Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appeared in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. What a year it has been on the Chinese Internet. In Chinese politics, 2012 brought a long-anticipated leadership transition at the highest levels, but incoming president Xi Jinping hasn’t dominated the headlines all by himself. A post on Weibo, China’s Twitter, by [...]

It was hard not to be stunned to by recent images of protests in Hong Kong, a massive sea of people of all ages donning black to rail against Beijing’s plan to enact national education. Hong Kongers deemed Bejing’s efforts “brainwashing” (洗脑), a paternalistic move from to inculcate the special territory into the mainland’s ways. [...]

Liu Bo is famous. One of many police officers assigned to quash recent protests over a planned molybdenum copper plant in Shifang (什邡), Sichuan province, Bo was famously pictured with a riot shield strapped to his forearm, baton raised, charging at the backs of a small crowd. His bull rush was captured on a mobile [...]

[Below are translated excerpts of a Chinese-language article (available here) that originally appeared in iSun Affairs, Issue 19, 2012. It details the stunning escape of activist Chen Guangcheng from his home in Dongshigu Village, part of Linyi municipality. Many thanks to iSun Affairs for its permission. Section headings and nicknames have been added by Tea [...]

Ah, memories. Chen Guangcheng’s daring escape from house arrest in Shandong province to U.S. protection in Beijing is by no means the first instance of a dissident crashing a foreign diplomatic outpost for protection. In fact, it’s been happening in China, and elsewhere, for over one hundred years. In 1898, two reformists pursued by the [...]

Don’t look away, even for one minute. Events have taken a dramatic turn in the case of Chen Guangcheng, the celebrated rights lawyer-turned daring escape artist-turned diplomatic impasse. Much of China now knows that after his daring escape from house arrest, Chen spent six days in the United States embassy before being reunited with (some [...]

When the going gets tough, the tough speak in code, at least on China’s Internet. It’s quitting time in China, and thousands of netizens are announcing they are leaving work “of their own volition.” But this happens every day. Why choose today to say so?  Faced with overzealous censors, netizens on Weibo, China’s Twitter, are [...]

Following blind rights lawyer Cheng Guangcheng’s daring recent escape from years of house arrest, observers waited with baited breath to see how China’s media would break its silence on the news. This morning, the relatively pro-party Global Times took the first step with articles in Chinese and English which, the Wall Street Journal reported, tried [...]

There’s been no better time to learn Chinese diplomacy-speak. With fled Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng likely now in United States custody, bystanders (including those at Tea Leaf Nation) have quickly begun to speculate on the incident’s diplomatic impact on U.S.-Sino relations.  But it’s not enough to know what China is saying, if a reader cannot [...]