For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun,...
Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent graduate of a Jiangsu technical school stabbed eight people on the campus to death. On Tuesday, a man rammed elementary...
At the end of a landmark national security trial that concluded on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s High Court...
At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent...
On Saturday, Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden met in Lima, Peru on the sidelines of the...
Under pressure from censorship and conservative public opinion, the original standards that guided our industry are being abandoned. [...] Apart from sticking to my guns when selecting topics to report on, I really don’t know what else to do."
— From an essay by a young journalist about the many challenges of investigative reporting in China
For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and frivolity. But the sheer volume of cyclists on the road—as many as 100,000 or more per night—led to traffic jams, littering, safety concerns, and seas of abandoned rental bikes. It may also have piqued government suspicions about the students’ possible motives for making the late-night trek en masse. There soon ensued a crackdown on the trend, with increased patrols by...
Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent...
Despite this year’s disappointing, propagandistic line-up of winners for the 34th China...
On the eve of “Journalists’ Day” on November 8, the All-China Journalists Association announced...
A murderous rampage in Zhuhai, Guangdong that left 35 dead and scores wounded was met with a now...
Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing...
A veil of silence has fallen around the car ramming attack that killed 35 and injured 43 in Zhuhai, Guangdong, this Monday. The shocking attack—the most deadly “Xianzhong” incident in a year marked by them—has become a highly politically sensitive incident. The Zhuhai attack was the first such mass killing to elicit a public response from Xi Jinping. In a statement released on Wednesday, Xi urged “all-out efforts” to treat the injured and demanded severe punishment for the perpetrator. Notably, according to Xinhua, he also instructed: “all localities and relevant authorities to draw...
China is leading the global trend towards cyber sovereignty, a norm based on the use of technology...
Xi Jinping’s latest diplomatic tour began this week in Peru, where he will participate in the...
Posting about politics on Weibo can sometimes look like a game of Russian Roulette: without...
Given the potential global consequences of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it has naturally...
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 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,...
For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and frivolity. But the sheer volume of cyclists on the road—as many as 100,000 or more per night—led to traffic jams, littering, safety concerns, and seas of abandoned rental bikes. It may also have piqued government suspicions about the students’ possible motives for making the late-night trek en masse. There soon ensued a crackdown on the trend, with increased patrols by...
Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent...
Despite this year’s disappointing, propagandistic line-up of winners for the 34th China...
On the eve of “Journalists’ Day” on November 8, the All-China Journalists Association announced...
A murderous rampage in Zhuhai, Guangdong that left 35 dead and scores wounded was met with a now...
Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing...
At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent bookstores and other cultural channels and venues: Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China, swept up in the ruling Communist Party’s crackdown on dissent and free expression. The Associated Press found that at least a dozen bookstores in the world’s second-largest economy have been shuttered or targeted for closure in the last few months alone, squeezing the already tight space for press freedom. One bookstore owner was arrested over four months ago. The crackdown has had...
At the end of a landmark national security trial that concluded on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s High Court...
On Saturday, Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden met in Lima, Peru on the sidelines of the...
A veil of silence has fallen around the car ramming attack that killed 35 and injured 43 in...
Despite this year’s disappointing, propagandistic line-up of winners for the 34th China...
On the eve of “Journalists’ Day” on November 8, the All-China Journalists Association announced...
At the end of a landmark national security trial that concluded on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced 45 pro-democracy figures to up to ten years in prison. Forty-seven democratic politicians, activists, and organizers were arrested and charged in January 2021 with conspiracy to commit subversion under the National Security Law. The charges related to their participation in organizing an unofficial primary election in 2020 ahead of a legislative election. In February 2023, the trial began. In May of this year, the court convicted 14 defendants who contested the accusations and...
The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary on Tuesday, October 1. The...
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...
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...
On Saturday, Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden met in Lima, Peru on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The meeting was their third in-person, and likely their last as leaders of their respective countries. China-U.S. bilateral relations are expected to enter a much more volatile period following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election earlier this month. Alluding to Trump’s hawkish economic plans vis-a-vis China, Xi stated that “neither decoupling nor supply chain disruption is a solution,” and he called on APEC members to “tear...
Xi Jinping’s latest diplomatic tour began this week in Peru, where he will participate in the...
Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing...
China has extended its dominance at home and abroad over critical minerals that are essential to...
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...
For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and frivolity. But the sheer volume of cyclists on the road—as many as 100,000 or more per night—led to traffic jams, littering, safety concerns, and seas of abandoned rental bikes. It may also have piqued government suspicions about the students’ possible motives for making the late-night trek en masse. There soon ensued a crackdown on the trend, with increased patrols by...
At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent...
Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent...
A veil of silence has fallen around the car ramming attack that killed 35 and injured 43 in...
Despite this year’s disappointing, propagandistic line-up of winners for the 34th China...
