Tea Leaf Nation

Let the hand-wringing begin. Sina has thrown up the trial version of a new user contract on Weibo, its Twitter-like microblog service, on May 8. The announcement was made via the official account of Weibo’s minder, the coyly named Little Secretary of Weibo (@微博小秘书), and attracted more than 30,000 comments in about 36 hours and attention from [...]

To love is to care, and to care is to want to change. But as the image below suggests, perfection is in the eye of the beholder. With over 22,300 reposts, it is Sina Weibo’s most viral image of May 9, 2012 according to Hong Kong University’s Weiboscope. Weiboscope displays the most widely reposted images among prominent users. [...]

Talk about pent-up demand. On the morning of Tuesday, April 3, Sina and Tencent Weibo, China’s most popular microblogs, were allowed to re-open the threaded “comment” function– the microblogs’ heart and soul — after three days of government-ordered blackout. And netizens have responded by the millions to express their thoughts and breathe a collective sigh [...]

It’s spring outside, but a chill wind is blowing through the Chinese blogosphere. After the government shocked observers with a Friday night crackdown that saw 16 sites shuttered for “spreading malicious rumors” with “negative social effects” and over 1,000 people detained for “Internet crimes,” frost is beginning to creep across China’s cyberspace.  News of the [...]

Has the music just stopped? Mere days ago, Tea Leaf Nation remarked upon the relatively unrestrained speech taking place on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platforms, even after the beginning of real-name registration. This speech included rumors of a high-level coup in Beijing. China’s government has just responded, and the results aren’t pretty. As party mouthpiece The People’s [...]

Real-estate tycoon and well-known Sina Weibo microblogger Pan Shiyi (@潘石屹) recently tweeted this provocative question: “After finishing the day’s work, I’m thinking: If my Weibo account were blocked one day, how would my life change?” The question may not be an idle one. Pan recently penned tweets touching on highly incendiary rumors of a coup at the [...]

- On Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, verified users have on average 10 times more followers than unverified accounts. – 44.06% of accounts on Sina Weibo have fewer than 10 followers.  – While most accounts claim to be from affluent regions of China, some regions exhibit high level of social connectivity judging by the average number of [...]

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), [...]

Rachel of Tea Leaf Nation is honored to be a guest columnist for TechRice,  a popular blog that offers sharp analysis of the China tech scene, from startups to internet giants and angels to IPOs. Here is a short excerpt from the article Romance of the Three Microblog Kingdoms brewed by Dragonwell. For the entire article, please see [...]

Censorship has just cost Sina Weibo, China’s premier microblogging platform, two of its major liberal voices. Just days apart, Messrs. Zhang Min and Yu Jianrong, two liberal professors that Tea Leaf Nation has profiled in its series “Who’s Who on China’s Twitter,” have defected to Sohu Weibo, an up-and-coming microblogging platform. On January 6, after [...]