Given the potential global consequences of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it has naturally attracted worldwide attention. In China, initially reticent coverage by state media has given way to editorializing about...
China’s State Council unveiled new policies last week intended to promote parenthood and foster a more “reproduction-friendly society,” which were met with muted skepticism. Along with other media pieces on the...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang...
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation...
These days, young people likewise have little to laugh about, so Halloween costumes became a way to let loose and express their remaining imagination and creativity. But now that, too, has become just another foolish dream."
— From a now-censored article by WeChat blogger Yu Feng, bemoaning the official crackdown on Halloween costumes and celebrations in Shanghai and other Chinese cities
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation by researcher Sze-Fung Lee into “PRC Consulate Gray Zone ‘Pop-up’ Events in New York and Beyond.” The People’s Republic of China (PRC) Consulate in New York has already been under scrutiny over the roles of several of its officials in the case of Linda Sun, a New York gubernatorial aide accused of exploiting her position to promote PRC interests. Lee writes that the consulate has been vigorously organizing to win favor and loyalty from local diaspora communities, and...
The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and...
Confronted with a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and socioeconomic shifts that...
Domestic critics of the Chinese Communist Party sometimes compare it to a mafia; that was...
Caving to online male backlash that included a threatened boycott, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com...
One of the latest trends on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu is for women to share...
China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to future high-tech and renewable-energy industries. Amid intensifying geopolitical competition, Western countries are increasing their efforts to claw back market share while countries in the Global South, where many of these minerals are mined, are attempting to capitalize on growing global demand. A recent article on the subject by The Economist stated that in 2023 Chinese companies invested roughly $16 billion in foreign mines, the highest figure in a decade, up from less than $5 billion the...
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Brazil-China relations, and a series of high-level...
China’s “distant-water fishing” (DWF) activities are both figurative and literal. Figuratively,...
The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) published its fifth election report (PDF) on...
The BRICS+ summit that took place this week in the Russian city of Kazan aimed to showcase the...
This week, Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held their first formal bilateral...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who has been on a nearly one-month hunger strike to protest his mistreatment in Shandong’s Lunan Prison. Many human rights groups and supporters have raised the alarm about Xu’s hunger strike, weight loss, and declining health, and have urged Chinese authorities to halt his mistreatment and provide him with medical care. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns have also spoken out on Xu’s behalf. #XuZhiyong on hunger strike, day 26: No update. It's...
Two years after Peng Lifa’s courageous one-man protest on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge against Xi...
China’s investments in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are increasingly moving away from...
Ren Xinyi, the daughter of Ren Zhiqiang—a 73-year-old former real-estate magnate currently serving...
In a two-part podcast interview with The Economist’s Drum Tower, former Canadian diplomat...
New research documents the repressive effects of Hong Kong’s national security laws. This week,...
The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, Halloween revelry has been marred by strict police curfews, the detention of costume-clad partygoers, and bans on organized festivities. Meanwhile, censors have been vigorously erasing discussion of the Halloween crackdown from social media. The repressive atmosphere is a major departure from last year’s Halloween celebrations in Shanghai, which featured costumes that poked fun at authorities and that were hailed as a sign of the city’s cultural tolerance. At The New York Times, Vivian Wang...
Confronted with a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and socioeconomic shifts that...
Domestic critics of the Chinese Communist Party sometimes compare it to a mafia; that was...
Caving to online male backlash that included a threatened boycott, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com...
One of the latest trends on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu is for women to share...
Chinese internet users are taking issue with a recent announcement that the Cyberspace...
Given the potential global consequences of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it has naturally attracted worldwide attention. In China, initially reticent coverage by state media has given way to editorializing about the “unprecedented chaos” of the race and depictions of American democracy as a “messy” affair. Cartoons published this week by China Daily and the Global Times deride the enormous cost of the election and a “tide” of vitriol that is depicted as being spewed by both political parties, threatening to drown the American public. At the South China Morning Post, Dewey Sim, Hayley...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang...
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation...
China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to...
Confronted with a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and socioeconomic shifts that...
