Tea Leaf Nation

With all the furor over Bo Xilai, his family and the suspicious death of Neil Heywood, Tea Leaf Nation brings you a look back at the political calculations that lay behind Bo’s controversial reign in Chongqing and his daring gambit in the form of the “Smash Black – Sing Red” campaign that was to pave [...]

On a high-speed train in the Orient, a murder has taken place under cover of night. On April 11, the public awoke to find that the political career of Bo Xilai, China’s “only celebrity politician,” had finally died. The news did not come as a surprise; Bo’s career suffered a brutal stabbing a month ago and [...]

Bo Xilai, the most controversial politician in China, has been sacked. Or as @唱反调 wrote on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter: “Bo Xilai has been ‘harmonized.’” Indeed, on March 15, the Ides of March, Xinhua News Agency announced that Bo Xilai was removed as the party boss of Chongqing. China’s microblogs have exploded at news of [...]

Christmas for journalists in China comes in early March. The “Two Sessions” – an annual powwow of representatives of the National People’s Congress, or NPC, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (try to say that five times fast), or CPPCC – is a bonanza for Chinese news outlets starved for a government-sanctioned opportunity to [...]

Do you know your left from your right? A visual key to the meaning of leftist versus rightist politics in China, an answer to this hugely popular pictorial on U.S. politics, was created by CNPolitics.org (政见). With CNPolitics’ permission, we reprint sections of the picture here with English translations and original commentary from Tea Leaf Nation. You can [...]

@中国草根大学 posted a photo of  Mr. Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the caption, “Dissidents with different political views don’t exist in China.” [Chinese] Apparently, Mr. Ma made this statement in February 2010 in response to questions about the conviction of Liu Xiaobo. [See this report from Singapore's Zaobao in Chinese.] Even though the [...]

The Chimerica couple is serious about romance. As President Obama gears up to teach Vice President Xi Jinping some Potomac two-step on Valentine’s Day, netizens on China’s microblogs are voicing their own hopes for their Heir Apparent. No one is questioning the succession chances of Xi aside from few grumblings of “who elected him?” A widely [...]

[Please see Part 1 of our double feature: Anarchy in China's Social Media] All the upheaval on social media can be traced to one man: Bo Xilai, the most polarizing and fascinating figure in Chinese politics, and his (foreseeable) political demise. When the Prince Was Not Red Bo was introduced as the “Red Prince” in [...]

[Please see Part 2 of our double feature: Why Bo Xilai is Like Anakin Skywalker. See here for the pilot article in our S-election 2012 coverage.] We knew it would be good, but we didn’t know it would be this good. Hollywood, are you watching this? Empire of the Clones Everyone had expected S-election 2012 [...]