Tea Leaf Nation

Shhhh…don’t type that name! “Chongqing” (重庆, which literally means “double celebration”), is currently not searchable on either the Sina or Tencent versions of China’s Twitter-like Weibo platforms. It is searchable on Sohu Weibo, which perhaps merely proves China’s government no longer much cares about Sohu Weibo. For the uninitiated, Chongqing is the city whose Party [...]

China’s social media landscape is exploding on a scale the Internet has seldom seen before. Every day, millions upon millions of new Chinese-language tweets appear in the blogosphere, an exciting but overwhelming deluge that even experienced “China hands” can have trouble parceling. How can someone interested in learning more about China, or trying to learn [...]

- 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 [...]

[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 [...]

Move aside you B.R.I.C.s and P.I.I.G.s, Chinese netizens are chattering about S.I.C.K., or Syria, Iran, China, and (North) Korea, the four countries in the world where Facebook is restricted. These four countries were called out by name in Facebook’s preliminary prospectus recently filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as places where “access to [...]

Listen closely; that’s the sound of wings flapping. China’s migratory birds are in full flight. A recent survey found that over half of Chinese millionaires are either emigrating or thinking of doing so. Netizens of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, may not be able to afford that visa application and plane ticket, but they can afford [...]

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 [...]

Hong Kong’s fraught relationship with mainland China is not off to an auspicious start in the Year of the Dragon. On social networking site Tianya.cn and Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, netizens have spent days throwing verbal bombs after well-known Maoist Kong Qingdong declared that “many Hong Kongers are dogs” on an online news show. This follows [...]

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 [...]