Competitors Try Curbing China Mobile’s 4G Urge
CAIXINThe wireless Internet technology race is intensifying a longstanding rivalry between China’s largest mobile phone operator, China Mobile, and its smaller competitors China Telecom and China Unicom.Since 2011, China Mobile customers in fifteen cities nationwide have been...
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...
Tencent Lets WeChat’s Rapid Growth Do the Talking
CAIXINTencent Holdings Ltd.’s free messaging service, WeChat, has seen its popularity grow among both individual users and businesses, even amid a dispute with the Big Three telecom operators [China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom].Since launching in January 2011, WeChat, the...
Censored: A Chinese Journalist’s Inside View
JONAH KESSEL, COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTSJournalist Liu Jianfeng worked at the China Economic Times newspaper in Beijing for fifteen years. Eventually, frustration with the nation’s state-controlled media system and pressure from his colleagues prompted him to quit. He then did brief stints reporting for China Reform...
Why Did Apple Apologize to Chinese Consumers and What...
JEREMY GOLDKORN, ISABEL HILTON, DAVID WERTIME (& authors)Jeremy Goldkorn:On March 22, before the foreign media or Apple themselves seemed to have grasped the seriousness of the CCTV attacks on the Californian behemoth, I wrote a post on Danwei.com that concluded:“The signs are clear that regulators and establishment media would both...
The Men Are Louder: A Gender Analysis of Weibo
TEA LEAF NATIONDoes Sina Weibo provide an equal platform for expression for both men and women in China? According to a recent study conducted by Sun Huan, a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies and a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at MIT, the answer is probably no....
‘Zombies’ and ‘Reincarnation’
TEA LEAF NATIONSina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, announced on February 20 that it had surpassed half a billion users—more people than live in South America, and approximately the population of North America. Thickly-settled Europe edges out Weibo by about 230,000, but the micro-...
Dirty Business for China’s Internet Scrubbers
CAIXINFlames of a public relations disaster were licking at the heels of a private equity firm when China’s most notorious Internet-scrubbing company rode to the rescue.Saving the Shenzhen-based firm’s image was not cheap, and it took more than two months to douse the flames of...
China’s 3D Printing: Not a Revolution—Yet
CAIXINEngineers, inventors, and industrial futurists in China are setting sights on a new technological frontier as three-dimensional printing slowly revolutionizes manufacturing.A Beijing University research team, for example, has been working on what industry sources say is a...
On China’s Twitter, Discussion of Hacking Attacks...
TEA LEAF NATION, DAVID WERTIMEAs The New York Times reported yesterday evening, U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant has just released a deeply troubling report called “Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units.” The report alleges wide-spread hacking sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army,...
Cyber Attacks—What’s the Best Response?
JONATHAN LANDRETH, JAMES FALLOWS, XIAO QIANG (& authors)Jonathan Landreth:With regular ChinaFile Conversation contributor Elizabeth Economy on the road, I turned to her colleague Adam Segal, Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Segal said that “the time for naming and...
China Air Daily
MICHAEL ZHAOBeijing’s air pollution regularly makes international headlines. But exactly how bad is the air in the Chinese capital, home to 20 million people? That’s the question China Air Daily strives to answer—in pictures we take every single day from the same spot.Air pollution...