Tea Leaf Nation

On April 29, 1968, a young Chinese dissident named Lin Zhao was secretly executed by firing squad. In 2013, on the 45th anniversary of her execution, her name resurfaced in the public sphere, as news broke that police had prevented people paying tribute to her at her grave. Lin Zhao was an ardent Communist in [...]

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 [...]

Model United Nations, a popular college- and high school-level extracurricular activity in the U.S. and Europe, has come to China. Students play delegates to simulated UN committees and compete for “best delegate” awards. This activity took root in China when the first collegiate MUN team was formed at the elite Peking University (PKU) in 2000. More collegiate MUN clubs [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Lin Miaoke, a 13-year old child star, is no stranger to controversy. Lin, then 9, wowed billions of viewers around the world with her sweet face and angelic voice at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics with the patriotic tune “Ode to Motherland.” Except that the angelic voice did not belong to her. It was later [...]

China’s social media is mourning the death of Baby Haobo, a two-month old boy, after a day of heart-wrenching search in the snow-covered city of Changchun for him ended in tragedy. On the morning of March 4, Haobo’s father left him in a SUV, with the engine running, while he went to turn on the [...]

Yesterday, a group of prominent Chinese citizens issued an open letter to China’s government calling on it to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. While open letters are a venerated form of protest and speech, this group made waves when they chose to share their message on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. As [...]

One day after the Chinese microblog account was verified by Sina Weibo as belonging to Frank Hsieh, the former presidential nominee of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), it was stealthily erased. But the disappearance did not go unnoticed; instead, it brought a tidal wave of online comments on China’s social media. No doubt the account [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. On February 17, ex-Google China head Lee Kai-fu stated on Twitter that he had been locked out of China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo for three days, ostensibly for criticizing a Party-backed search engine called Jike and its sporting celebrity director Deng Yaping. Lee, who [...]

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 also appears on Tea Leaf Nation partner sites ChinaFile and The Atlantic. When Mr. Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, rewrote and replaced the New Year editorial of the Southern Weekend weekly newspaper without the consent of its editors, he probably did not think it would make much of a splash. [...]