Tea Leaf Nation

Xi Jinping, where were you the night of March 1? Yesterday, both domestic and foreign news outlets were reporting that the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping had taken a ride in a taxi cab that night; Hong Kong paper Ta Kung Pao broke the news on April 18, which was then [...]

Whatever serious political signals that Xi Jinping’s first trip abroad as China’s new leader may have sent, Chinese Web users have recently focused on someone else: their new First Lady. Everything about Peng Liyuan seems to have fascinated users of Chinese social media, from Ms. Peng’s designed-in-China clothes and handbags to her mannerisms to her [...]

This article also appears in ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. A one-and-half-year-old girl wraps her arms around her mother’s neck, crying. Her mother, handcuffed, cannot hug her back—she can only squat down beside the police car to match her daughter’s height. “I’m sorry, mommy can’t hold you…” On March 6, 2013, one Chinese [...]

This article also appears in ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. With China’s new leadership now set, Chinese Web users have turned their attention to answering the key question: “What’s next?” In concert with the 18th Party Congress, the website of Communist Party-sanctioned Peoples’s Daily hosted an online poll asking Web users about their [...]

Even in Chinese, “911” is shorthand for September 11 and the events that transpired 11 years ago today. Web users in China have taken to social media to mark the anniversary, some waxing philosophical about the passage of time and the elusiveness of world peace, others repeating the claim, often heard here, that the world’s [...]

In American social media, politicians, journalists, and regular folks alike came out to voice condemnation of a recent statement by Republican Congressional Representative Todd Akin that women’s bodies had ways of preventing pregnancy from “legitimate rape.” The inflammatory comment, which led to pressure for him to withdraw from the race for one of Missouri’s U.S. [...]

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 [...]

With a little help, China’s youth have scored a preliminary victory. Business leader and Internet personality Kai-Fu Lee recently caused a huge stir in China’s blogosphere by calling for the boycott of controversial reality show “Only You” (非你莫属). When Mr. Lee tweets, China–especially its youth–listens. Mr. Lee was the founding president of Google China, serving [...]

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 [...]

Kai-Fu Lee (@李开复) is the founder of Innovation Works, or 创新工场, and is a well-known tech guru both inside and outside China as well as a frequent user of Weibo. While attending the World Economic Forum on January 25, Mr. Lee tweeted some of his wisdom on innovation: At #Davos discussing how large companies can innovate: 1) Search [...]