Several days ago, the state-run People’s Daily ran a piece entitled “The Post-80′s Generation is Dispirited: Early Decline Cause for Alarm,” arguing that while China’s youth born after 1980 have far and away better material conditions than their forbearers, they face “spiritual confusion and a loss of identity.” The piece concludes by noting that a [...]
Almost half of all Chinese report feeling “more anxiety,” now than they did five years ago. What, exactly, is driving these concerns, or increasing reports of these concerns? Avid followers of China-related news might immediately think of censorship and other restrictions on freedoms, yet reports show that the main sources of anxiety in China lie [...]
Readers following the news in China may already be familiar with the case of Huang Yang, a doctoral student at one of China’s most prestigious universities who was recently poisoned to death. Over the past week, several similar incidents have made the news: the principal of a school poisoned elementary school students at a rival school, [...]
On April 20, the most severe earthquake since 2008 struck China. In the days since, aid organizations have mobilized to provide food and shelter to surviving victims in the disaster area, many of whom lost their homes. Yet in sharp contrast to the outpouring of aid five years ago when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck [...]
On 8:02 AM, China time, a 6.9 earthquake hit Ya’an, Sichuan province, a city of 1.5 million not far from Chengdu, the provincial capital. In just an hour, a notice about the earthquake had 84,000 retweets and over 7,000 comments. The tremors woke many in Chengdu, Sichuan, a city of 14 million, and were felt [...]
Xi Jinping, where were you the night of March 1? Yesterday, both domestic and foreign news outlets were reporting that the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping had taken a ride in a taxi cab that night; Hong Kong paper Ta Kung Pao broke the news on April 18, which was then [...]
China’s state-run media reported on April 8 that Huang Sheng, former deputy provincial governor of Shandong, was being tried in the city of Nanjing for accepting bribes. What drew the most attention, however, were not the bribes – which allegedly amounted to 12.23 million RMB, or almost US$2 million – but the news that the [...]
Chinese authorities have confirmed 14 cases of humans infected with bird flu, and of those, 5 have already died. It’s no surprise, then, that “bird flu” and “H7N9” have been trending on Chinese social media sites. Internet users are taking to social media to spread information about preventative measures, the latest news about confirmed infections, [...]
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 [...]
One year ago, a young college student in Nanjing named Ma Jie killed herself after a prolonged struggle with depression. Before she took her own life, she posted this on Sina Weibo, a Chinese social media site: I have depression, so I think I’ll go ‘die die’ now. No particular reason. No one needs to [...]
This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Yesterday, CCTV, China’ state-run television network, ran an expose on Apple, generating to an outcry against the company on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. News quickly broke, however, that CCTV had paid celebrities to post anti-Apple remarks. A slip up on [...]
This article also appears in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. China’s Two Sessions are in full swing, with lawmakers proposing a variety of new regulations addressing issues of concern to China’s citizens. Perhaps one of the most welcomed of these proposals was Guangdong National People’s Congress (NPC) representative He Youlin’s call for an [...]
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