Tea Leaf Nation’s David Wertime spoke on January 22 at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The topic: “Redefining the Quote: Using the Social Web to Gauge Grassroots Sentiment in China.” Our thanks go to the fellows and staff at Berkman for the kind invitation. Please have a look.
As citizens across the globe become better connected, it’s not surprising that politicians find themselves plugging into the Internet to access citizen voices and gauge public opinion. Governments and officials of various nations have established Twitter and Facebook profiles, providing a medium to listen to their constituents. In recent years, the appearance of high-profile politicians [...]
Part of our job here at Tea Leaf Nation is trying our best to separate real (often censored) news from unsubstantiated rumors on China’s social media (e.g. see here and here). We wonder if there is any truth in the piece below that appeared on August 17 in Beijing Daily, a Party-controlled paper known to [...]
What would the Monkey King have tweeted on his Weibo microblogging account if there were Internet back in the Tang Dynasty? Would he boast about his transfiguring skills, which would possibly put even Professor Minerva McGonagall to shame? Would he put on airs, tweet about his wonderful journeys and try to attract as many followers [...]
To pick out three similar but unrelated incidents on Weibo and call them a trend is to risk forfeiting one’s right to say anything about the social media site ever again, except some things so defy responsible behavior that they deserve to be on the receiving end themselves. Roughly two weeks ago, Zhou Yan, a [...]
Shortly after China’s Party mouthpiece, Global Times, announced that China has long been a type of democracy, Qiao Mengke, an elementary school student from Zhengzhou, Henan province, supplied proof that democratic practice in China has reached even the nation’s youth. Sort of. Each year, elementary schools in China select representatives, called “Young Pioneers,” to help [...]
Shortly after China’s Party mouthpiece, Global Times, announced that China has long been a type of democracy, Qiao Mengke, an elementary school student from Zhengzhou, Henan province, supplied proof that democratic practice in China has reached even the nation’s youth. Sort of. Each year, elementary schools in China select representatives, called “Young Pioneers,” to help [...]
Has China’s most famous blogger finally been brought to heel? Han Han, writer, car racer, and China’s youth opinion leader, recently sealed a deal with massive Chinese Internet company Tencent and founded an e-journal, “One.” This is Han Han’s third attempt at founding a journal. His first, “Party,” sold 1.5 million copies of its first [...]
Has China’s most famous blogger finally been brought to heel? Han Han, writer, car racer, and China’s youth opinion leader, recently sealed a deal with massive Chinese Internet company Tencent and founded an e-journal, “One.” This is Han Han’s third attempt at founding a journal. His first, “Party,” sold 1.5 million copies of its first [...]
Shhhh…don’t type that name! “Chongqing” (重庆, which literally means “double celebration”), is currently not searchable on either the Sina or Tencent versions of China’s Twitter-like Weibo platforms. It is searchable on Sohu Weibo, which perhaps merely proves China’s government no longer much cares about Sohu Weibo. For the uninitiated, Chongqing is the city whose Party [...]
China’s social media landscape is exploding on a scale the Internet has seldom seen before. Every day, millions upon millions of new Chinese-language tweets appear in the blogosphere, an exciting but overwhelming deluge that even experienced “China hands” can have trouble parceling. How can someone interested in learning more about China, or trying to learn [...]
- On Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, verified users have on average 10 times more followers than unverified accounts. – 44.06% of accounts on Sina Weibo have fewer than 10 followers. – While most accounts claim to be from affluent regions of China, some regions exhibit high level of social connectivity judging by the average number of [...]
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