This phenomenon is not merely a return to old habits or rural mysticism. It has become a nationwide consumer frenzy, driven by the very demographic the Communist Party hoped would be its most rational constituency: the young and educated. In chasing these modern symbols of hope, they are losing more than just money.

[…] In today’s China, the most popular “spiritual” items aren’t books or teachings but small objects—especially crystals. These are sold not only as fashion items but as tools for cosmic power. Supposedly, they bring wealth, block bad energy, and balance inner forces. Livestreams offer quick lessons in “crystal basics,” and influencers promote them with the excitement once shown for new tech.

[…] Along with the crystal craze, astrology, tarot, and fortune-telling have become small but growing businesses. Highly educated youth—graduates, civil servants, tech workers—are quitting their jobs to become full-time “mystics.” On platforms like Taobao and WeChat, paid readings are everywhere. In many cities, you’ll find stylish little shops doing tarot readings, often run by baristas turned fortune-tellers.

This is happening despite—or maybe because of—government crackdowns. In 2021, China banned religious content on e-commerce sites and tightened rules on spiritual services. But the demand only adapted. Tarot readers now call themselves “emotional consultants.” Horoscope sellers move to foreign platforms like Discord. The state fights superstition with censorship, and loses every time.

[…] It would be wrong to see this wave of superstition as a uniquely Chinese flaw. But since 2024, China’s superstition boom has become a pressure cooker where many deep problems have gathered: economic slowdown, job stress, burnout, pushy online systems, and a desperate need for meaning.

Young Chinese are not naturally more superstitious. But they are trapped in an unstable system, and with no clear future, they are buying ready-made ones. These crystals and tarot cards aren’t ancient traditions—they’re quick-fix stories built from what’s left in the marketplace. Meanwhile, sellers and platforms continue testing how much people are willing to pay to ease their fears. [Source]

The Economist in January similarly described trends such as app-based horoscopes and fortune-telling and offline “metaphysical bars,” fueled by frustration at “a sluggish economy, a tight job market and intense competition in many aspects of life.” (Another Economist report the week before noted similar phenomena in the U.S. and India.)

The Communist Party has long tried to rid itself of what it calls “feudal superstition”. Last year the Central Party School, a training academy for officials, expressed concern about the number of members and cadres “believing in ghosts and gods”. It tried to clarify the party’s restrictions by publishing a Q&A on the matter. Occasionally participating in local folk customs or consulting a fortune-teller on a name for your baby? That’s fine. Spending a lot of time and money, especially public funds, on superstitious activities? Unacceptable.

The masses are also discouraged from embracing such practices. A notice issued by the city of Sanming in 2023 stated: “The public should improve their scientific literacy, enhance their psychological immunity to superstitious activities and not seek spiritual comfort through ‘fortune-telling’ when encountering real setbacks.” Other cities have followed suit. Last year some local governments cracked down on the burning of fake money and other paper offerings to the dead during the annual grave-sweeping festival.

State censors, with the help of internet firms, have tried to curb the spread of superstitious beliefs and divination services online. Search terms such as “astrology” and “fortune-telling” have been blocked on Taobao, an e-commerce market. But on Weibo, a social-media site, popular astrologers have accumulated tens of millions of followers. Some speak of playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. A 24-year-old tarot-card reader in Shanghai jokes that she tries to divine her own fate—to see if jail time is in the offing. [Source]

There is also online hay to be made from confronting superstition. In April, South China Morning Post’s Zoey Zhang reported on Shandong-based influencer Zhang Shulin, who has built a following with video stunts debunking beliefs such as hauntings, shamanism, and ghost marriages. This, too, can be a hazardous approach if targets include traditional practices favored with official endorsement, however. Mixed martial artist Xu Xiaodong was hit with censorship, travel restrictions, financial penalties, and forced apologies following his efforts to puncture the inflated claims of purported kung fu masters, some of whom he flattened in bouts lasting only seconds. In 2022, a number of prominent online voices were silenced in apparent retaliation for their criticism of Lianhua Qingwen, a traditional Chinese medicine-based herbal product promoted by Chinese authorities for treatment of COVID.

A pair of translations at CDT last month described how other frustrated young Chinese are turning to another old ritual: the annual civil service exams.

On Thursday, the Made in China Journal (MICJ) published its latest issue, titled “Chinese Journalism is Dead: Long Live Chinese Journalism!” The issue traces transformations in China’s media landscape over the past decade to demonstrate the ways in which journalism has both deteriorated and adapted to the Party-state’s tightening grip on information. One article, by Dan Chen, analyzes how Chinese local television news "performs governance." Chen focuses on a genre of local television news called minsheng xinwen (民生新闻, literally “news about people’s livelihood”), which highlights “citizen grievances and bureaucratic failures, framing them within a narrative of governmental accountability and responsiveness.” While these sorts of programs reinforce the state’s legitimacy, their top-down orchestration has also eroded public trust in media:

This practice of ‘controlled criticism’ allows limited critiques of governance to flourish within carefully delineated boundaries. Minsheng xinwen programs use investigative reporting to expose problems such as delayed services, poor infrastructure, and bureaucratic inefficiencies. Yet, far from threatening the regime, this critical reporting reinforces its legitimacy by positioning the state as both responsive to citizen concerns and capable of delivering solutions.

[…] In the early years of minsheng xinwen, many reports arose organically, driven by journalists who independently identified compelling stories through citizen complaints, hotline calls, or grassroots investigations. These organically initiated stories often reflected the agency of journalists within the constraints of state control. However, as political oversight tightened under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, this space for spontaneity has steadily diminished.

[…] The shift towards orchestrated reporting carries significant implications for the credibility of local television news. Early iterations of minsheng xinwen enjoyed widespread public trust, as their investigative tone and tangible outcomes made them appear authentic advocates for citizen concerns. Over time, however, the increasingly performative nature of orchestrated reports has eroded this trust. [Source]

At a smaller scale, a similar sleight of hand by the state can be seen in the evolution of print media. Last month, Jianbing Li, Jiakun Jack Zhang, Duoji Jiang, and Weifeng Zhong published an article in the Journal of Contemporary China titled, “Domestic Politics and Editorial Control Over Foreign News Coverage in the People’s Daily, 1993–2022.” The article found that, particularly under Xi Jinping, news coverage of foreign affairs in the People’s Daily has been steadily replaced by editorializing about foreign affairs:

This study examines the dynamics of foreign coverage in China’s official media as the country becomes more globally active. Many scholars argue that China has adopted a more assertive foreign policy and positioned itself as a global leader under Xi Jinping. Yet, analysis of over 1 million People’s Daily articles from 1993 to 2022 reveals that official Chinese media have notably reduced foreign news coverage during his administration. The authors suggest that foreign coverage is influenced more by domestic politics than by China’s growing international interests. As Chinese leaders consolidate power in their second terms, they exert greater editorial control, replacing foreign news coverage with commentary on foreign policy. This trend is not unique to Xi, but it is particularly pronounced during his tenure. [Source]

Our analysis reveals that foreign coverage is influenced more by domestic politics than by China’s growing international interests.

As Chinese leaders consolidate power, they exert greater editorial control, replacing foreign news coverage with commentary on foreign policy. pic.twitter.com/BFBt9WAV2m

— Jack Zhang (@HanFeiTzu) April 21, 2025

Many journalists are also deterred by their lack of autonomy and grueling work conditions. The South China Morning Post recently highlighted the story of a young woman who obtained a master’s degree in journalism from Peking University, interned at prominent state media agencies, and then swapped her high-paying media job for working at the university canteen. She stated that at the media outlets where she had worked, she chafed at the rigorous performance indicators and pressure to reply to messages from her boss at all hours of the day and night. “Compared to those jobs, working as a canteen auntie brings me more joy,” she said. In an article for Initium Media, translated by China Media Project, Xiaobai Yu described how many state television stations not only impose arduous working conditions but also force journalists to solicit advertisements in order to alleviate financial pressure, which corrupts their journalistic work and erodes public trust in the media:

In China today, there are 389 broadcasting and television stations at the prefecture-level and above, according to early 2024 data from China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA). There are 2,099 county-level television stations, and 33 educational television stations. Each television station broadcasts across several channels, and some operate 10 or more. But in 2024, as rumors circulated on social platforms that “nearly 2,000 local television stations are on the verge of collapse” (有近2000家地方電視台行將倒閉), the veneer of viability seemed to slip.

