This week on Sinica, we are pleased to present a live show recorded earlier this week at The Bookworm in Beijing, where Kaiser Kuo interviewed Jonathan Fenby, author of the book Will China Dominate the 21st Century?
Michelle Song, twenty-four, studies international relations at Beijing’s prestigious Peking University and lives in a dormitory, so she doesn’t watch television regularly and doesn’t subscribe to newspapers. But this has not hampered her ability to keep up with the headlines: Like many Chinese, Song uses her smart phone to forage for breaking news. Over the past year, she’s increasingly come to rely on a new tool: WeChat, a social messaging app owned by Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings Ltd that was launched in January, 2011.
Welcome to the big leagues, WeChat.
Yawei Liu directs the China Program at The Carter Center. He is the Zijiang Professor of Political Science at East China Normal University in Shanghai and teaches contemporary Chinese politics at Emory University in Atlanta. He edits the websites China Elections and Governance and US-China Perception Monitor.
When another user tries to view that same page from his or her computer, the post about Zhou Yongkang is missing.
A post, indicated by a red arrow above, about Zhou Yongkang successfully appears on one user’s microblogging page.
Earlier this week, Chinese Internet services blocked searches for the phrase mìshū bāng (秘书帮).
Jason Q. Ng is a research fellow at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs, where he co-authored, with Lotus Ruan, Jeffrey Knockel, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata, the report “One App, Two Systems: How WeChat Uses One Censorship Policy in China and Another Internationally.” Ng wrote the book Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (And Why). He is also a research consultant at China Digital Times, where he helps develop censorship monitoring tools. His research and writing have been featured in publications including Le Monde, The Wall Street Journal’s “China Real Time” blog, The Atlantic, BBC World Service, VICE, and Foreign Affairs. Ng was previously a 2013 Google Policy Fellow and has worked as a book editor at The New Press and Metropolitan Books. He graduated from Brown University and studied East Asian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
This is part of a special series of articles produced by thethirdpole.net on the future of the Yarlung Tsangpo river—one of the world’s great transboundary rivers—which starts on the Tibetan Plateau before passing through India and Bangladesh.
The pressure posed by ethnic unrest is the biggest story on the Chinese horizon, and that struggle—the pressure from below, and the response it will bring—just moved into the foreground.
