Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears on Tea Leaf Nation partner sites ChinaFile and  The Atlantic. Within twenty-four hours of registration, Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) deleted the microblog account of Frank Hsieh, former premier of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ironically, Hsieh’s last tweet before he lost the power to post on Weibo was: [...]

Freedom of speech has always been a sensitive topic in China. But when a prominent commentator calls for the right to free speech in one of the most famous (and state-controlled) universities in China, it raises the stakes yet further. On November 18, fresh off of a forced blogging hiatus coinciding with China’s leadership handover [...]

A recent viral tweet on China’s Internet starts this way: “He didn’t try to flee to the U.S. consulate, and he didn’t try to abscond to the U.S. with 200 million RMB. He’s not some big official with hundreds of apartments and countless mistresses. He’s just a little village official waiting for justice.” This man, [...]

Ever wonder what it is like to “drink tea” in a police station in China? No, it is not your average Oolong-sipping occasion — “drinking tea” has become an euphemism in the Chinese social media for police interrogation, particularly for tripping over some invisible line or another in one’s speech on the Internet. On September [...]

On August 23, judges in South Korea ruled the country’s controversial real name-registration system unconstitutional, a move hailed as a victory by free speech advocates. In practice since June 28, 2009 under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Information and Communication of Korea, real-name registration had required netizens to register with identification credentials in order [...]

Part of our job here at Tea Leaf Nation is trying our best to separate real (often censored) news from unsubstantiated rumors on China’s social media (e.g. see here and here). We wonder if there is any truth in the piece below that appeared on August 17 in Beijing Daily, a Party-controlled paper known to [...]

As any self-respecting booklover in Taipei knows, you can immerse yourself in the endless variety of glossy printed books at the Eslite Bookstore on Dunhua South Road. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Moreover, the flagship store near Taipei 101 stocks toys, stationery, music and lifestyle goods in addition to three floors of [...]

Recent demonstrations in Shifang, Sichuan over a planned molybdenum copper plant and Qidong, Jiangsu over a proposed wastewater pipeline have taught us about the violent side of social unrest in China. In Shifang, the protest turned into a bloody fight between police and protestors which resulted in serious injuries to both sides. In Qidong, protestors broke into [...]

To pick out three similar but unrelated incidents on Weibo and call them a trend is to risk forfeiting one’s right to say anything about the social media site ever again, except some things so defy responsible behavior that they deserve to be on the receiving end themselves.  Roughly two weeks ago, Zhou Yan, a [...]

What would a world without Weibo, China’s Twitter, look like? Two weeks ago, this author sat down with Michael Ardaiolo of  China Blogcast to discuss all things Weibo. About 22 minutes into the discussion, host Ardaiolo asks: What evidence exists of Weibo’s ability to sway outcomes in the real world? The question got this author talking, and [...]

Though nothing has been confirmed yet, the rumor that Zhang Ziyi, China’s famous actress, is implicated in the case of Bo Xilai, China’s recently collapsed high official, has gone viral online. It started with an article on boxun.com (博讯新闻网), an overseas Chinese website famous for its coverage of political news and human right abuses of [...]

Let the music play on. It’s been just under two weeks since real-name registration began to go into effect for China’s microblogs, or Weibos. To be sure, two weeks is not a long time. Many cities have yet to implement real-name registration; this author is still able to tweet and re-tweet from his anonymous and [...]