Readers following the news in China may already be familiar with the case of Huang Yang, a doctoral student at one of China’s most prestigious universities who was recently poisoned to death. Over the past week, several similar incidents have made the news: the principal of a school poisoned elementary school students at a rival school, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We’ve seen this movie before, and so has the rest of China. On Saturday, October 27, Tea Leaf Nation reported that protests were heating up in the coastal city of Ningbo as locals expressed opposition to the construction of a chemical refining project they feared would pollute their hometown environment. On that same day, prominent [...]
Li Chengpeng, an influential writer and social commentator, has published an article on his blog denouncing the boycott of Japanese goods and the violent anti-Japan sentiment currently sweeping China as the two wrangle over the Diaoyu Islands, called the Senkaku in Japanese. Li made news in 2010 when he ran for political office as a [...]
Have China’s people created her government? Or has China’s government made its people who they are? Following recent protests in Hong Kong against changes to the city’s educational curriculum–which residents say include overly positive coverage of the Chinese Communist Party and constitute “brainwashing”–prominent microblogger Li Chengpeng took to the blogosphere to ask this question. On [...]
To prominent blogger Li Chengpeng, deceit is everywhere in modern China. In the aftermath of the shocking collapse of a 10-month-old bridge in the northeastern city of Harbin, Li took to his account on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter (@李承鹏) to comment on the bridge’s unfortunate role as a metaphor for today’s China. Since its posting [...]
The Chinese blogosphere is abuzz this Christmas season. Anyone who is anyone has offered their two cents on the fierce debate started by Han Han’s blog entry “On Revolution.” The article, which seems to question the Chinese masses’ “fitness for democracy,” caused an uproar in the blogosphere among those with liberal leanings and earned approving mentions [...]
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