Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. On February 17, ex-Google China head Lee Kai-fu stated on Twitter that he had been locked out of China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo for three days, ostensibly for criticizing a Party-backed search engine called Jike and its sporting celebrity director Deng Yaping. Lee, who [...]

When the New York Times reported yesterday that Chinese hackers had been attacking its computer system for months, one social media user in China asked, “Another glorious feat of Lanxiang Vocational School?” While Lanxiang was not mentioned in the Times‘ January 30 report, a New York Times article from 2010 named Lanxiang as one of two Chinese [...]

This article also appears in The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Last week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet. Only a small proportion of that country’s 24 million people can access the World Wide Web, and the majority of the 1.5 million mobile phones there belong [...]

Do censors working for Sina corporation have a moral obligation not to work there? That is the provocative question posed by @假装在纽约, a user whose handle literally means “pretending to be in New York.” On Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, he recently wrote: I don’t agree with people who defend little secretaries [slang for censors] [...]

Social media users on Twitter and Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform, have complained about slow or spotty Internet access, particularly to Google and Gmail, during the countdown to China’s leadership transition. But is it a result of the Party’s desperate attempt to draw eyeballs to the 18th Party Congress, where the handover of power will take place? [...]

Foxconn it is not (although recent photos on TLN partner The Atlantic suggest Foxconn isn’t as shabby as some had thought). Images of the new office of a Chinese start-up have been making the rounds on China’s social media. Readers can judge for themselves whether it’s time for Google to get an upgrade. 1. Stairs are for [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Has a great thaw begun? On February 21, netizens reported that Google+ has become accessible in China without a user’s having to scale the Great Firewall. Accounts seem to differ on whether Youtube is now accessible in China as well. Writing on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, a magazine called The Founder (@创业家杂志 ) tweeted a [...]