The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary on Tuesday, October 1. The anniversary is both political spectacle and the advent of a week-long holiday marked by decidedly apolitical leisure travel. On the eve of the anniversary, Xi Jinping delivered a speech in front of 3,000 guests, both foreign and domestic, in the Great Hall of the People. At The Guardian, Helen Davidson wrote about the relatively muted political celebrations in Beijing: “The road ahead will not be smooth, there will definitely be difficulties and obstacles, and we may encounter major tests such as...
New research documents the repressive effects of Hong Kong’s national security laws. This week,...
In the face of growing government repression, many residents of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and various...
The first sentencing under Hong Kong’s new Article 23 national security law (officially called the...
Uyghur villages have been Sinicized in Xinjiang. Local communities have been displaced for...
The work environment for journalists in Hong Kong continues to deteriorate. Last month, Stand News...
A recent WeChat post reveals that some Chinese schools and universities are using special software to identify and punish students who “scale the wall”—that is, circumvent China’s Great Firewall (GFW) to access overseas websites and portals. The post begins with a not-very-convincing exchange of WeChat messages between three students—identified as “student A,” “student B,” and “student C,” respectively—discussing their university’s use of the ABT Online Behavior Management System (安博通上网行为管理, Ānbótōng shàngwǎng xíngwéi guǎnlǐ) to identify and punish fellow students who circumvented the GFW to...
In the two weeks since the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China...
A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long...
Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration has issued a series of regulations intended to...
Popular online writer Shen Maohua, who writes under the pen name Wei Zhou, is known for his...
As citizens revolt against never-ending lockdowns and local governments “resolutely struggle...
On September 12, 2003, John Battelle published the first post on chinadigitaltimes.net: Here’s what a Google Search on “china weblog” yields, I’m looking forward to seeing ours at the top soon! China’s online population at the start of that year was nearly 60 million. Ten years later, it was fast approaching 600 million, and now, after 20, it is well over a billion. This new completely revised and hugely expanded update to our ebook series, formerly known as “the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon,” aims to capture something of the enormous explosion of online speech that accompanied this growth, with...
In 2014, Leta Hong Fincher published her first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender...
Starting in March 2008, Tibetans across the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), Qinghai, Gansu, and...
Surveys have shown that Xi Jinping’s hardline foreign policy is increasingly unpopular abroad....
Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of Government at Cornell University, joined CDT to discuss his...
Evidence of human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang has...
China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to future high-tech and renewable-energy industries. Amid intensifying geopolitical competition, Western countries are increasing their efforts to claw back market share while countries in the Global South, where many of these minerals are mined, are attempting to capitalize on growing global demand. A recent article on the subject by The Economist stated that in 2023 Chinese companies invested roughly $16 billion in foreign mines, the highest figure in a decade, up from less than $5 billion the...
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Brazil-China relations, and a series of high-level...
Caving to online male backlash that included a threatened boycott, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com...
The BRICS+ summit that took place this week in the Russian city of Kazan aimed to showcase the...
Three years after the Chinese government’s cautiously supportive stance toward the Taliban’s...
In what is becoming an increasingly regular occurrence, a militant group carried out a deadly...
Given the potential global consequences of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it has naturally attracted worldwide attention. In China, initially reticent coverage by state media has given way to editorializing about the “unprecedented chaos” of the race and depictions of American democracy as a “messy” affair. Cartoons published this week by China Daily and the Global Times deride the enormous cost of the election and a “tide” of vitriol that is depicted as being spewed by both political parties, threatening to drown the American public. At the South China Morning Post, Dewey Sim, Hayley...
China’s State Council unveiled new policies last week intended to promote parenthood and foster a...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang...
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation...
The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang newsletter, detailing the work and attitudes of some of China’s legions of low-paid, overworked online content reviewers. These foot soldiers of censorship must often review sixty or seventy thousand pieces of content per day, working long hours of overtime with few prospects for career advancement. While some are true believers in the work, others are simply grabbing whatever work they can find in China’s bleak current job market, and their attitudes toward the job vary from...
The Shenzhou-19 spaceship carrying three of China’s youngest taikonauts successfully launched and...
China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to...
The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) published its fifth election report (PDF) on...
Chinese internet users are taking issue with a recent announcement that the Cyberspace...
