Last week, a speech by U.S. President Barack Obama on the value of engaged citizenship made waves in Chinese social media. “The core of Obama’s speech yesterday at the Ohio State University Commencement is ‘a sense of citizenship,’” posted influential Sina Weibo user @假装在纽约, or “pretending to be in New York,” a widely followed provocateur [...]
This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. A recent viral infographic compiled by Chinese news portal Sina shows that more than 150,000 Chinese citizens emigrated from China in 2011, or about 1/10 of the population of Philadelphia. Top destinations were the United States, followed by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Investment [...]
Do censors working for Sina corporation have a moral obligation not to work there? That is the provocative question posed by @假装在纽约, a user whose handle literally means “pretending to be in New York.” On Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, he recently wrote: I don’t agree with people who defend little secretaries [slang for censors] [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Who’s been naughty, and who’s been nice? Reporters Without Borders (RWB) has once again released its World Press Freedom Index, which ranks the world’s countries in order of the freedom afforded their journalists in the previous year. As usual, more attention is being paid to who’s been naughty. Mainland China fell three spots to #174 [...]
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