Tea Leaf Nation

This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, announced on February 20 that it had surpassed half a billion users — more people than live in South America, and approximately the population of North America. Thickly-settled Europe edges out Weibo by about 230,000, but [...]

This article also appears on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. On February 17, ex-Google China head Lee Kai-fu stated on Twitter that he had been locked out of China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo for three days, ostensibly for criticizing a Party-backed search engine called Jike and its sporting celebrity director Deng Yaping. Lee, who [...]

Should American schools celebrate the Lunar New Year? In both New York City and nationwide, more and more people are saying “yes.” Just yesterday, a petition on the White House’s official website calling for the establishment of Lunar New Year as a national holiday received over 39,214 signatures by its February 14 deadline, surpassing the [...]

In a high-stakes game marrying geopolitics with big business and international espionage, is turnabout fair play? According to one very opinionated corner of the Chinese Internet, the answer is a resounding yes.  Yesterday, the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report casting a heavy shadow over Chinese telecom behemoths Huawei and ZTE. [...]

Chinese President Hu Jintao was in Hong Kong this weekend to swear in the city’s new chief executive, C.Y. Leung, and to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the city’s handover to China. Many took to the streets, not to celebrate the inauguration, but to protest what they see as the Chinafication of the metropolis. Over [...]

Prominent dissident and artist Ai Weiwei, subject of the recently released documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, is known for his imaginative installations and acerbic criticism of the Chinese government, but in the past several years he has also become a well-known user of social media. He first began to blog in 2006, at a time [...]

Prominent dissident and artist Ai Weiwei, subject of the recently released documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, is known for his imaginative installations and acerbic criticism of the Chinese government, but in the past several years he has also become a well-known user of social media. He first began to blog in 2006, at a time [...]

Politicians around the world have embraced social media as a means of communicating with their followers. U.S. President Barack Obama’s Twitter account is prolific, employing a small staff to release 10 to 20 tweets a day. Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, brings social media to a whole new level as he shovels out snowed-in citizens [...]

We would like to think social media is a democratizing experience, but admit it, it is also a hierarchy. The bewildering array of services and applications offers a plethora of opportunities to validate one’s own technological acumen and social connections and look down on the less fortunate. (You still use Hotmail? Uhmm, no judgment.) The [...]

Netizens have been furiously tweeting and retweeting on Chinese microblogs about rumours that some have been able to access Youtube and possibly Twitter from inside China without having to scale the Great Firewall. Some netizens commented that they were able to access Youtube from inside the GFW simply by using “https” instead of “http” in their [...]

Is it another sign of a great censorship thaw? A technical glitch in China’s Great Firewall? A brilliant hacker? Or as @R小寧 of Shanghai speculates on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, “another hook” to catch would-be Firewall-crossers in the act?  For a few hours on February 27, many netizens across China reported that Facebook, Twitter and Youtube were [...]

It’s no secret that Weibo, China’s Twitter, is crawling with censors. And yet, some netizens say it has provided them with the most open forum they have ever enjoyed inside of China. Many statements that would have been considered serious crimes in the past are now routine in Chinese social media. On January 27, Beijing [...]