Tea Leaf Nation

Sometimes, the numbers tell the whole story. Leung Chun-ying was elected Hong Kong’s new chief executive with 689 votes on Sunday. In January, Ma Ying-jeou was re-elected in Taiwan’s presidential election with 6.89 million votes. With S-election 2012 looming on the horizon, netizens in China can’t help drawing some comparisons.  @佐拉 wonders “Doesn’t Hu Jintao’s successor only need [...]

Could a village in mainland China be more democratic than Hong Kong? With Wukan’s village elections recently complete and Hong Kong’s controversial election for Chief Executive on the way, iSun Affairs (阳光时务) has created a compelling pictorial suggesting the answer is “yes.” iSunAffairs.com [Chinese] describes itself as a magazine that covers economy, politics and culture in [...]

As if there were ever any doubt. Surprising no one, Vladimir Putin was re-elected to a third term as Russia’s president. The news hit the wire at 5:00 a.m., Beijing time. As @翠婷1990 described, “I woke up around 6 o’clock or so, as soon as I opened Weibo Putin was all over my screen.” As [...]

On February 1, Wukan held its village elections. Wukan exploded in an uprising late last year after village representative Xue Jinbo’s death in police custody. The new elections held following the uprising have caught the eye of China’s blogosphere because, as The Telegraph reports, “villagers believe [it] is China’s first wholly transparent, completely open, democratic [...]

A democratic election is soon to take place in the Republic of China–not the People’s Republic of China, commonly known as mainland China, but Taiwan. This island sits just east of China and retains the official name “Republic of China” from the days before the bloody Chinese civil war, which ended in 1949 when the [...]

The Supreme Court of the United States will soon decide the case of Bluman v. FEC, which asks whether the law banning foreigners resident in the US from donating to American political campaigns violates the Constitution. Writing on Weibo, China’s Twitter, one netizen living in the U.S. made his feelings known: @GoPats: Originally I wanted [...]