Regarding this figure, an individual working in a propaganda management department of a central government institution told Initium Media that while the above statement may to some extent be exaggerated, the fact that numerous local television stations face financial difficulties is undeniable. “Everyone is living like beggars, including China Central Television and leading provincial satellite TV stations,” they said.

[…] The gradual “salesification” (銷售化) of reporters has become a trend for television station workers in China, including at major state-run outfits like China Central Television (CCTV). To alleviate financial pressure, many television stations assign business tasks to their staff, meaning that directors, editors, and reporters must actively solicit advertisements. This, in fact, has become the primary standard for assessment when it comes to key performance indicators, or KPIs.

[…] “Under the current atmosphere of high-pressure control and political prioritization, television will gradually die out,” [said the aforementioned source working in the propaganda office of a central government institution]. “This is an inevitable end.” [Source]

In the face of these challenges, many Chinese journalists have ventured abroad to pursue media initiatives in the diaspora. Vivian Wu, founder of the media platform Dasheng (大声), wrote in MICJ about how the influx of fresh talent through migration has made Chinese diasporic media more diverse and active in offering uncensored content that both complements existing news from mainland China and offers its own unique perspectives. Last month, Oiwan Lam at Global Voices sampled several Hong Kong exile media outlets, among hundreds of Hong Kong journalists who left the city since the National Security Law. She also noted their struggles for financial sustainability (Flow HK announced it will shut down) and against transnational repression (numerous media workers are among those wanted for national security cases).

This is not the first time Guo has been targeted by Chinese authorities: in 2023, as reported by VOA Chinese and Variety, he was prevented from renewing his passport and was subject to a travel ban, likely in retaliation for his support of the White Paper Movement and attention to the plight of Xiaohuamei (a woman who was trafficked, abused, and kept chained in a shed). What distinguishes this latest episode of law-enforcement harassment is the sheer distance at which it occurred: the authorities who levied the fine are located 2,000 miles from Hunan province, where Guo once filmed; and 2,500 miles from Dali, Yunnan province, where Guo currently lives.

CDT Chinese editors have archived a March 27 essay by WeChat blogger Li Yuchen, titled “The Film Was Shot in Hunan, but Xinjiang Confiscated Cameras and Imposed a 75,000 Yuan Fine.” In it, the author discusses the harsh penalties imposed by Xinjiang authorities on Guo Zhenming, and argues that this will have a chilling effect not only on filmmakers and other creative artists, but on China’s entire creative ecosystem, and on anyone who has ever picked up a camera:

I just read an announcement about an administrative fine levied by the Urumqi Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism.

The announcement said that the individual involved, Guo Zhenming, shot a documentary called "Tedious Days and Nights" in Hunan. Although the director did not obtain official permission to release the film, he submitted the documentary to be screened at the Berlin Film Festival in Germany. Afterwards, Guo traveled to Xinjiang where he shot some footage that was stored on a hard drive but not yet incorporated into a film.

The relevant authorities in Xinjiang reasoned that since Guo had already submitted the film he shot in Hunan to screen at a German film festival, there was reason to believe that the footage he shot in Xinjiang and stored on a hard drive would also be made into a film.

As such, they confiscated his camera and hard drive and slapped him with a fine of 75,000 yuan.

Is this some type of cross-provincial manhunt for filmmakers?

Xinjiang’s Bureau of Radio, Film and Television was of the firm opinion that even though the footage hadn’t been made into a film, let alone been released to the public, the simple fact that the director had previously flouted the rules by allowing a similar film to be screened overseas meant that the footage in this case could be treated as a film.

The sternly worded administrative penalty notice employed the following astonishing logic:

> Although the work filmed by the party concerned is not yet complete, the actors have already been hired and paid, the estimated running time is 60-80 minutes, the finished product will have a 16:9 aspect ratio, and there are plans to submit or screen it at film festivals. This meets the definition of ‘a film.’ Furthermore, said party has submitted similar works to foreign film festivals in the past, which further confirms that his actions were taken with the intent to make a film. Therefore, the work produced by Guo Zhenming should be classified as a film.

If they know the work is incomplete, how can they be so sure it’s actually a film?

Anyone will be able to discern the logical flaw here—that a film shot by Guo Zhenming in Hunan was judged to have violated regulations in Xinjiang.

Reasoning by Extrapolation

In other words, if a director has ever filmed in other provinces, authorities in Xinjiang think they have reasonable cause for suspicion, reasonable grounds to impose a fine.

By that logic, Chinese directors and cinematographers would seem to be caught in an inescapable dilemma: if they have ever participated in any overseas screening, exhibition, or competition, then no matter where they travel or what equipment they use, any footage they shoot will automatically be considered a film, putting them at constant risk of punishment.

Can it really be that for someone holding a film camera, all of China is enemy territory?

Urumqi also issued a harsh and detailed list of the penalties: a fine of 75,000 yuan, and confiscation of the equipment he used for filming—one hard drive, two cameras, one recorder pen, two filters, and a set of lights.

The administrative penalty notice was harshly worded, making it clear that there would be no leniency—as if they had actually nabbed some dangerous fugitive after a nationwide manhunt.

The “Crime” of Filmmaking

Upon closer examination, the legal basis for the punishment can only be described as "specious.” After all, if something is to be considered “a film,” it must be a completed work and be approved for public screening, or at the very least, there must be a clear intention to screen it as a film. But apparently now, simply by filming something in Hunan and screening it in Germany, you can be slapped with a fine by authorities located thousands of miles away, in Xinjiang. The laxity of such “supervision” is appalling—even if someone were to commit some heinous offense in Hunan, or in Germany, what on earth would it have to do with the authorities in Xinjiang?

On a slightly deeper level, we might ask: where exactly do the boundaries of filmmaking lie? What are directors allowed to film, and what are they not allowed to film? If authorities in Xinjiang can punish a director simply because they suspect him of making a film, who else is in danger of being added to the “punishment list”? Today it might be those filming natural scenery; tomorrow, bloggers shooting travel videos; and the day after that, independent content creators documenting their hometown customs.

Underlying this superficially serious (but patently absurd) law-enforcement logic is a deliberate blurring of boundaries, a hyper-vigilant stance against creative freedom, and above all, a self-imposed and never-ending expansion of administrative authority.

Administrative Overreach

Ultimately, once the boundaries of authority become blurred, the "comfort zone" of authority will continue to expand, while individuals and creators subject to the authority of the law will find their freedom increasingly restricted.

Lurking behind such absurd punishment is the phenomenon of dwindling creative freedom. Punishing creators with law-enforcement methods based on "cross-provincial suspicion" not only harms specific individuals, but also damages the entire cultural ecosystem. Because now, when creators raise their cameras, they will hesitate and wonder, "Will doing this cause me to be fined by some faraway province?"

Artistic creation requires an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance. But if authority expands to such a point that it becomes completely arbitrary, how—in such an environment—can we even talk about cultural development or outstanding works of art? Even more ironically, given the current emphasis on "cultural confidence," by punishing filmmakers in this way, authorities are actively stunting artistic creativity. This has prompted many to lament, "Xinjiang didn’t just punish a director; it punished artistic creation itself."

