Alexander Boyd

Xi Jinping’s New Era has inspired the creation of a host of “new chengyu”: idiomatic, often four-character, literary expressions that are the kernel of a larger tale. The following New Era chengyu are all references to infamous incidents that have taken place within the last calendar year. Consistent with much of CDT’s 2024 coverage, the […]

China’s hottest television show, HunanTV’s “Singer 2024,” has inspired nationalist angst after two foreign contestants took first and second place—easily besting a field that included legendary Chinese pop star Na Ying. The show is wildly popular in part because it requires live singing without autotune or post-production touch-ups, common features of most Chinese variety television. […]

In China, the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre was met with all-out digital censorship that quashed overt online mourning. In Hong Kong, efforts to publicly commemorate “June Fourth” were ruthlessly suppressed by police. Globally, across 18 cities spanning four continents, thousands gathered in remembrance. Those within China seeking to share their memories of the […]

Chinese bookstore shelf arrangements rarely go viral—that is, unless they contain a hidden message calling for Xi Jinping to step down. Since Xi has risen to power, placing Xi’s works next to other books to make a political point has become a relatively common, low-key mode of political dissent. It’s often unclear whether the juxtapositions […]

A stabbing at a school bus stop in Eastern China that left two Japanese nationals and a Chinese national injured is the latest instance of anti-foreigner violence to rock China in the last month. Two weeks ago, four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College were stabbed in a park in northern China. Details of this latest […]

Fresh off a meeting planned in secret with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban had a surprise meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Monday. A Chinese readout of the meeting asserted that discussions focused on the war in Ukraine. Before his Moscow trip, Orban met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine […]

Microblogging platform Weibo is cracking down on speech about crackdowns on speech. In a weekly “safety” digest published to an official Weibo administrators’ account, the platform announced that it had suspended over 10 accounts for “hyping the censorship of other accounts.” The owners of the accounts were issued suspensions (禁言, jìnyán) for posting about, or “hyping,” […]

A photograph of a delivery driver forced to kneel before a neighborhood security guard in Hangzhou has inspired widespread calls for better labor protections for China’s working class. The viral image of the kneeling guard struck a chord on Weibo, where it shot to the top of trending rankings in mid-August: A police report released […]

In a remarkable interview, a censor for one of China’s biggest search engines described what gets deleted from the Chinese internet and how—as well as their perspective on the morality of their work. The interview was published by Mang Mang, an independent Chinese-language magazine that publishes on Substack. It is rare for a censorship worker […]

The specter of arrest has made Halloween extra spooky this year. In Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, Halloween revelry has been marred by strict police curfews, the detention of costume-clad partygoers, and bans on organized festivities. Meanwhile, censors have been vigorously erasing discussion of the Halloween crackdown from social media. The repressive atmosphere is a major […]