Tea Leaf Nation

Let the music play on. It’s been just under two weeks since real-name registration began to go into effect for China’s microblogs, or Weibos. To be sure, two weeks is not a long time. Many cities have yet to implement real-name registration; this author is still able to tweet and re-tweet from his anonymous and [...]

Will a civil war wrack China? Will China collapse? Or will it rise to be a great world power? In a sign of Weibo’s continuing vitality as a platform for speech, these questions are being openly discussed on Sina Weibo after Forbes China (@福布斯中文网) tweeted a provocative statement from its official account. The multiplicity and [...]

Netizens beware: One errant tweet can make years of your online history disappear. The Chinese blogosphere is abuzz after Zhuang Wuxie (@庄无邪), an advertising exec in Bejing, wrote a mini-essay on Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform, complaining about the deletion of a friend’s account. The friend, who uses the handle Mo Zhiguo (@魔之果), [...]

It’s no secret that Weibo, China’s Twitter, is crawling with censors. And yet, some netizens say it has provided them with the most open forum they have ever enjoyed inside of China. Many statements that would have been considered serious crimes in the past are now routine in Chinese social media. On January 27, Beijing [...]

Cantonese netizens reacted angrily to new regulations requiring that, starting on March 1, 2012, all television, radio and even Internet broadcasts in Guangdong province, one of China’s most prosperous, must use Mandarin Chinese instead of Cantonese.  The two languages have much vocabulary in common but are nevertheless nearly mutually unintelligible due to extensive differences in pronunciation. [...]