Film a movie in Hunan, and get fined by Xinjiang. It may sound utterly ridiculous, but it belies a serious problem: our ever-shrinking space for artistic freedom. If this nonsense continues, I fear that the next people punished for "illegal filmmaking" will be you, and me, and everyone we know who has ever used a camera or a mobile phone. [Chinese]

The frequently self-congratulatory “315 Gala” has long been accused of targeting low-hanging fruit, ignoring China’s glaring lack of consumer-product oversight, and naming and shaming only the most egregious offenders. One WeChat article, “Could Our Standards Possibly Fall Any Lower?,” complained that amidst a constant flood of product-safety scandals such as fake hot-pot ingredients, pig ears adulterated with glue, and dangerous fillings used in everything from sanitary pads to down jackets, March 15 Consumer Rights Day seems like nothing more than “a drop in the ocean.” A leaked censorship directive from 2018 reveals how Chinese news outlets, including state media, are encouraged to trumpet the successes of the “315 Gala,” particularly when the targets are foreign companies behaving badly. While a recent opinion piece in the China Daily acknowledged that “consumer rights protection should be a continuous effort, not just reliant on an annual gala that names and shames,” its main argument was that improving consumer rights protection is essential to stimulating consumer spending to shore up a flagging economy. Perhaps not coincidentally, on March 15 Chinese financial regulators also launched a crackdown on “rumors and fake news” about the stock market. According to the Securities Times, regulators plan to “hit early, hit hard, and hit at the heart" of the issue.

There is also some censorship of online discussion and comments critical of the 315 Gala. In one now-deleted comment, Weibo user 渝剑飘尘三代 (Yú Jiàn piāochén sāndài) highlighted the profound disconnect between the many public- and product-safety scandals and the insistence by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs that China remains one of the safest places in the world:

Food is unsafe, cafeterias are unsafe,
edible oil is unsafe, shopkeepers’ property is unsafe,
students’ lives are unsafe, our personal data is unsafe,
the elderly are unsafe, women are unsafe,
even sanitary napkins are unsafe.
—But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says: “China is globally recognized as one of the safest countries in the world!” [Chinese]

CDT Chinese editors have archived five articles and essays about 2025’s Consumer Rights Day. The first, from WeChat blogger Xiang Dongliang, focuses on how lax supervision facilitates the sale of counterfeit and substandard goods (often classified as “white-label” or “bulk-sale” products) on Chinese e-commerce platforms. “Destroying one such ‘den’ might throw a scare into an industry and bring about a temporary pause,” the author writes, “but if the root cause—e-commerce platforms looking the other way and allowing counterfeit or shoddy “white-label” products to flood their sites—is not eliminated, then next year and the year after that will see yet another tainted industry, yet another dark scandal brought to light.” A lengthy article from WeChat public account “Uncle Lei Writes Stories” mainly discusses quality problems with sanitary pads and other products. The author praises e-commerce site JD.com for paying attention to quality control, but complains that other platforms neglect their responsibilities to consumers and are afflicted by brutal price competition that incentivizes them to keep advertising shoddy products from third-party sellers. A piece by WeChat public account Gen Z Lab also notes the ongoing problem of sanitary pad quality, in addition to a roundup of current issues and news events related to women, including the topic of domestic violence.

An article from the youth-focused WeChat public account “Fourth Ring Road Youth” highlights a viral exposé about the reuse of food scraps at certain franchise locations of the vast fast-food chain Yang Mingyu’s Braised Chicken with Rice. After some restaurant employees told a Beijing News investigative journalist that they collected food scraps at the end of the day, mixed them together, and reused them the following morning, the journalist reminded readers “not to order takeout before 11:00 a.m.” The story horrified netizens and it became a trending topic online.

An article from WeChat public account QUEERTAIK异见 described a consumer-rights-themed March 15 broadcast from Jiangsu Radio and Television and Lizhi News that called on certain language learning apps to ban LGBTQ+ content because it was “incorrect.” Some of the so-called "incorrect" English-language examples mentioned on the broadcast included the word “lesbian” and the sentence “My aunt has a wife.” Incredulous netizens accused the show of “trying to erase the existence of gender minorities” and heaped scorn on the broadcasters:

"Considering all of the TV shows I’ve watched about straight men and women falling in love, how come I haven’t become straight yet?"

“Do they think just reading the word ‘lesbian’ is going to make people gay?”

"Cartoons show Prince Charming kissing Snow White, but it’s not like after watching them, kids run around the next day randomly smooching people!” [Chinese]

The sense that Beijing was transformative, personally and politically, is echoed by countless women, many of whom went on to become leaders in the women’s movement. “The atmosphere was incredible. I’d never sat with someone from Tibet or the Middle East – there was excitement and a feeling that we could achieve a lot,” says Lydia Alpízar Durán, co-executive director of IM-Defensoras, a Latin American network of female defenders. “We got a lot done in Beijing. Beyond the government agreement we built a global women’s movement. Beijing catalysed so many processes.”

[…] But if the contemporary political landscape is very different from the 1990s “golden era” of trust in democracy, multilateralism and institutions, the lessons learned from Beijing are still relevant, say the women who were there.

“We can’t forget we were the people who pushed back an unequal world – we were pushing back and transforming. We spent years explaining and showing the world there were inequalities and that we wanted to be better. We are fighting for democracies, so we can not think only ‘how are we going to react?’ but ‘what are we going to continue doing?’” says [Ana Cristina González], who [was part of the Latin American delegation to the conference and] now heads Causa Justa, the group that spearheaded the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Colombia – a fight it won in 2022. [Source]

In China, the state of gender equality and women’s rights has deteriorated under Xi Jinping. Highlighting specific challenges in this respect, Lee Chung Lun at the International Service for Human Rights published a statement, delivered during the 58th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, on behalf of Chinese feminist activists commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action:

Feminist activists and women human rights defenders (WHRDs) face increasing State repression, including censorship, surveillance, arbitrary detention, harassment, and politically motivated charges. Broader movements such as the #MeToo movement, which was inspired by global efforts to expose sexual harassment and gender-based violence, have been targeted by a government that refuses to yield space for any form of organising or an independent civil society. While enjoying support from younger generations, China’s #MeToo movement has been confronted by a still predominantly patriarchal society, and conservative courts dismissing the rare cases brought by survivors.

[…] In partnership with Chinese feminist activists who cannot address the HRC out of fear of reprisals, ISHR’s statement highlights the resilience and determination of feminist activists in China as they continue their struggle despite mounting challenges. [Source]

Despite its current setbacks, the gender-equality movement in China has made some lasting progress in certain domains over the past few decades. Li Jun at the Made in China Journal recently published an article outlining some of the ways that the feminist movement has influenced journalism and the media in China:

Twenty years ago, few journalists or readers could have anticipated the seismic shifts in Chinese journalism we see today. The once-dominant high-profile male journalists and opinion leaders have largely faded from the scene, while women now make up more than half of the journalistic workforce in China. Reporting on gender-based violence has become mainstream, and young women have emerged as the benchmark for journalism’s public role measured in terms of serving both ‘the public interest’ and ‘the interest of the public’. Meanwhile, media outlets frequently find themselves at the centre of public controversies over their stance on gender equality and women’s rights. The evolving relationship between feminism and the media stems not only from generational differences in feminist movements and their interactions with the state, but also from the profound influence of feminist movements on audiences and the journalistic community. [Source]

The arc of these movements in China can be seen through the life of certain individuals. Last month, Li Xiaojiang (李小江), a pioneer of women’s studies in China, passed away from breast cancer. CDT Chinese highlighted a recent issue of Diyin (低音) about Li’s life, noting her contributions to gender-related theory and movements in post-Mao China. Li was reportedly invited by the Women’s Federation to participate in the NGO Forum on the side of the Beijing conference, but she declined (perhaps due to her skeptical attitude towards power). Commenting on the role of the conference at that period in China’s history, Li said, “Given the unfavorable political and economic conditions at the time, women’s liberation was the only positive card left for China to play, one that would meet with global approval and recognition. For this reason, women’s issues very quickly became a topic of national importance.”

CDT Chinese also featured a recent WeChat article about Taiwanese scholar Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu’s (许慧琦) book “Nora in China: The Shaping and Evolution of New Female Images, 1900-1930s.” Nora is the main character in Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen’s influential feminist play, “A Doll’s House,” about a married woman’s pursuit of self-fulfillment in a stereotypically gendered world. The play was first translated into Chinese in 1918, on the cusp of the May Fourth Movement, and its dissemination in China over the subsequent decades was part of a process of repeated reinterpretation and reconstruction. Hsu traces the evolution of Nora’s image and shows how it was frequently dominated and distorted to serve certain patriarchal political agendas.

