‘Islamic State Killings: China’s Censored Social Media Is in Uproar, so What’s Beijing Thinking?

Coco Liu
South China Morning Post
The deaths of two Chinese prompt widespread calls for retribution. Beijing, seeking favour in the region with its Belt and Road Initiative, remains curiously silent.

Online Gossip Clampdown in China Leads to Netizen Outcry

Yuan Yang, Yingzhi Yang
Financial Times
Chinese netizens have decried a government campaign to shut down many of the nation's top celebrity gossip outlets as Beijing escalates its control over online content.

Sinica Podcast

11.23.16

Lines of Fracture in Chinese Public Opinion: A Conversation with Ma Tianjie

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
On this week’s episode, our guest Ma Tianjie, editor of the bilingual environmental website chinadialogue and the blogger behind Chublic Opinion, untangles the complexities and contradictions of online discussions in China. Ma shares insights into...

Why Chinese Netizens Cheer Trump

Zak Dychtwald
To online 'Trump Guards,' the U.S. race pits a corrupt official against a plain-spoken outsider

Media

04.21.15

This Chart Explains Everything You Need to Know About Chinese Internet Censorship

David Wertime
What goes through a Chinese web user’s head the moment before he or she hits the “publish” button? Pundits, scholars, and everyday netizens have spent years trying to parse the (ever-shifting) rules of the Chinese Internet. Although Chinese...

Zhou Xiaoping, Director of History

Josh Rudolph
China Digital Times
Since nationalistic blogger Zhou Xiaoping’s “positive energy” won accolades from Xi Jinping at the Beijing Forum on Literature in Art last week, he has been the subject of much netizen scrutiny, and some have taken him to task for his blatant...

China’s Netizens React To Kunming Station Attacks With Anger, Grief

Kevin Tang
Buzzfeed
Panic, calls against racial profiling, and anger at Western coverage permeate Weibo in absence of ongoing TV coverage of terror attacks.

Viewpoint

01.24.13

China at the Tipping Point?

Perry Link & Xiao Qiang
Of all the transformations that Chinese society has undergone over the past fifteen years, the most dramatic has been the growth of the Internet. Information now circulates and public opinions are now expressed on electronic bulletin boards with...

Tell-All on the Internet Fells Chinese Official

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
China's top guardian of Communist literature is said to have provided a woman with a fellowship at his research institute in exchange for $1,600. The sex and jewelry came later.

Media

10.26.12

Myanmar Envy

Bi Cheng
Chinese 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...

Radio: Shanghai Residents Discuss U.S. Presidential Debate

Frank Langfitt
NPR
Eight Chinese watched and discussed Tuesday's U.S. presidential debate at the NPR Shanghai bureau.

Media

10.11.12

Netizens React to Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize

Ouyang Bin
Upon hearing the news that novelist Mo Yan was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, a flurry of messages about the fifty-seven-year-old Shandong native circulated on weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, expressing decidedly mixed opinions...

Envy and Spectacle: America’s Presidential Race Finds an Adoring Audience in China

Helen Gao
Atlantic
After the Democratic and Republican National Conventions closed, as candidates charged back to the campaign trail and as the American media moved on, the campaign speeches made their way across the Pacific Ocean to China, where they are still...

Media

09.16.12

What Microblogs Aren’t Telling You About China

Amy Qin
In China, where notions of freedom of speech and freedom of expression are seen by the government as secondary to the all-important ideal of social stability, there is little space, if any, for truly open and unmediated public conversation...