Tea Leaf Nation

Launched in February, an emergency two-can limit on exports of baby milk formula was made permanent Hong Kong law last Friday. The South China Morning Post reported that by Saturday last week, customs officials in Hong Kong arrested 26 Hong Kong residents and 19 Mainland Chinese for attempting to smuggle baby milk powder across the border [...]

This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Beijingers are choking on their air — again. Just seventeen days after Chinese cyberspace erupted with complaints about pollution so bad that it was “beyond index,” denizens of the Chinese capital awoke once again to a city blanketed with smog. Over the past [...]

Real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi (@潘石屹) tweeted a picture of China’s new aircraft carrier, Liaoning, in its full dress to celebrate National Day with the comment, “Neon light on the aircraft carrier. Looks bad. It’s gaudy like a nightclub.” {{1}}[[1]]航空母舰上亮起霓虹灯，不好看。花花绿绿的像夜总会。[[1]] The tweet has since gone viral and many netizens have taken the chance to mock [...]

For Chinese citizens, voting is easy–if you’re a Weibo user, that is. The votes may not have any legal effect, but a profusion of online polls allows netizens to cast a “shadow” vote on matters that range from the trivial to the overtly political.  One poll currently popular on Sina Weibo has some 18,500 netizens [...]

Real-estate tycoon and well-known Sina Weibo microblogger Pan Shiyi (@潘石屹) recently tweeted this provocative question: “After finishing the day’s work, I’m thinking: If my Weibo account were blocked one day, how would my life change?” The question may not be an idle one. Pan recently penned tweets touching on highly incendiary rumors of a coup at the [...]

Here we go again. Just weeks after Tea Leaf Nation debunked rumors of Kim Jong-Un’s demise at a North Korean embassy in Beijing, we find ourselves fending once more with China’s great Internet Rumor Machine. In what will likely become an ongoing series, we revive our 10-part checklist and apply it to these latest rumors.  As [...]