June 4, the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, is among the most sensitive dates on the Chinese political calendar. Any attempts to draw attention to the event are routinely censored on the Chinese internet. This year, as...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white banners with red, hand-painted political slogans to the railings of a pedestrian overpass near a bus station in Chengdu, and unfurled...
Posting about politics on Weibo can sometimes look like a game of Russian Roulette: without knowing where the pitfalls lie, at some point one is bound to run into trouble. Hot takes can lead to quick suspensions. Asking for...
The political atmosphere in Venezuela remains fraught in the weeks after its presidential election. While President Nicolás Maduro’s loyalist-packed supreme court backed his claim of victory on Thursday, the opposition produced...
Hu Xijin has seemingly been banned from posting to Chinese social media platforms. Hu, formerly the editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid Global Times, appears to have run into trouble for “misconstruing” the...
Following Monday’s news of a late-night helicopter crash in heavy fog that killed Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and six others (including crew members), some Chinese social...
The use of the standard Party formulation of Xi Jinping “pointing the way forward” on various policy issues has become so commonplace that the phrase has become an object of satire, a way of mocking Xi’s cult of personality and...
Four years after the death from COVID of Dr. Li Wenliang, the young Wuhan ophthalmologist who alerted colleagues to the emerging novel coronavirus, tributes to the widely admired doctor continue to pour in, despite some online...
“Rejoicing over a disaster (or mocking or insulting the victims of disaster) in this way makes the citizens of this great nation infinitely less civilized.” – From an essay by WeChat blogger 江湖挑灯看剑 (Jiānghú tiǎo dēng kàn jiàn),...
Current affairs blogger Xiang Dongliang has had his Weibo account banned for reporting Hu Xijin, a nationalist blogger and retired editor-in-chief of the Global Times, for using a VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall of China...
A recent comment by Sheng Laiyun, deputy director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, has attracted a fair amount of negative attention online. Addressing China’s declining population growth at an October 18...
A Weibo user who works as a computer programmer in Chengde, Hebei province, has reported that he was fined and had three years of income confiscated by the local public security bureau for using a virtual private network (VPN)...
With hundreds of documented (and censored) online sobriquets, Xi Jinping is arguably the most nicknamed leader in recent Chinese history. To stay ahead of the censors, online Chinese have long resorted to using homophones,...
Earlier this week, Apple removed over 100 generative AI and ChatGPT-related apps from its mainland Chinese store in response to new Chinese government regulations on managing generative AI. The regulations were introduced in...
Over the past few weeks, several think tanks have published reports evaluating the expansion and success of China’s external propaganda. Together, they show the wide range of tools, targets, mediums, and regions involved in...
As of June 7, the Twitter account belonging to Bei Zhenying, wife of well-known blogger program-think (whose real name is Ruan Xiaohuan), appears to have been deleted. The abrupt deletion of her relatively new account...
This week, a set of reports emerged alleging that Chinese state-backed actors perpetrated cyberattacks against foreign governments. In response, Chinese state media sprang into action by relaying official denials of...
CDT English will continue for now to post as @CDT on Twitter, but has launched additional accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky: @[email protected], and @CDT.bsky.social You can also keep up with our Chinese team on Twitter at...
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