To mark the tenth anniversary on Monday of his sentencing to life in prison, Marie Holzman writes...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who has been on a nearly one-month hunger strike to protest his mistreatment in Shandong’s Lunan Prison. Many human rights groups and supporters have raised the alarm about Xu’s hunger strike, weight loss, and declining health, and have urged Chinese authorities to halt his mistreatment and provide him with medical care. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns have also spoken out on Xu’s behalf. #XuZhiyong on hunger strike, day 26: No update. It's...
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation...
Confronted with a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and socioeconomic shifts that...
China’s “distant-water fishing” (DWF) activities are both figurative and literal. Figuratively,...
Domestic critics of the Chinese Communist Party sometimes compare it to a mafia; that was...
Two years after Peng Lifa’s courageous one-man protest on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge against Xi...
On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was off to a good start in 2024, with reported 5.3% year-on-year GDP growth in the first quarter of the year. The better-than-expected data was touted by various Chinese state media outlets online, although many of those news posts had comment filtering enabled, perhaps in anticipation of negative or skeptical reactions from social media users. Two items in particular seemed to strike netizens as overly optimistic: the reported “nationwide average per-capita disposable income” figure of 11,539 yuan...
A recent WeChat post from oft-controversial entrepreneur, publicity hound, and philanthropist Chen...
Even before the lifting of China’s long-standing “zero-COVID” policy in early December of last...
After conducting nucleic acid testing on its 26 million residents this week, Shanghai remains...
Evergrande offices across China have been beset by protesting retail investors and homeowners...
Anyone who has boarded an airplane in the last 20 years knows what stands between arrival at the...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who has been on a nearly one-month hunger strike to protest his mistreatment in Shandong’s Lunan Prison. Many human rights groups and supporters have raised the alarm about Xu’s hunger strike, weight loss, and declining health, and have urged Chinese authorities to halt his mistreatment and provide him with medical care. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns have also spoken out on Xu’s behalf. #XuZhiyong on hunger strike, day 26: No update. It's...
Two years after Peng Lifa’s courageous one-man protest on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge against Xi...
China’s investments in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are increasingly moving away from...
China’s relationship with Israel has soured over the past year. Throughout Israel’s war in Gaza, China has repeatedly blamed Israel and its American backing for the continuation of violence, and has attempted to play the role of mediator between Palestinian factions, thereby winning some support in the Global South. In Israel, polls show that a majority of the public considers China to be unfriendly or hostile towards Israel, with a third of respondents reporting a negative change in their perception since last October. Recent articles highlight these fluctuations and their impact....
In a remarkable interview, a censor for one of China’s biggest search engines described what...
Leaders of southeast Asian countries gathered in Laos this week for the annual ASEAN summit and...
An October 8 stabbing outside an elementary school in Guangzhou, in which two nine-year-old students and an adult woman were injured, has drawn renewed attention to the phenomenon of indiscriminate knife attacks by people seeking “revenge on society.” All three victims received medical treatment and are reportedly out of danger. The perpetrator, a 60-year-old man surnamed Zhao who served over six years in prison for a previous stabbing attack on a girlfriend, was arrested by local police, but the official police statement about the incident and arrest was very short on details. The Guangzhou...
Several recent reports and articles highlight the experience of those in China who seek to leave...
WeChat has censored an article on a trending question on Douyin: “Why are jails packed this year?”...
Around 5:00 p.m. local time on Friday, an explosion damaged an office building of the Chinese consulate in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar. No casualties were reported, but the Chinese government condemned the incident as an attack, and Myanmar’s military junta attributed it to “terrorists,” although no one has claimed responsibility yet. The incident suggests that China’s balancing act among dueling sides in Myanmar’s civil war is becoming increasingly unstable. AFP reported on the Chinese government’s strong reaction to the incident: “China expresses its deep shock at the...
The latest draconian decree issued by the Taliban on Monday was a gradual media ban on all images...
International media coverage of China’s territorial disputes often focuses on India, Taiwan, and...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who has been on a nearly one-month hunger strike to protest his mistreatment in Shandong’s Lunan Prison. Many human rights groups and supporters have raised the alarm about Xu’s hunger strike, weight loss, and declining health, and have urged Chinese authorities to halt his mistreatment and provide him with medical care. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns have also spoken out on Xu’s behalf. #XuZhiyong on hunger strike, day 26: No update. It's...
