It’s been a fascinating year in Chinese cyberspace. Chinese Internet users now number about 538 million, with hundreds of millions of those generating over 100 million posts per day on Sina Weibo, China’s most vibrant micro-blogging platform. No wonder: With once-in-a-generation political upheavals and a steady stream of scandalous, salacious, and sentimental stories, there has been [...]
It was an interesting November for spectators on the island of Taiwan. Taiwan’s media has been paying close attention to the results of the U.S. presidential election and the recently-concluded 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Taiwan is awkwardly positioned between two giants, having close relations with the U.S. and an undetermined political [...]
The below article also appeared in ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Speech on the Chinese Internet, it seems, is beginning to thaw once more following the country’s leadership transition. After months of speculation, new Chinese leader Xi Jinping was announced on November 15 at the close of the 18th Party Congress, which accompanied a [...]
As China has held its all-important 18th Party Congress over the past week to choose its new leadership, dissidents have been removed from Beijing and in some cases ordered to keep their mouths shut. For the duration, there have been no posts on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, from prominent (and usually loquacious) blogger Li Chengpeng, [...]
This article also appears in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. A recent blog post from a Peking University student on Chinese social networking site Renren.com about his girlfriend’s shopping habit went viral online. In the last four days, it has been shared over 26,000 times. At first glance, it is nothing more [...]
As Beijing enters extreme lock-down prior to the 18th National Party Congress (十八大 or “shi ba da” in Chinese), social media users have invented a new coded reference–”Sparta”–to talk about this otherwise censored topic on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. A search for Sparta (斯巴达) yielded more than 3.2 million results on Sina Weibo. To help those visiting [...]
It’s a state of lockdown so extreme that it feels like war. With China’s change in leadership at the 18th National Party Congress just nine days away, “stability and security” has become the number-one issue for all levels of Chinese government. Although “stability preservation” (“维稳”) is always a high priority in China, it has now [...]
On Thursday Oct 26 The New York Times published a 4,700 word article on corruption among the members of Wen Jiabao’s family, alleging that they amassed a fortune of $2.7 billion through shadowy business dealings. Appearing on the front page of both New York Times’ English and Chinese websites, both sites were completely blocked in China [...]
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