Tea Leaf Nation

The term “hardest job-hunting season in history” has become a buzzword in China recently. According to China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, 6.99 million students will be graduating institutions of higher education this year, a record high since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This intimidating number is inextricably [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Is this another sign of the coming of the “China Century?” The Schwarzman Scholars Program, backed by Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and launched at Tsinghua University in Beijing on April 21, might have the potential to become as prestigious as the Rhodes Scholarship one day. In 1902, six years after the death of Cecil John [...]

On April 16, 2013, while the attention of the world and the U.S. media was gripped by the Boston Marathon bombings, the Chinese news outlets and social media were captured by horrors of another kind: Huang Yang, a medical science graduate student at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, was poisoned to death, and the prime suspect [...]

This is part of a Tea Leaf Nation series covering gender issues in today’s China. Gender has recently been in China’s social media spotlight. On March 13, a university professor named He Guangshun wrote on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging platform: This morning, I was talking about something important during my class: It’s really [...]

The geographic center of the world’s most populous country sounds like a busy place. But if you stabbed a finger at the middle of a map of China, you would most likely find yourself pointing at a sparsely-populated region once known as Tibet. Today, Tibet lingers on officially only as the TAR (“Tibet Administrative Region”), [...]

This summer, I gave presentations about the American college application process at Company X, one of the largest companies in China that specializes in language training and overseas study consulting. In September, a few months after I gave the presentation, I received a job offer from Company X: “We are very impressed with your academic [...]

This article also appeared in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Recently, an essay purportedly written by a sixth grader—an epitome of the “butterfly effect”—went viral on the Chinese Internet. On Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, user @土豆网 posted the photograph below at right. Within several days of its appearance, it had been retweeted over [...]

More and more Chinese students are willing to get grilled by the SATs rather than by the notorious college entrance exam in their own country, known as gaokao; but not all of them choose to apply for American colleges for the same reason. During my first year at Yale, my friend told me that she [...]

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, [...]

Beijingers and Shanghai’ers usually have zero love for each other, but lately some natives of China’s two top metropolises have presented a united front — against migrants from other parts of China. Beijingers usually refer to them as “provincials” (外地人), while Shanghai’ers prefer “country folk” (乡下人). Migrants from other provinces in China, who may have [...]