On the Chinese internet, wall-to-wall state media coverage of the Chinese Olympic delegation’s departure for the 2024 Paris Games has been met with a shrug. With 405 Chinese athletes slated to compete across 236 events,...
The stabbing of four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College in a Jilin park has become the latest flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. A Chinese national who attempted to intervene in the attack was also stabbed. An official...
China’s hottest television show, HunanTV’s “Singer 2024,” has inspired nationalist angst after two foreign contestants took first and second place—easily besting a field that included legendary Chinese pop star Na Ying. The show...
Xi Jinping’s New Era has inspired the creation of a host of “new chengyu”: idiomatic, often four-character, literary expressions that are the kernel of a larger tale. The following New Era chengyu are all references to infamous...
Hu Chenfeng, a Chinese content creator who first rose to fame making videos about poverty, has been suspended from Bilibili and Weibo after a livestream viewer asked him: “Do you think Xi Jinping is a dictator?” CDT a published...
Beijing’s half-marathon is under investigation after three runners from Kenya and Ethiopia appeared to allow a Chinese runner to win. The odd ending of the race saw Willy Mnangat and Robert Keter of Kenya and Dejene Hailu of...
One of the subtler ways Chinese internet users voice their displeasure with the status quo is through “pinkfishing” (粉红钓鱼, fěnhóng diàoyú), tricking nationalist “little pinks” into criticizing Party leaders—generally by quoting...
Explaining a meme often takes the wind out of a joke’s sails. Not so in this case. A recent Xi Jinping quote published by Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, has breathed new life into a long-running meme...
The use of the standard Party formulation of Xi Jinping “pointing the way forward” on various policy issues has become so commonplace that the phrase has become an object of satire, a way of mocking Xi’s cult of personality and...
This month, there have been a number of incidents—some major and some minor—that illustrate the “U-lock” mentality, a phrase that is sometimes used as shorthand to describe vitriolic xenophobic (particularly anti-Japanese)...
Reading between the lines of Xi Jinping’s foreign trips is often a subtle art; not so during his latest trip to Vietnam. China Central Television, the Party-state’s premier broadcaster, unwittingly uploaded a video of a...
A fawning Xinhua article on Xi Jinping’s concern for citizens affected by natural disasters has become the latest piece of “low-level red, high-level black” propaganda. Intended to tout Xi’s steadfast leadership, it...
Hangzhou’s Center for the Practice of Whole-Process People’s Democracy has become the butt of online jokes about China’s lack of democracy. Whole-process people’s democracy is Party-speak for the deliberative elements of China’s...
The death of Li Keqiang has dominated discussion on the Chinese internet. Censors have tightly controlled all commentary on his death. One directive, published earlier today, instructed media outlets to “pay particular attention...
A year after his protest against Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party atop Beijing’s Sitong Bridge, netizens continue to ask: where is Peng Lifa? On October 13, 2022, Peng hung two banners from Sitong Bridge that read: “We...
A skit reenacting former Japanese President Shinzo Abe’s assassination—staged during a high school field day in Zaozhuang, Shandong—has reignited online debate over rising anti-Japanese sentiment in China. Abe’s assassination in...
With hundreds of documented (and censored) online sobriquets, Xi Jinping is arguably the most nicknamed leader in recent Chinese history. To stay ahead of the censors, online Chinese have long resorted to using homophones,...
An underpass in Zhengzhou has quietly become a site of contention over artistic freedom. A photograph of the poem “Momma” by the little-known artist Zhang Boyi, graffitied underneath a Zhengzhou bridge in May, went viral on...
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