On the eve of “Journalists’ Day” on November 8, the All-China Journalists Association announced...
China is leading the global trend towards cyber sovereignty, a norm based on the use of technology to control what sort of information can be accessed and exchanged within a national boundary and by whom. Several recent reports shed light on these practices and their diffusion around the world. This week, Sam Ju published a report for the Open Technology Fund titled, “Blocked by Numbers: The Impact of Real-Name Registration Policies on Transnational Access to Chinese Social Media Apps.” The report shows how real-name registration (RNR) policies create an “ideological security firewall” that...
Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing...
The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin...
China Media Project has published a translation of an extended article by Qin Shi at the Mang Mang...
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...
Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent graduate of a Jiangsu technical school stabbed eight people on the campus to death. On Tuesday, a man rammed elementary school students with his car in Hunan, leaving several injured. These are just the latest in a longer string of similar incidents. The back-to-back-to-back attacks have provoked soul searching on Weibo, where many have asked, “How can we solve this?”: 李庄：One after another. How can we solve this? It calls for reflection. @JintangPeople’sProcuratorate, @JintangPeople’sCourt,...
At the end of a landmark national security trial that concluded on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s High Court...
A veil of silence has fallen around the car ramming attack that killed 35 and injured 43 in...
The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin...
Concern is mounting over the health of imprisoned civil society activist and human-rights lawyer...
Last week, the Jamestown Foundation published the second installment of a two-part investigation...
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...
On Tuesday, Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States. The election had been closely observed from China, by both the government and the populace. The Chinese government’s official response has so far been muted. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “We respect the choice of the American people and congratulate Mr. Trump on being elected as president of the United States.” Xi Jinping later called Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory and express hope for this new period in U.S.-China relations. Trump’s election did not catch the...
Confronted with a rapidly aging population, a declining birthrate, and socioeconomic shifts that...
The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) published its fifth election report (PDF) on...
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...
Domestic critics of the Chinese Communist Party sometimes compare it to a mafia; that was...
One of the latest trends on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu is for women to share...
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...
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...
Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent graduate of a Jiangsu technical school stabbed eight people on the campus to death. On Tuesday, a man rammed elementary school students with his car in Hunan, leaving several injured. These are just the latest in a longer string of similar incidents. The back-to-back-to-back attacks have provoked soul searching on Weibo, where many have asked, “How can we solve this?”: 李庄：One after another. How can we solve this? It calls for reflection. @JintangPeople’sProcuratorate, @JintangPeople’sCourt,...
At the end of a landmark national security trial that concluded on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s High Court...
A veil of silence has fallen around the car ramming attack that killed 35 and injured 43 in...
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...
For college students in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, it was a brief moment of freedom: a short-lived craze for cycling overnight on ride-share rental bikes to the nearby city of Kaifeng for a bit of fun, food, and frivolity. But the sheer volume of cyclists on the road—as many as 100,000 or more per night—led to traffic jams, littering, safety concerns, and seas of abandoned rental bikes. It may also have piqued government suspicions about the students’ possible motives for making the late-night trek en masse. There soon ensued a crackdown on the trend, with increased patrols by...
At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent...
Despite this year’s disappointing, propagandistic line-up of winners for the 34th China...
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 is leading the global trend towards cyber sovereignty, a norm based on the use of technology to control what sort of information can be accessed and exchanged within a national boundary and by whom. Several recent reports shed light on these practices and their diffusion around the world. This week, Sam Ju published a report for the Open Technology Fund titled, “Blocked by Numbers: The Impact of Real-Name Registration Policies on Transnational Access to Chinese Social Media Apps.” The report shows how real-name registration (RNR) policies create an “ideological security firewall” that...
Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing...
The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin...
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...
At the end of a landmark national security trial that concluded on Tuesday, Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced 45 pro-democracy figures to up to ten years in prison. Forty-seven democratic politicians, activists, and organizers were arrested and charged in January 2021 with conspiracy to commit subversion under the National Security Law. The charges related to their participation in organizing an unofficial primary election in 2020 ahead of a legislative election. In February 2023, the trial began. In May of this year, the court convicted 14 defendants who contested the accusations and...
The People’s Republic of China celebrated its 75th anniversary on Tuesday, October 1. The...
New research documents the repressive effects of Hong Kong’s national security laws. This week,...
At the Associated Press, Fu Ting reports mounting pressure on China’s independent bookstores and other cultural channels and venues: Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China, swept up in the ruling Communist Party’s crackdown on dissent and free expression. The Associated Press found that at least a dozen bookstores in the world’s second-largest economy have been shuttered or targeted for closure in the last few months alone, squeezing the already tight space for press freedom. One bookstore owner was arrested over four months ago. The crackdown has had...
Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing...
While the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre was massively censored within mainland China...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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