Tea Leaf Nation

Well-known environmentalist and frequent micro-blogger Liu Shengjun’s (@刘胜军改革) plane just touched down in Hong Kong, and he loves the place. He tweeted the following:  “Today I arrived in Hong Kong. A free city; a hard-working city; a city with very low taxes; a financial center; a city with no controls on speech and therefore with [...]

Quick: What would you do if you saw a kidnapped baby and knew you had only hours to save him before he and his captors disappeared forever? For one Chinese netizen-activist who ran into just such a scenario on an overnight train, the answer was to live blog the entire incident on Sina Weibo, a [...]

What do you regret most about love? Career? Kids? Life?  These are heavy questions, but over 1,400 Shanghaiers ventured an answer in a survey by Chinese-language Life Weekly magazine. Surprisingly, residents of this glistering and cosmopolitan city listed a failure to “explore the world” as their single greatest regret about life. On love and children, [...]

Shanghai Morning Post (@新闻晨报) reports on Weibo that netizen @-夜莺-May spotted surface cracks in the busiest area of Pudong, Shanghai. Well trained by Hollywood, many netizens’ first thoughts ran to disaster movie-land. @漾漾乐园 tweets, “So scary! Is 2012 really coming?” @china_lidb suggests helpfully, “Apply glue, quickly!” @Sai-SH warns, ”Earth has finally reached its limit.” Shanghai Morning Post interviewed Mr. Ge Qing (@葛清EMBA10SH7), [...]

Following our well-received series Who’s Who on Weibo, Tea Leaf Nation is pleased bring you a second series discussing some of the popular memes and terms of art in the Chinese social media. Please email us at editors@tealeafnation.com if you would like to suggest a new term to add to the list. Please see Part [...]

Ex-NBA star Yao Ming struggles to keep awake during a (nap) session of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress on January 13, 2012.