I took out my phone to record what the bailiffs were doing, and they demanded that I delete the recording. I asked them to show me the legal provisions barring recording of law enforcement activities while court was in recess. They refused to do so, and grabbed my phone."

— From defense lawyer He Zhijuan's first-person account of a clash with court bailiffs in Guizhou, who attempted to thwart He and her colleagues from checking that prosecutors were following correct legal procedures in an extortion case

 

CDT Highlights

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Online and Offline Tributes Paid to Suzhou’s School-Bus Attendant Heroine Hu Youping

Online and offline tributes continue to pour in for Hu Youping, the Chinese school bus attendant who was fatally stabbed when she tried to prevent a knife-wielding man from attacking Japanese schoolchildren and parents at a bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu province last week. A Japanese preschooler and his mother also sustained non-fatal stab wounds, and police promptly arrested the attacker, an unemployed man in his 50s surnamed Zhou. The attack followed June’s non-fatal stabbings of four American teachers in a park in Jilin province, and a knife attack in May at a hospital in Yunnan province...

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Scams, Weapons, and Resource Extraction Entangle Chinese Actors in Myanmar Civil War

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Chinese Feminist Activists in Nine Cities Rally in Support of Imprisoned Rights Activists Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing

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Online and Offline Tributes Paid to Suzhou’s School-Bus Attendant Heroine Hu Youping

Online and offline tributes continue to pour in for Hu Youping, the Chinese school bus attendant who was fatally stabbed when she tried to prevent a knife-wielding man from attacking Japanese schoolchildren and parents at a bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu province last week. A Japanese preschooler and his mother also sustained non-fatal stab wounds, and police promptly arrested the attacker, an unemployed man in his 50s surnamed Zhou. The attack followed June’s non-fatal stabbings of four American teachers in a park in Jilin province, and a knife attack in May at a hospital in Yunnan province...

Online and Offline Tributes Paid to Suzhou’s School-Bus Attendant Heroine Hu Youping

Online and offline tributes continue to pour in for Hu Youping, the Chinese school bus attendant who was fatally stabbed when she tried to prevent a knife-wielding man from attacking Japanese schoolchildren and parents at a bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu province last week. A Japanese preschooler and his mother also sustained non-fatal stab wounds, and police promptly arrested the attacker, an unemployed man in his 50s surnamed Zhou. The attack followed June’s non-fatal stabbings of four American teachers in a park in Jilin province, and a knife attack in May at a hospital in Yunnan province...

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New eBook: China Digital Times Lexicon, 20th Anniversary Edition

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Online and Offline Tributes Paid to Suzhou’s School-Bus Attendant Heroine Hu Youping

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Quote of the Day: Courtroom Altercation “Reflects the State of the Justice System as a Whole”

This week, defense lawyer He Zhijuan posted her account of a clash between her and her colleagues and court bailiffs in Guizhou. According to one Weibo comment highlighted by CDT Chinese editors, “The situation in this courtroom reflects the state of the justice system as a whole.” The incident took place a week before the anniversary of the “Black Friday” or “709” crackdown in 2015, in which China’s burgeoning community of rights defense lawyers and legal activists was systematically demolished. Although in the Guizhou case He’s colleagues...

Quote of the Day: Official Disposable Income Figures Derided as “Today’s Daily Dose of Humor”

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Human Rights

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Chinese Feminist Activists in Nine Cities Rally in Support of Imprisoned Rights Activists Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing

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Politics

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Society

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Stabbing of Americans in Jilin Draws Comparisons to the Boxer Rebels

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China & the World

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China Shuns Swiss Peace Summit to Support Russia

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Law

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Quote of the Day: Courtroom Altercation “Reflects the State of the Justice System as a Whole”

This week, defense lawyer He Zhijuan posted her account of a clash between her and her colleagues and court bailiffs in Guizhou. According to one Weibo comment highlighted by CDT Chinese editors, “The situation in this courtroom reflects the state of the justice system as a whole.” The incident took place a week before the anniversary of the “Black Friday” or “709” crackdown in 2015, in which China’s burgeoning community of rights defense lawyers and legal activists was systematically demolished. Although in the Guizhou case He’s colleagues...

Information Revolution

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Culture & the Arts

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Translation: He Jiayan on the “Accelerating Collapse” of the Chinese Internet

Late last month, a WeChat article about the “collapse of the Chinese-language internet” attracted tens of thousands of views and spurred an enthusiastic response before it was eventually censored. Written by He Jiayan, a blogger who frequently writes about notable businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the article explores the massive and accelerating deletion of content from the Chinese-language internet, particularly from the pre-mobile internet era.  A recent New York Times article by Li Yuan mentioned the popularity of the censored WeChat article, and noted some concerning statistics about...

The Great Divide

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Quote of the Day: Official Disposable Income Figures Derided as “Today’s Daily Dose of Humor”

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...

Sci-Tech

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Chinese Social Media Platforms Launch Crackdown on Extreme Nationalism and Xenophobic Hate-Speech After Fatal Suzhou Stabbing

Chinese social media platforms have announced a belated crackdown on “extreme nationalism” and xenophobic hate-speech online, following last week’s fatal stabbing at a school bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in which a Japanese mother and child were injured by a knife-wielding man, and Chinese school bus attendant Hu Youping was killed after trying to intervene. Just two weeks earlier, four visiting American teachers were stabbed and injured by another man at a public park in Jilin, in northeastern China. Both stabbings are believed to have been motivated by xenophobic sentiment, and...

Environment

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Reports Detail Forced Displacement and Violent Reprisals Against Protest in Tibet

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Hong Kong

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New “June Fourth” Sensitive Words Reference PLA Medals and Hong Kong Musicians

In China, the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre was met with all-out digital censorship that quashed overt online mourning. In Hong Kong, efforts to publicly commemorate “June Fourth” were ruthlessly suppressed by police. Globally, across 18 cities spanning four continents, thousands gathered in remembrance. Those within China seeking to share their memories of the spring and summer of 1989 were forced to publish their recollections in foreign outlets, a selection of which CDT archived and translated. The dominant theme on the mainland, however, was censorship. CDT Chinese has...

Taiwan

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35th Tiananmen Anniversary Commemorated Around the World

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...

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