Tea Leaf Nation

On May 8, the Japanese government announced it would honor the 1995 war apology, a decision widely interpreted as a diplomatic gesture aimed at smoothing ties with China.  Tensions between the two countries have recently escalated due to events such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s suggesting a possible revision of the 1995 apology, key cabinet [...]

Rat meat + gelatin + red food coloring + nitrates = lamb. Have you tried it yet? “This is what a ‘complete’ sheep looks like,” reads a caption under the photoshopped image of a sheep with Jerry from Tom and Jerry as its head. The image was posted by @无锡微生活, an account that focuses on [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. David Barboza, the New York Times correspondent and Shanghai bureau chief, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for exposing the wealth amassed by the extended family of former premier Wen Jiabao. The report, which tackles head-on the politically sensitive topic of [...]

This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Is Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, turning into a new war zone? Dai Xu, a colonel in the Chinese Air Force and military strategist, thinks so. “A month ago, a pseudo-Japanese devil [derogatory term for pro-Japan Chinese] at Shanghai’s Fudan University besieged me 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, [...]

This article also appears in ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. A one-and-half-year-old girl wraps her arms around her mother’s neck, crying. Her mother, handcuffed, cannot hug her back—she can only squat down beside the police car to match her daughter’s height. “I’m sorry, mommy can’t hold you…” On March 6, 2013, one Chinese [...]

Imagine a city flush with both renminbi and Taiwan dollars, one where Chinese and Taiwanese managers, designers, researchers, and officials work together to create a harmonious “home,” and where children from both sides of the Straits play together at summer camps. Does such a city exist? Not quite yet. But Pingtan—an island located in China’s [...]

People’s Liberation Army Major General Luo Yuan debuted on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, just as a true military man should—with a big blitz and an ensuing war-in-words. On February 20, Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, published an article headlined: “What Asahi-readers should know: The Truths of China. PLA Major General says ‘Will Bomb Tokyo’.” [...]

This article also appears on Tea Leaf Nation partner sites ChinaFile and  The Atlantic. Within twenty-four hours of registration, Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) deleted the microblog account of Frank Hsieh, former premier of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ironically, Hsieh’s last tweet before he lost the power to post on Weibo was: [...]

This article also appears in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. In 1987, when Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-kuo finally lifted martial law after nearly forty years, Taiwan’s Government Information held its first Taipei International Book Exhibition. The exhibition, which in 1987 gathered 67 publishers from eleven countries, has grown immensely since, attracting 420 [...]

The Chinese Web version of Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers, posted the following image on Sina Weibo, China’s most active microblogging platform: The screenshots shows two remarkably similar posts, the top from Sina’s Weibo platform, which has about 400 million users, the lower from Internet giant Tencent’s own Weibo platform, which, according to [...]

Five months since Japan’s “nationalization” of the disputed Senkaku islands, called Diaoyu in Chinese, the issue remains as combustible as before — and now, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounding off on the topic, the reactions of Chinese and Japanese social media users highlight the uneasy reality of geopolitics over these remote isles. [...]