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 [...]
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 [...]
This article also appears in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Last week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet. Only a small proportion of that country’s 24 million people can access the World Wide Web, and the majority of the 1.5 million mobile phones there belong [...]
This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Last week, Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. The index surveyed business people and country experts to measure perceived levels of government corruption in countries and territories around the world. China ranked 80 out of 176 countries, with #1 (Denmark) [...]
What do people in China really think about U.S. President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Southeast Asia? A glance at Chinese mainstream and social media depicts conflicting narratives, with topics ranging from President Obama’s now-infamous kiss with Aung San Suu Kyi to geopolitical power dynamics between China, Myanmar, and the United States. Kisses, flirtatious eyes, [...]
In late October, Chinese citizens in Ningbo protested a controversial plan to expand a petrochemical plant. The Ningbo protest was the latest in a spate of similar public incidents, where Chinese citizens have taken to the streets in large numbers—sometimes resorting to violence—to oppose controversial industrial projects that they believe would impact their health and [...]
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