Weibo Reacts To the Paris Olympics with a Shrug

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...

I am appalled that the first press conference I am giving as HKJA’s new chair is to announce that I was fired for taking up this position in a press union.”

— Hong-Kong based Wall Street Journal reporter Selina Cheng, announcing that she was fired by her employer after refusing to withdraw from the election for chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association (HKJA). Cheng has served on the board of HKJA, an industry union that advocates for freedom of speech, since 2021.

 

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Weibo Reacts To the Paris Olympics with a Shrug

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, China is expected to challenge the United States in the national gold medal count. Despite such rosy prognostications, and the Chinese public’s enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Games held in Beijing (which were partially overshadowed by tennis star Peng Shuai’s #MeToo accusation against a former top Party official), there has been little online fanfare about this...

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Courts, Governments Advance Efforts to Investigate Forced Labor in Xinjiang

Activists have long attempted to use legal systems to seek accountability for Uyghur forced labor and other potential crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. At the international level, China has effectively used its leverage to block efforts at accountability in the U.N. Some progress has been made at the E.U. level. Over the past few weeks, rights groups have made new gains at the domestic level across several countries. Last week, the U.S. government added aluminum, seafood, and PVC to its list of priority sectors for the enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, as detailed in...

Renmin University Professor Fired, Expelled from Party After Sexual Harassment Accusation

On Sunday, Renmin University Ph.D. candidate Wang Di publicly accused her doctoral supervisor Wang Guiyuan (no relation) of sexual harassment and assault in a video that went viral on Chinese social media. Her supervisor was previously the Party secretary and vice dean of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts. Displaying her university ID card and using her real name, Wang Di presented detailed evidence, including audio recordings and screenshots of messages, to describe the harassment and appeal for support. Kanis Leung from the Associated Press provided more information about Wang’s...

Weibo Reacts To the Paris Olympics with a Shrug

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, China is expected to challenge the United States in the national gold medal count. Despite such rosy prognostications, and the Chinese public’s enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Games held in Beijing (which were partially overshadowed by tennis star Peng Shuai’s #MeToo accusation against a former top Party official), there has been little online fanfare about this...

Party Propagandists Promote, Then Backtrack on “Xi as Reformer” Narratives Amid Third Plenum

The CCP’s recently concluded Third Plenum yielded a final communiqué that acknowledged current economic, geopolitical, and ideological risks and the need for continued systemic reforms but offered little (yet) in the way of specifics. Nevertheless, propagandists promoted various “Xi as Reformer” narratives in Chinese state media. Some of the claims, including one that Xi visited the “cradle of reform” Xiaogang village in Anhui province in 1978, were met with incredulity on Chinese social media. The pushback to these glorifications of Xi’s reformist image appears to have led to at least...

Wall Street Journal Fires Journalist Elected as Chair of HK Press Freedom Group

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Selina Cheng announced that she was fired after refusing her supervisor’s request to withdraw from the election for chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association (HKJA). Cheng was elected to the position on June 22 and assumed office on July 1. The HKJA has come under increased pressure in the wake of a national security crackdown that has empowered authorities to arrest journalists and force outlets to close. Cheng’s firing appears to highlight the questionable ways in which some outlets attempt to navigate the shrinking space for...

Translation: Special One-Month Reconnaissance Operation Against “Overseas Cyber Forces”

A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long operation, held in Beijing and involving over 40 Ministry of Public Security computer specialists from around the country, to combat “overseas cyber forces” in the battle for public opinion. The apparently leaked internal instructions from the Ministry of Public Security are likely to be the result of an email breach. They include the names and locations of many of the computer-specialist officers, as well as the name and contact information of the individual in charge of the operation. At some...

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

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...

Party Propagandists Promote, Then Backtrack on “Xi as Reformer” Narratives Amid Third Plenum

The CCP’s recently concluded Third Plenum yielded a final communiqué that acknowledged current economic, geopolitical, and ideological risks and the need for continued systemic reforms but offered little (yet) in the way of specifics. Nevertheless, propagandists promoted various “Xi as Reformer” narratives in Chinese state media. Some of the claims, including one that Xi visited the “cradle of reform” Xiaogang village in Anhui province in 1978, were met with incredulity on Chinese social media. The pushback to these glorifications of Xi’s reformist image appears to have led to at least...

Weibo Reacts To the Paris Olympics with a Shrug

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, China is expected to challenge the United States in the national gold medal count. Despite such rosy prognostications, and the Chinese public’s enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Games held in Beijing (which were partially overshadowed by tennis star Peng Shuai’s #MeToo accusation against a former top Party official), there has been little online fanfare about this...

Report: CCP-Linked Professional Associations in France Facilitate Tech Transfer, Political Influence

At the Prague-based Sinopsis, René Bigey has published a new report on the CCP’s use of professional associations to pursue technology transfer and political influence in France: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has developed a sophisticated strategy to transfer knowledge and technologies from abroad. Its implementation includes recruiting scholars and entrepreneurs for short-term or permanent positions in China or from abroad. As has been documented elsewhere, talent recruitment programs are often associated with misconduct and intellectual property theft. This study — the first...