A promotional poster for Huo Meng’s film “Living the Land”

“Living the Land,” whose Chinese title is 生息之地 (Shēngxī zhī dì), depicts a year in the life of a Chinese farming village in 1991, as several generations of farmers try to come to terms with the massive socio-economic shifts that will soon remake their lives. The film’s young protagonist, a boy named Chuang, is part of the first generation of “left-behind children.” After his parents decamp to Shenzhen to seek work, taking their two older children with them, third-born Chuang is left in the care of his uncle Tuanjie, who never lets Chuang (who has a different surname) forget that he doesn’t quite belong in the village. When the boy innocently wonders where he will someday be buried, his uncle mutters, “This is not your place.” With non-professional actors and realistic settings, “Living the Land” explores complex intergenerational family dynamics, state-enforced family planning policies, developmental disabilities, “left-behind children,” farmers seeking ways to supplement their incomes, encroaching industrialization and urbanization, and more.

Despite the hostile reaction to Huo Meng’s Berlin win from some Weibo users, the film garnered positive reviews in a number of overseas trade publications. Even the Global Times noted that it marked “the first time in six years that a Chinese-language film has won an award at one of the ‘Big Three’ European film festivals, and the first time in 24 years that a Chinese film has won the Best Director award in Berlin.” The Global Times article went on to mention some of the past Chinese films that earned accolades at the Berlin Film Festival, including Chen Kaige’s “Yellow Earth” in 1984, Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern” in 1991, and Diao Yinan’s “Black Coal, Thin Ice” in 2014.

A recent article from WeChat account “Writer” discusses the dilemma of Chinese cinema today, particularly for arthouse films that find themselves locked in a “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” dynamic with domestic audiences:

At the 75th Berlin Film Festival, Chinese director Huo Meng won the Silver Bear Award for Best Director for "Living the Land."

The film hasn’t been released in China yet, so it’s just a bit of news. Filmmakers are pleased about it, as are those eager to see Chinese films make a resurgence. Some people aren’t pleased, however, as we can see in the [Weibo] comments below:

> 怒海狂蛟79 (from Guangdong): Theme of “rural misery” = a young director’s ticket to kudos from international film festivals

> Vivid飞 (from Shanxi): Europe still hasn’t managed to release “Ne Zha 2 in theatres,” but in 2025, a film that pretends to be objective (but actually aims to slander China) won an award at a European film festival.

> Minar2018 (from Shaanxi): You call this a movie? It’s obviously Western-manufactured propaganda.

> 顽石风烟 (from Jiangsu): Not another one of these films.

> 马蹄岭番鬼局 (from Guangdong): No surprise, foreigners love this sort of subject matter.

> Overly域 (from Chongqing): China’s not just countryside—there are modern cities, too.

In other words, whether you’re pleased or not depends on your reaction to this bit of news. The film, reportedly told from the perspective of a “left-behind” child, chronicles how the changes taking place in rural China in the 1990s—and the attendant clash of values, individual anxieties, and collective difficulties—affected individuals, families, the village, and the world outside the village. Perhaps just reading some of these words will make some folks unhappy.

Chinese cinema has never been as conflicted as it is today. If your box-office earnings are low, they say you’re incompetent; if your box office earnings are high, they say it’s because you’ve got backers with deep pockets. If you’re too ambitious, they say you’re trying to copy from the West; if you’re not ambitious enough, they say you’re an embarrassment to China. If you make “popcorn” commercial movies, they call you superficial; if you make hard-hitting arthouse films, they say you’re slandering China. If you don’t win awards, they say you’re useless; but if you win a big international award, they say you’re just in it for the accolades, that you’re sucking up to the judges, pandering to Western tastes, or only focusing on China’s "backwardness."

[…] In movies, literature, and drama, there is no such thing as “Eastern tastes” or “Western tastes,” only "human tastes.”

[…] Movies, like literature, should portray human lives and human destinies. Society is just part of the backdrop.

If movies were only expected to portray the glamorous side of life, then there wouldn’t be many such films. "Les Miserables" is set in Paris, the most glamorous city in France, but it shows people fleeing through the dark, filthy sewers. "Léon: The Professional" is also set in a glamorous city, but depicts exploited streetwalkers and brutally corrupt law enforcement officers.

[…] And when it comes to “smearing its own reputation,” no one beats Hollywood. We need not mention [serious fare such as] "The Shawshank Redemption.” Even in a romantic film like "Waterloo Bridge,” the heroine falls into prostitution; even in a comedy like "Roman Holiday,” there are sleazy tabloid reporters who stir up gossip for profit.

The South Korean film "Parasite," which won a Best Picture Oscar, might be the most serious example of Korea “smearing its own reputation” by depicting class conflict, economic inequality, rich folks humiliating the poor, the pitiful pride of the poor, and even violent resistance and bloody fights. But oddly, I don’t think Korean society is really like that—I think “Parasite” is a universal metaphor, and the events it depicts could happen in any corner of the Earth.

So the Koreans are happy, but I’m left feeling jealous: remember the glory days when mainland Chinese and Hong Kong films and TV shows were dominant in Asia and on their way to conquering the world? Where were Korean films and TV shows back then? Nowhere, but now they’re leaving us in their dust!

Chinese films are facing strong interference from the forces of cultural conservatism. But actually, people like that never set foot in theatres.

The development of the internet has allowed a small number of people to specialize in hurling abuse at certain writers, directors, novels, movies, companies, and entrepreneurs. In every case, they are simply “pouring dirty water into their own courtyard.” This is the true definition of “smearing China” and it is simply self-destructive. [Chinese]

A festive Spring Festival promotional poster for “Ne Zha 2” features many of the animated film’s characters.

The engaging story, painstaking animation, and box-office success of “Ne Zha 2” have inspired a great deal of pride among the Chinese movie-going public, not to mention birthing a plethora of memes, trends, and social-media hashtags. But this surge of pride has also resulted in the suppression of critical takes on the film and the buzz around it: some critical articles have been deleted from social media platforms, and Chinese bloggers and reviewers have reported being criticized or attacked online for expressing dissenting views. CDT Chinese editors have archived 15 articles and essays about the film, at least six of which have been deleted by either the original authors or by platform censors.

Some on social media have also repurposed catchphrases from the film, using them to satirize various social issues or economic woes. One netizen, riffing on the line “My fate is in my own hands,” recalled China’s now-defunct “zero-COVID” policy: “My fate is in my own hands, except when it comes to queuing up for nucleic-acid tests.” A WeChat blogger wrote a long essay comparing the fate of the film’s sea-dragons (who were slaughtered and made into an elixir of immortality) to the fate of writers of online gay erotica for the fan-fiction website Haitang, who have been targeted with fines and imprisonment by Anhui authorities operating across provincial lines: “The Haitang writers exploited by ‘deep-sea fishing’ expeditions are very similar to the creatures in ‘Ne Zha 2’ who were turned into the elixir of immortality.” A now-censored article titled “Why Do Groundhogs Always Imagine That They’re Ne Zha?” from WeChat account “District 526” used the film’s hapless population of groundhogs as a metaphor for the downtrodden who unwisely equate their lot with those of the political or economic elites. One Weibo reviewer described how they related to various characters in the film—protagonist Ne Zha, martial-arts disciple Shen Gongbao, and the ill-fated groundhogs: “Before watching the movie, I thought I was Ne Zha. While watching it, I put myself in the shoes of Shen Gongbao. But by the time the movie was over, I realized I was just one of those pathetic groundhogs.”

Two stills from the film show Ne Zha interacting with a crowd of anthropomorphized groundhogs.

A WeChat article by seasoned journalist and columnist Song Zhibiao argued that, unlike previous government-led campaigns to support nationalistic films such as “The Battle of Lake Changjin,” the tide of public support for “Ne Zha 2” is more of a grassroots phenomenon, a relatively spontaneous outpouring of patriotism and national pride:

The film’s visual effects, its plot, and what it’s trying to say—none of these things matter. What matters is that it creates a Chinese-style box-office miracle and shatters a global box-office record, thus leaving a Chinese imprint on a list long dominated by American films. The more American films it can push down that list, the more it will fuel Chinese cultural pride.

