Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, announced on February 20 that it had surpassed half a billion users — more people than live in South America, and approximately the population of North America. Thickly-settled Europe edges out Weibo by about 230,000, but [...]

It was a drab February day in 2009. I sat in my college dorm room four floors above York Street, drinking instant coffee and languorously gazing out the window at pedestrians below—miniature fortresses of warmth set against knuckle-tightening air. That’s when I saw the email. At first, I thought it was from Yan herself. It [...]

In a high-stakes game marrying geopolitics with big business and international espionage, is turnabout fair play? According to one very opinionated corner of the Chinese Internet, the answer is a resounding yes.  Yesterday, the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report casting a heavy shadow over Chinese telecom behemoths Huawei and ZTE. [...]

Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog in China, chimed in with its two cents on the Zuckerberg-Chan wedding.  In a “Micro Topic” entitled “Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is Married,” the microblog offers this advice to would-be Priscilla Chans: “Priscilla Chan, the wife of Mark Zuckerberg, has been called ‘The World’s Luckiest Woman.’ She’s Chinese-American with ancestry from [...]

With Facebook making its initial public stock offering today, some Chinese netizens are reminded of the existence of a juicy social networking platform that is, unfortunately, blocked in their home country. As Tea Leaf Nation previously reported, many netizens would love to have a chance to create a Facebook profile and waste countless hours sharing [...]

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 [...]

What’s this image? This photograph depicts beloved Taiwanese band Mayday (五月天) playing to a rapturous reception in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium on May 5 as part of their Nowhere World Tour 2012 (or 诺亚方舟, which translates literally as “Noah’s Ark”).  With over 33,000 re-posts, it is Sina Weibo’s most viral image of May 7, 2012 [...]

Is it another sign of a great censorship thaw? A technical glitch in China’s Great Firewall? A brilliant hacker? Or as @R小寧 of Shanghai speculates on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, “another hook” to catch would-be Firewall-crossers in the act?  For a few hours on February 27, many netizens across China reported that Facebook, Twitter and Youtube were [...]

Move aside you B.R.I.C.s and P.I.I.G.s, Chinese netizens are chattering about S.I.C.K., or Syria, Iran, China, and (North) Korea, the four countries in the world where Facebook is restricted. These four countries were called out by name in Facebook’s preliminary prospectus recently filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as places where “access to [...]