Tea Leaf Nation

Tea Leaf Nation’s David Wertime spoke on January 22 at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The topic: “Redefining the Quote: Using the Social Web to Gauge Grassroots Sentiment in China.” Our thanks go to the fellows and staff at Berkman for the kind invitation. Please have a look.

On Saturday protestors in dozens of Chinese cities took to the streets to voice their anger at the Japanese government’s nationalization of the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku Islands in Japanese) in the East China Sea as a flagrant violation of Chinese sovereignty. In Beijing, thousands of protestors besieged the Japanese embassy, hurling eggs, bottles and anything [...]

What’s the best camera for capturing images of the recent boycott of Japanese goods in parts of China? Why, a Canon SLR camera, of course.   At least so thought one apparent protestor (or so one might think at first glance – more on this later) sporting a vivid ‘Boycott Japanese Goods’ t-shirt complete with [...]

The recent devastating floodwaters that hit China’s capital ten days ago may have receded, but thousands of residents who dwell in Beijing’s basement tenements–many migrant workers with few other options in the expensive capital–have been left homeless, their subterranean flats flooded. And it appears that authorities, as well as many netizens, couldn’t seem to care [...]

The recent devastating floodwaters that hit China’s capital ten days ago may have receded, but thousands of residents who dwell in Beijing’s basement tenements–many migrant workers with few other options in the expensive capital–have been left homeless, their subterranean flats flooded. And it appears that authorities, as well as many netizens, couldn’t seem to care [...]

An infographic circulating on Chinese social media provides some background information on the planned oceanic wastewater pipeline and a compelling call-to-action for local residents in Qidong, a small city north of Shanghai. Fierce mass protest forced local government to abandon the project on July 28, the second successful mass NIMBY protest in China in a [...]

Protests against a planned pipeline to channel wastewater into the ocean for a Japanese paper manufacturer near a major fishery on China’s east coast (just north of Shanghai) has turned ugly.  Thousands of angry protesters in Qidong in China’s Jiangsu Province (江苏省南通市启东) have overturned police cars and threatened to overwhelm a massed police formation.    One [...]

With another veto cast by China against a UN resolution aimed at resolving the Syrian crisis, some Chinese netizens are expressing their outrage on Sina Weibo, a microblogging platform. Thursday’s resolution would have used the threat of economic sanctions to pressure the Syrian government into implementing a peace plan that had been accepted months ago [...]

Microsoft’s new Surface tablet is being billed by some as a potential iPad killer. So what do netizens from China, Apple’s second biggest and fastest growing market (representing over 11% of Apple’s worldwide net sales in 2011, an astounding increase of over 450% compared to net sales in 2010) think about the big M’s bold [...]

If it’s true, it may be the greatest case of blanket censorship in history. Netizens in China reported yesterday that most Japanese domains had been blocked outright. One netizen tweeted on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter: “Craziness. China has now blocked most domain names in Japan, with the key blocked term being ‘.co.jp.’ This is the [...]

If it’s true, it may be the greatest case of blanket censorship in history. Netizens in China reported yesterday that most Japanese domains had been blocked outright. One netizen tweeted on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter: “Craziness. China has now blocked most domain names in Japan, with the key blocked term being ‘.co.jp.’ This is the [...]

In a society increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots, migrant workers who leave their homes in the countryside for jobs in China’s cities often find themselves right at the bottom of the urban social hierarchy, with limited protection from employer abuses, no right to an education for their children and, perhaps worst of [...]