The battle for “Ne Zha 2” box-office success has coalesced into a short-term cause that unites the Chinese public. Those watching the same screening of the film are not so much fellow audience members but comrades-in-arms, and their weapons of choice are movie tickets. After watching the movie, they eagerly check the latest box-office figures, because although they’ll never see a penny of the box-office profits, they’re brimming with lofty sentiment and utterly dedicated to the cause.

When examining this phenomenon of extreme support—which goes well beyond the movie’s fundamentals—we need to understand that this is no mere patriotic marketing campaign, because other contemporaneous “positive-energy” films received nowhere near the same level of popular support. Rather, it is best understood as a sort of spontaneous mass emotional catharsis. The overwhelming love and support for “Ne Zha 2” is an indicator of where mainstream sentiment lies.

This astonishing mass-support movement, which exhibits both highly dispersed and highly concentrated patterns of consumer behavior, proves the simple fact that nationalist sentiment plays a key role in helping Chinese-made products succeed in a broadening range of consumer-goods sectors. From [the footwear and sportswear brand] HongXing Erke to made-in-China electric vehicles to “Ne Zha 2,” popular patriotism is displacing government policy as a driver of consumption. [Chinese]

A now-censored article written by 牛角 (Niǔjiǎo, “Ox horn”) for the WeChat account Glacier Think Tank analyzed why so many Chinese citizens feel the need to support “Ne Zha 2”—both at the box-office and online—and why it is becoming almost unacceptable to criticize the film on Chinese social media spaces:

The current box-office figures for "Ne Zha 2" can only be described as “terrifying.”

[…] It is hard to imagine that screenings in a normal film market could yield such numbers. “Ne Zha 2’s” terrifying box-office haul is the product of the government and the general public “banding together in support of a righteous cause.”

This sense of communal support for the cause is reflected not only in the film’s skyrocketing box-office haul, but also in the arena of public opinion, where people are closing ranks, united by “hatred of our common enemy.”

First of all, it’s becoming unacceptable to criticize "Ne Zha 2.”

At least during the Spring Festival, there was no problem with expressing misgivings or criticisms about the film, and those who refuted such criticisms tended to base their rebuttals on their personal opinions and viewing preferences.

But more recently, many articles critical of "Ne Zha 2" have met with backlash that has nothing to do with the content of the criticism and everything to do with so-called "national interests.”

Zi Ge, one film critic who came under attack, said on Douban that someone scolded him: "It’s fine to criticize, but you have to be able to read the room. Would it kill you to hold your criticism until after the [box-office] record is broken? If you decide to jump in and trash the film now, at this critical moment, then you’re just being obtuse and could ruin the whole thing."

Zi Ge’s readers are relatively rational, so at least they don’t accuse him of being biased against China, destroying national unity, or “passing the knife” [providing ammunition to hostile foreign forces].

To many people, “Ne Zha 2” isn’t just a movie: it’s been burdened with the responsibility of winning glory for the nation. “Ne Zha 2” gives them the same sense of pride they felt when Xu Haifeng won China its first Olympic gold medal [in the free pistol competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics]. You really think they’re going to let others rain on their parade?

And they’re not just complaining about articles critical of the film. Weirder still, they’re complaining that some cities aren’t generating enough box-office revenue for it.

As essayist Wei Zhou wrote, “So far, the film is dominating the box office in every province in the country, with the exception of Shanghai. This has earned mockery such as: "Shanghainese turn their noses up at domestic films" and "They like foreign films with their coffee.”

In the end, even the Shanghai Observer felt compelled to weigh in: “Loving one’s own country, one’s own people, and one’s own culture is a simple emotion. It is for this reason that we are so enamored of ‘Ne Zha 2,’ and are eagerly looking forward to it making a mark internationally, and are wholeheartedly rooting for it to break the 10 billion yuan mark at the box office. While the emotion may be simple, it is in no way equivalent to blind conceit or parochialism.”

Clearly, people’s expectations for "Ne Zha 2" have expanded far beyond the realm of entertainment and art, and have veered into identity politics. This is too great a burden for a cartoon to bear.

Now I’m a bit worried for the film’s director Jiaozi [Yu Yang]]. If at some point in the future, he happens to “stray out of line,” he’ll probably be eaten alive by the very same audience that “supported” him at the box office.

[…] The obsession with "Ne Zha 2" topping the box-office charts is no different from our obsession with Olympic gold-medal counts back in the day. It just goes to show that, over the course of four decades, many people’s mentalities and mindsets haven’t changed one bit. [Chinese]

Public debate began when the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports released its 2025 budget, revealing that it had allocated 48.148 million yuan (over $6.6 million U.S.) to support the training expenses of Olympic freestyle skier Eileen Gu (Gu Ailing) and figure skater Beverly Zhu (Zhu Yi). The now-censored Caixin article noted that the bulk of those funds would go to Gu, and that Beijing’s sports bureau had provided a similar amount (47.379 million yuan) to Gu in 2023. Some bloggers and commenters expressed surprise at the large amount; suggested that taxpayers’ money might be better spent on education, health-care, or sports access for the general public; and questioned the wisdom of such exorbitant support for two Chinese-American athletes perceived to have “parachuted in from abroad” (外国空降, wàiguó kōngjiàng).

An article from the WeChat account Sports Talk included screenshots of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports budget, photos of the athletes, and information on their past performances, injuries, upcoming competitions, and more. The Sports Talk article was later deleted across multiple platforms, including Tencent, NetEase, Caixin, Sohu, and China.com. A now-censored article by Ni Ren, published to the WeChat account Black Noise, discussed the phenomenon of sports stars “parachuting in from abroad” and noted that 47 million yuan sum spent annually on Gu Ailing is roughly equivalent to Zhejiang’s annual 50 million yuan investment to expand preschool education to the province’s rural and underdeveloped areas. Another censored WeChat article, from social-commentary and social-satire WeChat account Senior Professor Ye, half-jokingly posed the question: “Does Eileen Gu Need to Hand Over Her Business Income to China? If So, How Much?” The author mentioned Gu’s many lucrative commercial endorsements, and cited examples of Chinese athletes such as Yao Ming, Li Na, and Zhu Ting, who paid the Chinese government a percentage of their income after choosing to turn professional and work outside of the Chinese system. Lastly, an article from WeChat account Narwhal Studio focused on the fact that, after the public backlash, the Beijing municipal government altered its original statement by deleting Gu and Zhu’s names and replacing them with the vague formulation “for the training and support of our city’s outstanding athletes.” If the city believed in these two athletes enough to give them 100 million yuan over the course of two years, the author asked, why is it so embarrassed about it now? The author also expressed concern that the incident might result in government authorities being less forthcoming about budget details in the future.

CDT Chinese editors have archived a selection of comments from Weibo users about Beijing’s financial support of Eileen Gu, widespread online censorship of the subject, and debate about the expense of pursuing Olympic gold via athletes who just “parachute in.” “As soon as winter rolls around, Beijing becomes ‘Beiping,’ Xi’an becomes ‘Chang’an,’ and Eileen Gu becomes Chinese,” wrote one online wag, referencing the names of two ancient Chinese capitals and hinting at Beijing’s high hopes for an Olympic gold from Gu in the upcoming 2026 Winter Olympics to be held in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. The Weibo comments are translated below:

风雨飘零任平生：They spent nearly 100 million yuan on two people. Why are they so afraid the taxpayers will find out?

清风不问流年Ta：If the ‘beasts of burden’ found out about this, they might not be willing to keep ‘pulling the millstone’ for them.

@飞呀飞_777：(responding to an image posted by another user) Smart! A link would have been harmonized, but an image will last longer. Only you forgot to include a name with the image.

风雨飘零任平生：(replying to @飞呀飞_777) Some names won’t make it past the censors, so the only way to mention her name is by using the hashtag #Gu Ailing (#谷爱玲)!