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation...
Confronted with a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and socioeconomic shifts that...
On Thursday, the Canadian government announced that it will ban Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its 5G networks. The move comes as the Biden administration debates imposing further sanctions on Hikvision, a Chinese surveillance camera company, for supplying and operating equipment in Xinjiang mass detention camps. Both of these developments bring renewed attention to the role of Chinese technology companies in problematic surveillance activities and the role of sanctions in combating their alleged abuses. Catharine Tunney and Richard Raycraft from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...
On Monday of last week, Malaysian musician Namewee (Wee Meng Chee, 黃明志) learned that his YouTube...
A group of students under the impression they had discovered a WeChat “bug” that hides the phrase...
The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, Halloween revelry has been marred by strict police curfews, the detention of costume-clad partygoers, and bans on organized festivities. Meanwhile, censors have been vigorously erasing discussion of the Halloween crackdown from social media. The repressive atmosphere is a major departure from last year’s Halloween celebrations in Shanghai, which featured costumes that poked fun at authorities and that were hailed as a sign of the city’s cultural tolerance. At The New York Times, Vivian Wang...
Caving to online male backlash that included a threatened boycott, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com...
Several recent reports and articles highlight the experience of those in China who seek to leave...
On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was off to a good start in 2024, with reported 5.3% year-on-year GDP growth in the first quarter of the year. The better-than-expected data was touted by various Chinese state media outlets online, although many of those news posts had comment filtering enabled, perhaps in anticipation of negative or skeptical reactions from social media users. Two items in particular seemed to strike netizens as overly optimistic: the reported “nationwide average per-capita disposable income” figure of 11,539 yuan...
A recent WeChat post from oft-controversial entrepreneur, publicity hound, and philanthropist Chen...
Even before the lifting of China’s long-standing “zero-COVID” policy in early December of last...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang newsletter, detailing the work and attitudes of some of China’s legions of low-paid, overworked online content reviewers. These foot soldiers of censorship must often review sixty or seventy thousand pieces of content per day, working long hours of overtime with few prospects for career advancement. While some are true believers in the work, others are simply grabbing whatever work they can find in China’s bleak current job market, and their attitudes toward the job vary from...
The Shenzhou-19 spaceship carrying three of China’s youngest taikonauts successfully launched and...
China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to...
China’s “distant-water fishing” (DWF) activities are both figurative and literal. Figuratively, the term “fishing the high seas” (远洋捕捞, yuǎnyáng bǔlāo) describes the phenomenon of cash-strapped local authorities replenishing their coffers by arresting private business owners in other localities and seizing their assets. But in a literal sense, it refers to the thousands of Chinese fishing vessels that have sprawled across the globe to plunder fish stocks, often by anchoring in international waters and launching incursions into other countries’ maritime zones to expand their catch. This...
Two research reports published this week underscore how authorities in Tibet have displaced local...
At a recent summit in Ethiopia, the African Union (AU) decided to approve a 15-year continent-wide...
The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary on Tuesday, October 1. The anniversary is both political spectacle and the advent of a week-long holiday marked by decidedly apolitical leisure travel. On the eve of the anniversary, Xi Jinping delivered a speech in front of 3,000 guests, both foreign and domestic, in the Great Hall of the People. At The Guardian, Helen Davidson wrote about the relatively muted political celebrations in Beijing: “The road ahead will not be smooth, there will definitely be difficulties and obstacles, and we may encounter major tests such as...
New research documents the repressive effects of Hong Kong’s national security laws. This week,...
In the face of growing government repression, many residents of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and various...
While the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre was massively censored within mainland China and Hong Kong, people elsewhere around the world made tributes in order to highlight the incident and reflect on its significance in the present era. The Hongkonger compiled an inexhaustive list of commemorative events that took place in 18 cities across four continents. The Hong Kong Free Press reported on commemorations in Canada and the U.K., among other countries: On June 4, over 300 people joined an assembly in front of the Chinese Embassy in Britain to share and hear memories of the...
On Monday, May 20, Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party was inaugurated the president...
Over a whirlwind two weeks of diplomacy in Beijing, China has sought to strengthen its ties to...
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