Tea Leaf Nation

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 [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. As Chinese authorities try–and repeatedly fail–to cool off the nation’s red-hot real estate market, the real-world impact of high housing prices is being keenly felt in the nation’s capital, Beijing. In a recent viral post on Douban, a Chinese social media platform featuring [...]

Eat your heart out, Jack Kerouac; wanderlust has found its way to modern China. On November 14, a 27-year-old woman from the coastal city of Ningbo made headlines in a local newspaper after coming back from a four-month tour around China. The article describes how she spent 14,000 RMB (about US$2,200) on the whole trip; [...]

To many people in China, domestic universities are known for “narrow admissions, wide exit” while American universities have “easy admissions, tough exit.” This means that Chinese students facing the high school entrance exam (“gaokao” in Chinese) are under extreme pressure to gain college admittance; but entering college is the beginning of a relatively carefree four [...]

With gender suddenly a hot issue in China, anger over sex discrimination has generated what can only be called a world-class smackdown on Chinese social media. China’s media and blogosphere have roiled with the recent contrast between female taikonaut Liu Yang’s ascension to space with the forced abortion of rural resident Feng Jianmei’s seven-month-old fetus. Netizens [...]

With gender suddenly a hot issue in China, anger over sex discrimination has generated what can only be called a world-class smackdown on Chinese social media. China’s media and blogosphere have roiled with the recent contrast between female taikonaut Liu Yang’s ascension to space with the forced abortion of rural resident Feng Jianmei’s seven-month-old fetus. Netizens [...]

We would like to think social media is a democratizing experience, but admit it, it is also a hierarchy. The bewildering array of services and applications offers a plethora of opportunities to validate one’s own technological acumen and social connections and look down on the less fortunate. (You still use Hotmail? Uhmm, no judgment.) The [...]