Following Monday’s news of a late-night helicopter crash in heavy fog that killed Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and six others (including crew members), some Chinese social...
Chinese netizens have had a lot to say about economist Ma Jiantang’s prescription for adapting to the “era of longevity” by reclassifying workers between the ages of 60-70 as “the youthful elderly,” those between the ages of...
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...
On April 14, Sina News Hot Topics published a lengthy article on Weibo under the clickbait headline “The First Batch of DINKs, Exposed: Where Are They Now, and Do They All Regret Not Having Kids?” The four-part article focused...
A recent WeChat post from oft-controversial entrepreneur, publicity hound, and philanthropist Chen Guangbiao urging the Chinese government to keep its hands off people’s pocketbooks has attracted many supportive comments from...
A Party organization’s flippant invocation of “World War III” using video game terms went viral over the weekend, thrilling some nationalists but perturbing other Chinese netizens. The video was later removed from Bilibili and...
A recent donation from a medical non-governmental organization (NGO) to the Beijing municipal and Chinese central governments has raised eyebrows and prompted online discussion about the legality of a medical charity...
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...
In recent weeks, both the Nobel prize-winning novelist Mo Yan and the Chinese bottled water company Nongfu Spring have come under fire from extreme Chinese nationalists, who have accused them of being insufficiently patriotic....
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s sudden death last Friday in an Arctic prison was scarcely mentioned by Chinese state or commercial media, and what coverage there is has simply echoed Russian government talking points....
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)...
Some recent restrictions placed on historical books, museum exhibits, and academic discourse have brought renewed attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to rewrite history, control the historical narrative, and...
In this poetic essay, first published in Matters, author Lola muses on the various types of walls that restrict our freedom of speech, thought, movement, and association: I cannot fight the wall I only dream I could (from...
In mainland China, August 1 is known as PLA Day or Army Day, and commemorates the establishment of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1927. This year, the celebration of the PLA’s 96th anniversary coincided with a...
On May 18, 2023, blogger and activist Wu Gan was released from prison after serving an eight-year sentence for “subversion of state power.” Active in rights defense cases since 2009, Wu Gan (whose screen name was “Super Vulgar...
Three years and three months after whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang’s death from COVID-19, the “Wailing Wall” that emerged in the comments section under his last Weibo post continues to serve as a repository for the hopes, dreams,...
People’s Daily Online breathed new life into a stale meme this past week with an opinion piece titled “We Cannot Let Vulgar Online Slang Poison Our Children” that railed against online slang and vloggers. The piece singled out...
On February 15, just weeks before the opening of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) legislative session in Beijing, thousands of Chinese retirees in the cities of Wuhan and Dalian held large demonstrations against...
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