Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Historical narratives lie at the core of national identity.  As a result, competing interpretations of the past can come to define international relationships.  Nowhere is this more evident than in Northeast Asia, where so-called “history wars,” combined with the destabilizing growth of [...]

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 [...]

[Note: The following is a Tea Leaf Nation op-ed, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors.] The recent dispute over “illegal fishing” off the Scarborough Shoal between China and the Philippines calls to mind the Dokdo/ Takeshima dispute between Korea and Japan in the East Sea. Just as the Japanese flaunt historical documents [...]

Writing on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, in response to recent discussion of the mainland’s brewing conflict with the Philippines over the Huangyan Islands, user @有子如虎 recently tweeted his summary of military history this way: “I was thinking about recent history: U.S.: We strike whoever we want! England: We strike whoever the U.S. strikes! Russia: We [...]

Don’t read this right before you eat, or go to sleep. To horrified gasps, the mainland publication Global Times (Chinese) and other media outlets reported that on May 6, 2012 the Korean government  announced a seizure of thousands of smuggled capsules, inbound from China, filled with the powdered flesh of dead babies. The Global Times [...]

What do Chinese people think of the U.S.? Or Korea? Or India? On March 2nd, Tea Leaf Nation attempted to see the world through Chinese eyes–or more accurately, through the eyes of a Chinese person using Baidu, China’s most popular search engine. For simplicity of analysis, we reproduce only the first page of results for each [...]

On Weibo, China’s Twitter, netizens are once again focusing on Kim Jong-Il’s death as images of his two-day long funeral are broadcast around the world. Indifference is rare, and most comments use the opportunity to reflect on the situation in China. Slightly more than half of Weibo users who weighed in were glad to see [...]