全球证券市场：From Caixin: Eileen Gu’s training expenses are 47.07 million yuan. Based on the total amount of funds invested in the Olympics, that works out to an average cost of $100 million U.S. dollars per Olympic gold medal.

粉龙星人：I’m not against spending money on athletes, but I wish that taxpayers’ money would be spent on athletes within the Chinese system. Has she become a naturalized Chinese citizen? Is she part of the Chinese athletic system?

User 7739243963：I’m waiting for this post to be deleted.

北冥小咸鱼 ：I wonder if this post will be deleted.

论衡1998：I am not against spending money on athletes, but the money should come from the free market. No one objects to or complains about Messi’s high income.

思想部队：Eileen Gu has a budget of 47 million yuan—how will she spend it? No wonder she’s willing to represent China in competition. Damn … for that price, who among us wouldn’t be?

大鼻子虎鲸：I always figured that the cooperation deal with Eileen Gu’s team was that the Chinese side would resolve the citizenship issue to facilitate her being able to compete for China, and that Gu’s team would be responsible for her training expenses and winning the gold, thus enhancing her reputation and gaining endorsements—a win-win for both sides. But I never expected that the Chinese side was footing the bill for Gu’s training. Is it right for a local government to spend 47 million yuan annually in taxpayers’ money, in exchange for a gold medal of dubious global importance? How can her team be so stingy, when they’ve got so much money and fame on their side?

九九渝：Are gold medals still … that important? [Chinese]

Tibetan minority languages suffer particularly from the latter. Gerald Roche, an anthropologist who studies these languages, recently spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the disappearing languages of Tibet. He noted that in acknowledging only a single Tibetan language, the Chinese state has used it “as a tool of domination over other minority languages,” many of which are at risk of extinction. Roche described the process of languages dying—be they state-recognized standard Tibetan or Tibetan minority languages—as the result of “an unequal hierarchical relationship of domination that forces bad choices on a particular group of people,” who then “lose a way of relating to each other and the world around them.” (CDT interviewed Roche on this topic last December.) In Global China Pulse on Monday, Dak (Lajadou) Lhagyal wrote about the difficulty of navigating different linguistic hierarchies in Tibet, as the push for linguistic purity can not only defend against the encroachment of Mandarin but also repress minority languages:

These judgements [against those who do not speak pure Tibetan] have sparked debates within Tibetan society about the need to standardise the language and establish a version of Tibetan that is mutually intelligible across its diverse, often mutually unintelligible regional varieties (Roche and Suzuki 2018). While Tibetan remains a critical aspect of cultural preservation, internal policing of linguistic norms has become more widespread, with expectations around pure Tibetan growing stronger (Thurston 2018). This policing often operates through naming and shaming those who speak Chinese or mix Tibetan with Chinese, while praising those who consistently use pure Tibetan, and is enforced both through peer pressure in daily interactions and on social media among Tibetans (Lhagyal 2021).

However, this internal policing can also create unintended consequences. Efforts to standardise Tibetan may marginalise speakers of non-standard varieties or those who regularly code-switch between Tibetan and Chinese. Roche and Suzuki (2018) caution that such movements could limit linguistic diversity within the broader Tibetan community. While the movement for language purism is driven by a genuine concern for cultural survival, it also reinforces linguistic hierarchies that may divide Tibetans rather than unite them.

The tension between preserving linguistic purity and navigating the pressures of everyday life in a Mandarin-dominated world reflects a deeper struggle within Tibetan society. As Mandarin continues to grow in influence, the desire to maintain Tibetan as a vibrant, living language persists, but this goal is complicated by the realities of cultural adaptation and the practical need to engage with Mandarin in public life. [Source]

More detrimentally, Chinese government policies have forced Mandarin education upon Tibetan children, contributing to the erasure of Tibetan languages. A dispatch from Human Rights Watch this month described how Chinese authorities have arbitrarily shuttered at least six vocational schools in Tibet since 2021 and forcibly disappeared prominent Tibetan educators. Last week, PBS and ITV released a FRONTLINE documentary titled “Battle for Tibet,” which showcases the struggle for the survival of language and culture in Tibet. One Tibetan mother interviewed says that her children who were forced to attend boarding schools “don’t speak our language. We can’t teach the kids Tibetan. They don’t listen to us.” Describing this aspect of the documentary, Sunny Nagpaul at PBS highlighted the risk of language loss and cultural erasure:

The children had “forgotten the Tibetan they knew and could no longer speak it properly,” says Gyal Lo, who lived in a Chinese province at the time, and now lives in exile in Canada. “The parents and the children couldn’t have a proper conversation with each other in Tibetan.”

The video above, drawn from the new FRONTLINE documentary Battle for Tibet, chronicles Gyal Lo’s next moves. Deciding to investigate what was happening at schools across Tibet, Gyal Lo visited over 50 kindergarten boarding schools for Tibetan children between 2017 and 2020. He says he found little teaching of Tibetan language and culture contrary to official claims.

[…] “These boarding pre-schools erase the fundamental mindset of Tibetan children from the age of four and replace it with a new Chinese mindset,” Gyal Lo says. “Over the next 15 to 20 years, if boarding schools continue, Tibetan national culture and identity will be completely destroyed.” [Source]

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy also released a report earlier this month titled “Dissenting Voices: The State of Expression in Tibet.” One section of the report discusses the crackdown on Tibetan language and culture via digital platforms. (CDT previously covered the removal of Tibetan and other minority languages from the language-learning app Talkmate and the video-sharing platform Bilibili in 2021.)

The suppression of Tibetan language platforms is part of a broader policy to prioritize Mandarin and restrict ethnic minority languages in China. Tibetan users of popular Chinese apps like Douyin and Kuaishou frequently report discriminatory practices, such as account shutdowns or reduced visibility for content created in Tibetan.

In June 2023, Rinchen and Sonam from Kham protested these practices through video messages. They highlighted the disparity between how Tibetan cultural content is censored while harmful content from other groups often remains unrestricted. Although their campaign gained significant support within Tibetan communities, Rinchen’s account was eventually blocked, and Sonam’s video was removed. Their pleas to platforms like Kuaishou to address this discrimination went unanswered.

Douyin’s parent company, ByteDance, has drawn similar criticism for censoring Tibetan-language content. In July 2024, Tibetan netizens such as Youga Ga and several others publicly criticised the platform for banning Tibetan language usage in videos, sparking widespread concern. [Source]

The controversy is being described online as “breaking in (literally, ‘prying open the lock’) to turn on the lights” (撬锁点灯, qiàosuǒ diǎndēng; also 撬门开灯, qiàomén kāidēng). Other permutations of the phrase include “breaking in late at night to turn on the lights” (半夜撬门开灯, bànyè qiàomén kāidēng) and “smashing/forcing the door to turn on the lights” (破门亮灯, pòmén liàngdēng). Some have borrowed a more classical phrase (from chapter 77 of Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber) to describe the perennial conflict between imperious authorities and the citizenry: “Only magistrates are allowed to set fires, while ordinary folk aren’t even allowed to light lanterns” (只许州官放火，不许百姓点灯, Zhǐxǔ zhōuguān fànghuǒ, bùxǔ bǎixìng diǎndēng.) The implication, of course, is that those in power can do whatever they please, whereas ordinary people are restricted even in their legitimate daily or business activities.

CDT Chinese editors have thus far archived about a dozen articles and essays about the controversy in Datong, as well as a variety of netizen comments. Some online commenters said the unauthorized break-in reminded them of COVID pandemic lockdowns, during which white-suited pandemic workers would sometimes break into private homes to "disinfect" the premises or "cull" dogs whose owners had been placed in quarantine facilities. Others said that it felt like a real-life version of a skit, featured in this year’s televised Spring Festival Gala, in which a noodle shop—in a misguided effort to comply with a local government initiative to make the town streets appear bustling and prosperous—forces a pair of customers to sit outside in freezing temperatures as they attempt to enjoy their noodles.

