Tea Leaf Nation

One year after a very similar incident occurred in the waters between China and North Korea, North Koreans once again allegedly hijacked a Chinese fishing boat, kidnapping 16 crew members and demanding a ransom of 600,000 yuan, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily and the boat’s owner, Yu Xuejun. Yu said on his Tencent microblog, another Twitter-like social media platform popular [...]

It’s commencement season in America again, and quite a few heavy hitters have already spoken. On Tuesday, the Guardian published its first speaker roundup, featuring Vice President Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, and former president Bill Clinton. Yet it was a speech by Vice President Joe Biden that seemed to draw the most attention [...]

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 [...]

[Note: The following is a Tea Leaf Nation op-ed, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors.] On November 29, 2012, at the end of his visit to “The Road to Revival” exhibition, which showcased China’s achievements in modern and contemporary history despite foreign invasions and exploitation, the newly appointed General Secretary of [...]

The island of Lanyu lies not far off the southeast coast of Taiwan — a small, bucolic island with a population barely exceeding 4,000. Aboriginal Tao people make up nearly 60% of the population, with the rest being mainly Han Chinese. Residents also share the island with a more unwelcome neighbor – the Lanyu Nuclear [...]

The White House surely has a full plate already. But it can add one more item to its long to-do list: Respond to Chinese petitioners. Starting on May 3, the White House’s petition website has become a favored landing spot for Chinese Web users, and the hashtag #occupytheWhiteHouse, and a variety of related memes, has [...]

Whether or not I deserved the Nobel Prize, I already received it, and now it’s time to get back to my writing desk and produce a good work. I hear that the 2013 list of Nobel Prize nominees has been finalized. I hope that once the new laureate is announced, no one will pay attention [...]

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 [...]

The third fatal victim of Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing was a Chinese graduate student at Boston University. The Chinese Internet is lit up with thousands of virtual candles in remembrance of her, amid some controversy over her background. The Chinese Students and Scholars of Boston University (BUCSSA) confirmed that the victim is the missing student [...]

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 [...]

Coming in the wake of an increasingly petulant North Korea threatening to rain fire and brimstone over East Asia and beyond, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s first official visit to China was only ever going to be about one issue: getting North Korea’s closest thing to an ally to take a tougher stance against [...]