Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. When the state-commissioned film The Beginning of a Great Revival was listed on social network site Douban in 2010, many people rushed to rate the film with one star out of five even though it had not even premiered. An alternative and [...]

Imagine a city flush with both renminbi and Taiwan dollars, one where Chinese and Taiwanese managers, designers, researchers, and officials work together to create a harmonious “home,” and where children from both sides of the Straits play together at summer camps. Does such a city exist? Not quite yet. But Pingtan—an island located in China’s [...]

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: [...]

This article also appears in ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Are Chinese audiences growing weary of anti-Japanese propaganda? It would seem that some, at least, are growing sick of the pathetic villains, superhuman heroes and lame endings that many Chinese movies and television series about World War II, or what Chinese refer to [...]

Chinese authorities’ heavy-handed censorship often makes headlines, but another force does just as much to obscure the truth and control the media. That force is fake news. Something must fill the void left by the deleted, blocked, and discouraged content, and fake news is often that “something,” as fiction is more flexible than fact, and [...]

Chinese authorities’ heavy-handed censorship often makes headlines, but another force does just as much to obscure the truth and control the media. That force is fake news. Something must fill the void left by the deleted, blocked, and discouraged content, and fake news is often that “something,” as fiction is more flexible than fact, and [...]