One Weibo user noted the relative impunity enjoyed by those in uniform, and mocked the “non-apology apology” issued by the neighborhood government in Datong:

When ordinary people break in: We get arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
When the government breaks in: "We were impatient for results and excessively hasty in carrying out our work." [Chinese]

Another comment, from an anonymous netizen, made reference to local authorities’ desire to promote tourism at all costs and to create the impression of economic prosperity, even if it is a sort of “Potemkin prosperity”:

Breaking into a shop in the middle of the night to turn on the lights—how could such a ridiculous thing happen? It’s because to the authorities, “false prosperity” resembles "prosperity,” and they care more about the appearance of prosperity than the “false” part. [Chinese]

A recent WeChat article from Zhao Hong, a professor of law at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, poses the following questions: "How can a voluntary ‘initiative’ become mandatory? And how do law-enforcement officers turn into scofflaws?" Professor Zhao’s article, published by Phoenix.com’s current-affairs WeChat blog Fengsheng OPINION, offers some legal insights into the supposedly voluntary local initiative asking shopkeepers to keep their lights on overnight for about two weeks during the Lunar New Year to make the historical city center appear more festive. The article also mentions the shopkeeper in question, a Mr. Yue, who had told local authorities that he couldn’t rush to his shop in the middle of the night just to turn on the lights, because he was too busy tending to his newborn child at home:

After the video surveillance footage provided by Mr. Yue was widely circulated, netizens described the scene of law-enforcement officers breaking the lock on the door and turning on the lights as an instance of “absurdly violent enforcement exposed under the glare of incandescent lights." The illegality of their behavior in this case is self-evident.

[…] In this case, Mr. Yue simply failed to keep his lights on overnight during the Spring Festival holiday, as recommended by his local neighborhood committee. His behavior was not in violation of public security enforcement protocols, nor did he fail to carry out any obligations as prescribed by the law. Public security organs are only tasked with enforcing the law, thus there was no conceivable legal basis for law-enforcement officers to break into Mr. Yue’s shop.

Merchants have significant legal property rights over their own shops. As Article 13 of the Constitution clearly stipulates, “Citizens’ lawful private property is inviolable. The state shall protect the right of citizens to own and inherit private property in accordance with the provisions of law.” And Article 240 of the Civil Code also emphasizes, "Those with ownership rights enjoy the rights to possession, use, earnings, and disposition of their own real estate and chattel.”

By forcibly entering Mr. Yue’s shop to turn on the lights without the express permission of the owner, the neighborhood committee property-management and law-enforcement departments committed a serious violation of Mr. Yue’s property rights. This violent action by law enforcement not only disrespects private property rights expressly protected by the Constitution and the Civil Code, but also disregards the owner’s right to exercise autonomy over his own business operations. It may even constitute a violation of Article 245 of the Criminal Law, which defines the crime of "unlawful entry into a private residence." According to paragraph two of Article 245, “Any judicial officer who abuses his power and commits the crime [unlawful entry into a private residence] mentioned in the preceding paragraph shall be given a heavier punishment.”

[…] From the audio [of the phone call] that Mr. Yue publicly shared, one is struck anew by the sheer arrogance of the [local] authorities: "If you don’t open the door, then the police are just going to show up and force it open. We’ll open that door for you—just see if we don’t.” “You don’t have to stay [in the shop], but the lights have to stay on.”

It is astonishing that even now, as we enter 2025, public authorities could show such blatant disregard for private property rights. Is this due to law-enforcement officers’ indifference to the rule of law, or do those in power genuinely believe that their authority supersedes the rule of law? Are those in power so protected that they can simply cast off the constraints of the rule of law?

A photo showing the shop door’s broken ground-level lock after it was cut. (source: Dafeng News)

[…] Mr. Yue informed reporters that the local propaganda department had told him that nearly 97% of the shops in the city were actively cooperating with the guideline to keep their lights on overnight for the duration of the Spring Festival holiday. Regarding the 3% of shops that decided not cooperate, Mr. Yue asked, "Do those 3% deserve to have their doors pried open?"

Surveillance video from Mr. Yue’s shop shows uniformed officers after they broke into his shop. (Source: Dafeng News)

[…] After law-enforcement officers broke into his shop, Mr. Yue called the 12345 hotline to report the incident, and also attempted to consult Pingcheng District authorities and the district’s Urban Management Bureau, but received no response to his queries.

[…] Facing tremendous public opinion backlash, the Gucheng Neighborhood Committee in Pingcheng District finally issued an apology letter early on the morning of February 7. Unfortunately, the apology letter made no mention of the legal consequences for the law-enforcement officers who broke in and turned on the lights, nor did it reassess the policy of requiring shops to keep their lights on all day and night throughout the Spring Festival. It simply attributed the problem to "improper working methods" and what it called “our impatience for quick results, a crude and heavy-handed approach, and a lack of service awareness in our work." Such an apology is undoubtedly disappointing to Mr. Yue, the shopkeeper whose rights were violated, as well as to the many netizens who have been paying close attention to the matter.

Today is only the tenth day of the first lunar month, and the traditional Spring Festival holiday is not yet over, but this incident in Datong, Shanxi province, serves as a reminder that if we wish to foster harmony, the rule of law must be our guiding light: it is only by respecting the rights of every individual that we can enjoy a fine, festive, vibrant city. [Chinese]

Another Weibo article, from the former publisher and editor-in-chief of China Blog magazine, is titled, “Breaking in to turn on the lights in Datong: Was it really just the product of ‘excessive enthusiasm?’” The author is deeply critical of both the wording and sentiment of the apology issued by local officials, and points out that local enforcers in general—whether they call themselves “chengguan” or “comprehensive enforcement teams”—frequently take a heavy-handed approach, and seem to behave with impunity:

During Chinese New Year, an utterly ridiculous incident occurred in Datong.

Local officials in the Pingcheng historic district had asked all shop owners to keep their lights on, even after closing hours, but one shop owner turned off his lights and went home. The neighborhood committee later called him up and asked him to come back to turn on the lights. As a new father trying desperately to coax his one-month-old infant to sleep, the shop owner told them he couldn’t rush back immediately just to turn on the lights in his shop.

So a group of guys wearing high-visibility jackets emblazoned with the words "comprehensive enforcement team" broke the lock on the shop’s door, turned on all the lights, installed a U-shaped padlock on the door, and left.

[…The subsequent apology from Datong authorities] expressed the superficial belief that "There was poor communication, which led to misunderstandings, which incited negative public opinion.” This was their original assessment of the situation.

Note that despite the commas used in that sentence, they are not parallel events, but a series of events. The logic of the apology is very confusing.

Later, under pressure from a public opinion backlash, they issued a new assessment.

This time, they blamed “our impatience for quick results, a crude and heavy-handed approach, and a lack of service awareness in our work.”

If you have any experience in writing official documents, you will know that when such words appear, the people who made mistakes won’t lose their jobs, nor will they even be punished. That kind of wording means: “Our intentions were good, but our execution was clumsy.”

Did the people who picked the lock and broke into that shop to turn on the lights have good intentions?

Of course not! Do well-intentioned people go around breaking and entering for no good reason? Even if you gave me lock-picking tools and asked me to break in, I still wouldn’t know how to pick a lock. If you tried to coerce me to smash the lock, I could probably manage it, but I’d still be too afraid to do it.

If you’ve ever lived in a second-tier or even lower-tier city, you’ll know that those so-called “comprehensive enforcement teams” are more than likely just thugs.

So why is Datong protecting these lock-picking thugs?

Because these thugs are loyally carrying out orders from above, and you can’t punish someone for loyally carrying out your orders. Managers and higher-ups rely on these thugs for their survival. If you start punishing them, they won’t want to work for you anymore.

[…] But we are modern citizens, not imperial subjects, so we shouldn’t just stand aside and gawk at the misfortunes of others. When things go wrong, we must employ logic to explain why things went so wrong, so that the truth eventually becomes clear.

Was Datong’s order to “keep the lights on" really aimed at helping tourists? Were they trying to prevent tourists from tripping in the dark and spraining their ankles?

