Why Is a 1995 Poisoning Case the Top Topic on Chinese...
RACHEL LU, ANDREW J. NATHAN, SUSAN JAKES (& authors)With a population base of 1.3 billion people, China has no shortage of strange and gruesome crimes, but the attempted murder of Zhu Ling by thallium poisoning in 1995 is burning up China’s social media long after the trails have gone cold. Zhu, a brilliant and beautiful...
The Power of the Internet in China
GUOBIN YANGSince the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang’s pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to...
Why is China Still Messing with the Foreign Press?
ANDREW J. NATHAN, ISABEL HILTON, JONATHAN LANDRETH (& authors)To those raised in the Marxist tradition, nothing in the media happens by accident. In China, the flagship newspapers are still the “throat and tongue” of the ruling party, and their work is directed by the Party’s Propaganda Department. That’s the first...
No Closer to the Chinese Dream?
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH2013 began dramatically in China with a standoff between journalists and state propaganda authorities over a drastically rewritten New Year’s editorial at the Southern Weekly newspaper.In the first week of the New Year, the editors of Southern Weekly, a weekly newspaper in...
Media Censorship and Its Future
OUYANG BINThe year 2013 has gotten off to an inauspicious start for China’s press, especially for its most outspoken members. At the end of last year, when many of the country’s media were heralding newly installed Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Guangdong province as a modern...
Their Horizons Widening, China’s Web Users Look...
TEA LEAF NATIONLast week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet. Only a small proportion of that country’s 24 million people can access the World Wide Web, and the majority of the 1.5 million mobile phones there belong to political and...
Online and Off, Social Media Users Go to War for...
TEA LEAF NATIONWhen Mr. Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, rewrote and replaced the New Year’s editorial of the Southern Weekend newspaper without the consent of its editors, he probably did not think it would make much of a splash. Indeed, Mr. Tuo might have believed that...
The Old Fears of China’s New Leaders
JONATHAN MIRSKYI felt a shudder of déjà vu watching the mounting protests inside China this week of the Communist Party for censoring an editorial in Southern Weekend, a well-known liberal newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou. It is all too similar to the disciplining in April 1989 of...
Politics and the Chinese Language
PERRY LINKThe awarding of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese novelist Mo Yan has given rise to energetic debate, both within China’s borders and beyond. Earlier this month, ChinaFile ran an essay by Chinese literature scholar Charles Laughlin called “What Mo Yan’s...
Yu Jie: Awarding Mo Yan the Nobel Prize Was a “Huge...
OUYANG BINMo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm on December 10.The 57-year-old novelist often writes stories based on memories of his village childhood, and his work and his political views have triggered wide debate. In discussion with ChinaFile Associate Editor...
A Conservative Commentator Calls Out Chinese Liberals,...
TEA LEAF NATIONSpeech on the Chinese Internet, it seems, is beginning to thaw once more following the country’s leadership transition. After months of speculation, new Chinese leader Xi Jinping was announced on November 16 at the close of the 18th Party Congress, which accompanied a slowdown...
Myanmar Envy
BI CHENGChinese netizens’ reactions to tentative democratic reforms in neighboring Myanmar, including to the recent repeal of censorship rules for private publishers by the Southeast Asian nation’s reformist government, reflect just how closely it’s possible for average Chinese to...