have learnt that the styrofoam boxes from which they eat their lunches will soon be legal. On February 16, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s highest economic policy-making body, changed the Industrial Restructuring Catalog (2011) and removed disposable foam plastic tableware from the list of banned products. [...]

Until recently, Chen Tao (@陈涛哥在成都) worked at Alibaba, a Chinese Internet company, as an in-house censor deleting inappropriate postings. Now, he drives six hours every weekend from his home in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, up into the mountains to the north of the city to purchase wild mushrooms, free range eggs and organic honey. Chen [...]

How much can be said in ten words? The prevalence of Twitter in recent years has honed our powers of summary and truncated our online invective, but the laconic Tweet rarely speaks volumes and has yet to attain the spare artistic heights of the Haiku. For Yu Hua, however, ten words are enough to describe [...]

This article also appeared in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. It is ironic yet befitting. “In the past 20 years, every China director faced a great torment,” said director Feng Xiaogang, who was called China’s Spielberg by Newsweek, “and that torment is [beep].” The censored word, as anyone reading Feng’s lips can [...]

Modern Chinese literature is flourishing—at least for those who have an Internet connection. A survey by Chinese Internet market research firm iResearch counted a total of 12.2 million daily readers among China’s top ten literary websites. These websites together contain millions of online books, some reaching millions of Chinese characters in length. Qidian.com is the [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Type the word “Ordos” into Google and the results are rather uniform. “Ordos, China: A Modern Ghost Town,” reads one headline, from a 2010 Time Magazine photo essay. “Ordos: The Biggest Ghost Town in China,” reads another, from a 2012 BBC report. [...]

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 [...]

The move is bold, inspired, and desperate. According to photos posted by a local journalist named He Guangwei (@何光伟) on Sina Weibo, China’s main micro-blogging platform, peasants from Gouli village in Henan Province hoisted a banner at the gate of the provincial-level environmental protection agency (EPA) that invited the officials to ”have a taste of the [...]

In a parallel universe, that could have been him keeping the world on edge with his outrageous antics and retro hairstyle. Indeed, what does North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un have has that he doesn’t? The bloodline, the last name, the girth? But in this world, it’s not to be. Mao Xinyu, Mao Zedong’s only [...]

Journalist Zhou Zhiyi (@周志懿) tweeted on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, the rumor that China’s two censorship organs, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) and General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) will merge as a part of the widely-expected reshuffling of China’s central bureaucracy. What will the merged entity be called? Zhou’s [...]