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 [...]

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 [...]

Hugh Jackman is not the only one doing a new take on Jean Valjean. Les Misérables has been turned into a Peking opera and posted online. This version of the Victor Hugo classic was written by students at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in 2006. If Mulan can become a Disney classic, there [...]

This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Is “bromance” in the air? Not according to state-run China Central Television (CCTV). Thousands of fans yelled “Get together” in unison when piano prodigy Li Yundi made a guest appearance at Chinese-American pop sensation Leehom Wang’s New Year’s Eve concert at the end of 2012, fueling speculations [...]

Chen Mei (alias) is a 23-year-old girl from Shaanxi province. Most days from 8 o’clock in the morning until 9 o’clock at night, she has worked at a factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu province. Chen had lived a relatively isolated existence bereft of outside activities, until a grassroots non-profit organization called Suzhou Migrant Workers’ Family built [...]

“As a Chinese citizen…I hereby officially announce that the Australian branch of the De Yun society has been established. The first overseas De Yun will be founded in Melbourne.” This post on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, came from Guo Degang (@郭德纲), a cross-talk performer who shot to fame around 2005, courtesy of China’s Internet. The [...]

Annie Yi — a.k.a. Yi Nengjing, a.k.a. Inō Shizuka, and formerly Wu Jingyi — is a woman of many facets. Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1969 to a political family with a history of persecution by the Kuomintang, the popular singer and actress has faced harsh online criticism for an extramarital affair and a failed [...]

[This article was originally published on April 13, 2012.] There’s something different about this picture–a ripple, a shimmer, a presence. Do you see it? Do you see him? Look closer. Try starting at the bottom, where two white sneakers peer out from the rows of plush consumer goods. Now follow the image upward. All of [...]