Tea Leaf Nation

Beat this, New York Times. This new caption on an Internet oldie has helped thousands of Chinese netizens understand the current saber-rattling between China and the Philippines over a barren rock in the South China Sea. As an example of its popularity, Reporter Peng Yongtang (@彭永棠)’s tweet with this captioned picture has generated more than 1,200 [...]

Photos of a Mao temple in Mianyang, Sichuan Province were posted to Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, by Lin Jie (@林洁), chairman of B.A. Consulting, a real estate service group.  The temple was built in 2006, but many users seem to be encountering these photos for the first time, and Lin’s tweet generated more than 4,700 retweets [...]

The recent trend of North Korea bashing continues in China’s blogosphere. @张洲演义, a young film director, has brought netizens his latest masterpiece: What Tea Leaf Nation chooses to call “Kim Jung Un Re-Imagined.”  Director Zhang poured oil on the proverbial flames with his accompanying tweet: “Looking at this late at night, actually got a biological reaction.” [...]

Strap on your rocket boosters and get ready for hilarity. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Disney’s China division and Marvel studios have agreed to work with the China-based DMG to film Iron Man 3 in China. Sir Ben Kingsley has reportedly confirmed he will play the Mandarin, one of Iron Man’s nemeses from [...]

Our dear readers can be forgiven for thinking that Chinese politics is complicated. When it comes to the epic fall of Bo Xilai–covered extensively by Tea Leaf Nation (see our most recent posts here and here)–the uninitiated may feel that it’s too late to jump in.  Not so. The good people at Taipei-based Next Media Animation have [...]

We at Tea Leaf Nation have followed one strict editorial guideline since our founding: No cute pictures of cats, even if that approach would get us millions of hits. Today we perforce break that rule. After all, we can’t change facts: With over 47,000 re-posts, this cute picture to our left is Sina Weibo’s most [...]

Mr. Tupac Shakur can rest in peace knowing that his influence has lived on through time and space–to rural China circa 2010, to be exact. This video, circulating on Chinese social media since at least 2010, shows a young man lip-syncing 2Pac’s classic rap song “California Love.” He certainly knows how to party — on [...]

We all call it the Internet, but we see very different things. Given the existence of China’s Great Firewall (and the unique preferences of China’s netizens), some have said that China has an Intranet, not an Internet. If that’s true, what are the differences between American and Chinese social networking sites? What about the differences [...]

Xu Weihua (@徐卫华), a mobile Internet analyst, tweets: “I heard that Apple’s CEO Cook was very happy with his trip to China, because he saw a lot of people on the streets using iPhones. There are iPhone3, iPhone4, iPhone4S, as well as iPhone5 and iPhone6. There are [iPhones] with three-inch screens, four-inch screens, five-inch screens, single-screens [...]

Netizens have one word to describe their feelings about rising fuel prices: @#$%. On Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, public opinion about the largest hike in fuel prices in three years is perhaps best represented by a university student who has shot to (likely ephemeral) fame as “Brother Gas Price” (油价哥). This “brother’s” rise began after [...]