Renmin University Professor Fired, Expelled from Party After Sexual Harassment Accusation

On Sunday, Renmin University Ph.D. candidate Wang Di publicly accused her doctoral supervisor Wang Guiyuan (no relation) of sexual harassment and assault in a video that went viral on Chinese social media. Her supervisor was previously the Party secretary and vice dean of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts. Displaying her university ID card and using her real name, Wang Di presented detailed evidence, including audio recordings and screenshots of messages, to describe the harassment and appeal for support. Kanis Leung from the Associated Press provided more information about Wang’s...

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...

Human Rights

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Renmin University Professor Fired, Expelled from Party After Sexual Harassment Accusation

On Sunday, Renmin University Ph.D. candidate Wang Di publicly accused her doctoral supervisor Wang Guiyuan (no relation) of sexual harassment and assault in a video that went viral on Chinese social media. Her supervisor was previously the Party secretary and vice dean of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts. Displaying her university ID card and using her real name, Wang Di presented detailed evidence, including audio recordings and screenshots of messages, to describe the harassment and appeal for support. Kanis Leung from the Associated Press provided more information about Wang’s...

Politics

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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...

Society

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Netizens Reflect on Anti-Japanese Propaganda After Stabbing at School Bus Stop

A stabbing at a school bus stop in Eastern China that left two Japanese nationals and a Chinese national injured is the latest instance of anti-foreigner violence to rock China in the last month. Two weeks ago, four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College were stabbed in a park in northern China. Details of this latest attack are sparse: a Japanese mother and her child were stabbed while waiting for a school bus to Suzhou’s Japanese School, a school for Japanese children that follows a Japanese curriculum. Both sustained minor injuries. A Chinese bystander who attempted to prevent the...

China & the World

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

More than three years after the military’s coup d’état, Myanmar remains engulfed in instability and civil war. China has more leverage in Myanmar than any other foreign power, and the ongoing crisis along the China-Myanmar border has pushed China to take on a larger role in the conflict. Thus far, China has pursued a delicate balancing act by attempting to “play all sides” and safeguard its economic interests while calling for a peaceful resolution. But these political and economic imperatives have occasionally clashed with each other and with China’s domestic concerns, to the...

Law

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Renmin University Professor Fired, Expelled from Party After Sexual Harassment Accusation

On Sunday, Renmin University Ph.D. candidate Wang Di publicly accused her doctoral supervisor Wang Guiyuan (no relation) of sexual harassment and assault in a video that went viral on Chinese social media. Her supervisor was previously the Party secretary and vice dean of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts. Displaying her university ID card and using her real name, Wang Di presented detailed evidence, including audio recordings and screenshots of messages, to describe the harassment and appeal for support. Kanis Leung from the Associated Press provided more information about Wang’s...

Information Revolution

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WeChat “Bug” Turns Out To Be Obscure Insult for Xi Jinping

A group of students under the impression they had discovered a WeChat “bug” that hides the phrase “200 jin of dumplings” (roughly 220 pounds) had in fact stumbled upon an obscure insult for Xi Jinping that triggers automatic censorship.  In the course of daily conversation, the students found that messages preceded by the term “200 jin of dumplings” (200斤饺子) were not received by their counterparts. Juvenile hilarity ensued. They sent each other curses and confessions: “200 jin of dumplings, you’re a stupid c***,” “200 jin of dumplings, you’re an idiot,” “200 jin of dumplings, piggy,” and...

Culture & the Arts

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Weibo Reacts To the Paris Olympics with a Shrug

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, China is expected to challenge the United States in the national gold medal count. Despite such rosy prognostications, and the Chinese public’s enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Games held in Beijing (which were partially overshadowed by tennis star Peng Shuai’s #MeToo accusation against a former top Party official), there has been little online fanfare about this...

The Great Divide

Latest

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

Latest

Report: CCP-Linked Professional Associations in France Facilitate Tech Transfer, Political Influence

At the Prague-based Sinopsis, René Bigey has published a new report on the CCP’s use of professional associations to pursue technology transfer and political influence in France: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has developed a sophisticated strategy to transfer knowledge and technologies from abroad. Its implementation includes recruiting scholars and entrepreneurs for short-term or permanent positions in China or from abroad. As has been documented elsewhere, talent recruitment programs are often associated with misconduct and intellectual property theft. This study — the first...

Environment

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Reports Detail Forced Displacement and Violent Reprisals Against Protest in Tibet

Two research reports published this week underscore how authorities in Tibet have displaced local communities to impose state-sponsored projects, undermining environmental protection and human rights. The collaborative research network Turquoise Roof published the first report, “Occupying Tibet’s rivers: China’s hydropower ‘battlefield’ in Tibet.” The report details how violent paramilitary reprisals have stifled protests against the construction of the planned Kamtok hydropower dam along the Drichu (Yangtze) river, threatening the displacement of villages and Buddhist monasteries: The...

Hong Kong

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Wall Street Journal Fires Journalist Elected as Chair of HK Press Freedom Group

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Selina Cheng announced that she was fired after refusing her supervisor’s request to withdraw from the election for chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association (HKJA). Cheng was elected to the position on June 22 and assumed office on July 1. The HKJA has come under increased pressure in the wake of a national security crackdown that has empowered authorities to arrest journalists and force outlets to close. Cheng’s firing appears to highlight the questionable ways in which some outlets attempt to navigate the shrinking space for...

Taiwan

Latest

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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