Tea Leaf Nation

Gather ’round; front-row tickets to this spat are free to all users of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform. In a rare public war of words between government officials, the Shaoxing City prosecutor’s office in Zhejiang Province used its official Weibo account yesterday morning to ridicule a public safety officer in distant Yunnan province. The angry [...]

Foreigners, watch out. Beijing police have sent a shot across the bow of the city’s estimated 120,000 non-Chinese residents, some of whom are in the country illegally. After a video of a British man apparently sexually assaulting a Chinese woman caught fire on Weibo, Beijing police have announced a campaign to “clean up” (清理) unwelcome [...]

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 [...]

First it was the prodigal melon; now it’s the airborne pepper. On Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, a discussion recently erupted about potential high-leader-in-waiting Wang Yang after a university student in Guangdong (@思想聚焦) recalled a 2006 story in which Mr. Yang threw a farm-fresh pepper at a subordinate. As the story goes, while party chief of Chongqing [...]

Don’t look away, even for one minute. Events have taken a dramatic turn in the case of Chen Guangcheng, the celebrated rights lawyer-turned daring escape artist-turned diplomatic impasse. Much of China now knows that after his daring escape from house arrest, Chen spent six days in the United States embassy before being reunited with (some [...]

When the going gets tough, the tough speak in code, at least on China’s Internet. It’s quitting time in China, and thousands of netizens are announcing they are leaving work “of their own volition.” But this happens every day. Why choose today to say so?  Faced with overzealous censors, netizens on Weibo, China’s Twitter, are [...]

Is the treatment of Bo Xilai–China’s former contender for high office, now in detention as he and his wife are investigated respectively for corruption and murder–a victory for the rule of law? Or selective enforcement? Netizens are making their opinions clear: It’s the latter. On April 19, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported (in both [...]

What a way to spend 450 million dollars. The regime of North Korea’s new (and likely insecure) young leader, Kim Jong-Un, will almost certainly scramble to save face after inviting international reporters to a botched April 12 launch of the Kwangmyongsong No. 3 missile. The intended demonstration of the North’s might and Kim III’s competence [...]

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 [...]

Hear that sound? That’s the other shoe, crashing to the floor. After hours of speculation about “major news” concerning Bo Xilai, the charismatic and ambitious former Communist Party chief of Chongqing ultimately laid low by his own right-hand man, the news came. At 11:00 p.m. sharp on April 10, an official Xinhua account on Sina [...]