Tea Leaf Nation

What is “a lot” of money in China, anyway? With over one million US-dollar millionaires in China and counting, the country’s currency doesn’t go as far as it used to. A delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference recently irked China’s blogosphere by suggesting China issue higher-denomination bills. Although that idea has been officially shelved, China’s [...]

Mark Zuckerberg, eat your heart out.  12306.cn may not sound like the most alluring, or easy to remember, website, but starting on January fifth of this year its average daily page views have exceeded 1 billion, making it one of the world’s most trafficked sites.  No, it’s not the next Facebook or Google.  It’s the [...]

Is it a New Years’ miracle? An elaborate media charade? A Greek tragedy? Microbloggers on Weibo, China’s Twitter, diverge sharply on the story of Xiao Yanqin, the betrayed young wife who reportedly commited suicide on Christmas day, only to appear, very much alive, for a January 1 interview on Beijing television after her “resurrection” was [...]

China’s class divide continues to rile the masses.  Netizens have rushed to condemn a young mother who called a young laborer “dirty” after he offered her his seat on a public bus in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. As of this post, this incident had garnered almost 1.3 million  comments on Weibo, China’s Twitter, and was the [...]