No, of course not. They just wanted the city to look prettier at night. [Chinese]

Lastly, a WeChat article by Yang Naiwu for Planet Business Review explains Datong’s enthusiasm for all-night lights in terms of the increasing competition for tourist income. As local governments struggle with more debt, declining land revenues, and demands to provide more local services, there is more incentive than ever to pull out all the stops to attract tourists and generate holiday tourism income:

Why are [local authorities] making such a fuss this year? Many of my local friends say it’s connected to the Lantern Festival taking place in Datong’s historic district.

I looked into it and learned that Datong’s Lantern Festival started in 2016. In 2019, Datong’s tourism revenue exceeded 70 billion yuan, 60 billion of which was generated during the Spring Festival holiday period.

But tourism revenue hasn’t returned to the pre-pandemic level of 2019.

In 2023, Datong welcomed 1.66 million tourists during Spring Festival; during the same period in 2019, there were over two million visitors. Tourism revenue has only recovered to two-thirds of the pre-pandemic level.

Last year, due to the popularity of the video game Black Myth: Wukong, travel to Shanxi became very popular. For that reason, Datong has attached great importance to this year’s Spring Festival Lantern Festival, which started 20 days earlier than it did in previous years. The Pingcheng District environmental and commercial brigades also carried out major inspections. Datong’s entire historic district was festooned with lanterns and colorful decorations, and the government website promoted the slogan, "The lights of the ancient capital burn as bright as day, and in Pingcheng, the night is never-ending." [Chinese]

This report provides detailed analysis of key policy documents undergirding Sinicisation policy to reveal the framework, ambitions and proposed measures of Sinicisation policy. The General Office of the State Council’s “Opinions on Suggestions for Strengthening and Improving Islamic Work Under the New Situation”, more commonly known as Document No. 10 of the Xinjiang Papers, and the China Islamic Association’s (2018) “Five Year Plan for Maintaining Progress Toward the Sinicisation of Islam in Our Nation (2018-2022)” together provide a blueprint for radical transformation of Islamic communities and social organisation, alongside further measures for reducing the numbers of mosques and additional surveillance of Muslim migrants within China. The rhetoric of this campaign established clear norms of appropriateness for Islamic religious belief and practice in accordance with standards set by the party-state.

[…] The party-state applies significant pressure to Islamic communities to ensure compliance with Sinicisation policy. These measures have included targeted arrests of key individuals, including imams, dissidents and mosque management committee members, interventions into mosque management committees and imam selection processes, ‘study visits’ for key local religious professionals and officials, and Public Security Bureau (PSB) deployment around forced mosque renovations considered to be of high sensitivity. Other coercive tactics have included leverage of health and safety regulations and other bureaucratic processes to enforce closures, and outright threats of demolition made against targeted mosques and religious institutions. Such processes of quiet coercion have similarly served to dilute public opposition and obscure the true impact of Sinicisation measures.

[…] We estimate that all mosques with ‘Arabic’ features have either been subject to architectural Sinicisation or will be targeted in further policy cycles. [Source]

This theme was also discussed on a recent episode of the Remote Chay Podcast, published last week, titled “Studying Mosque Destructions in China From Afar.” The podcast is part of a project called Remote Ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In the episode, Ruslan Yusupov, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, described the process and historical references that underlie de-Arabization and Sinicization of mosques in China, focusing on Hui communities:

There are several stages to this campaign. The interplay between various forces and the way the campaign takes hold on the ground is varied. Most of the time, the government targets what it sees as obvious signs of Saudization and Arabization of Islamic architecture. Those are minarets that are thin, and they have finials, which are usually crescent moons, and then also all sorts of different round-shaped domes. So those are typically targeted. And if you look at the [classified government] report [on mosque rectification] from Xining, which includes lots of different pictures, you will see that, at first, when the on-the-ground grassroots remodification committee proposed those changes in the design, none of them included any pagodas or pavilions on top of mosques. […] They provided before- and after-photos. What you see them imagining sinicization to be like is that it’s actually shapeless, because it can’t escape its Arab style reference. So [in] the after-pictures of mosques, which are doctored, obviously, photoshopped in order to visualize sinicization, these mosques have nothing. They have just flat roofs. Nothing replaces minarets and domes.

Then, when actual demolitions took place, you see that so-called elements of Chinese culture [were] added, not only Sinicizing [by] just maiming the mosques, but [also] replacing the Arab structures with Sinicized structures. That itself is very interesting because the dominant way this is imagined is that the reference is taken from […] the architecture of Ming-era mosques that have really elaborate structures. The Niujie mosque in Beijing, for instance, is a good example of that. But the reference to history is misleading, because many Ming era mosques did not survive the destructive forces of 20th century China, even if they had a Sinicized look. So that is also very interesting, the way […] a particular version, rather diluted version of history, is used to justify why these mosques have to […] have these pagodas and pavilions if they are allowed to remain in China. [Source]

While these Sinicization campaigns have remodeled mosques without the full consent of many communities, few Western commentators have acknowledged the relatively recent origin of the ostensibly non-Chinese, Arabic style of some mosques targeted in these campaigns. Indeed, Mohammed Turki A Al-Sudairi has written about how “imaginaries of Saudi culture—in terms of mosque architectural styles […]—had become far more common within Hui cultural contexts” during the 1980s and 1990s due to an influx of funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Writing about Chinese madrasas’ links to Islamic schools abroad, Jackie Armijo has also written that “mosques dating back to the Ming and Qing periods [such as Kunming’s South City Mosque] have been torn down and replaced with what can best be described as ‘neo-pseudo-Middle Eastern’ style mosques. […] In at least some instances, students returning from their studies overseas played a role in the community’s decision to tear down and rebuild a mosque.”

In order to justify its Sinicization policies, the Chinese government has often invoked the threat of “foreign forces” that allegedly compel Chinese ethnic minorities to convert to Islam and push them towards the “three evils” of ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and violent terrorism. These claims are largely overblown and inflated with propaganda, and they have led to severe human rights abuses for even the most banal forms of religious observance. At the same time, Chinese Muslims’ historical resistance against government repression has been anchored in certain prominent mosques that they call “Little Meccas” (alluding to Islam’s holiest city, located in Saudi Arabia). Jianping Wang published an article in the Journal of Contemporary East Asian Studies last week on this subject:

[Chinese Muslims] needed strong community structures of their own to counter and resist the injustices and discrimination that might come from the totalitarian imperial polity. For [the] purpose of competition and safeguarding communal autonomy, particularly with respect to maintaining normal religious life and upholding cultural customs, the Chinese Muslims constructed Little Meccas as regional religious centers that brought together their dispersed enclaves for the purposes of survival.

[…] In the People’s Republic, Shadian Mosque was led by Ma Bohua, a Hui young teacher, to resist the People’s Liberation Army in their struggle against religious persecution and repression during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Even in contemporary China, many big mosques became centers of resistance against the Anti-three tides in the Campaign of Sinicization of Islam. In these movements, the governments wanted to change the Arabic architectural style of the mosques into a Chinese one. However, they were blocked from doing so by the Muslims in Weizhou in Ningxia, Xining in Qinghai and Zhaotong and many other places including Najiaying and Daying in Yunnan. All these locations have large mosques led by famous clerics, have well-developed Madrasas, and are regarded as regional centers of Islam who have had a history of resistance to the imperial forces.

[…] Little Meccas can be considered a method used by Muslims at the grass-root level or as a historical solution aimed at protecting Chinese Muslims from being assimilated into the Han Chinese cultural environment, and shielding them from the arbitrary politics of the imperial government. [Source]

The struggle for Hui Chinese religious freedom can be observed through other angles, as well. With a gendered lens, the Oxford China Centre’s newsletter last month highlighted a new book by Maria Jaschok titled, “Inside the Expressive Culture of Chinese Women’s Mosques,” which describes “the history and significance of current contestations over the increasing prominence of expressive piety in Hui Muslim women’s mosques in central China.” With an international lens, The New York Times published an article in December on the emigration to the U.S. of Hui Muslims fleeing persecution in China. And with an advocacy lens, former U.S. State Department advisor Todd Stein highlighted Congress’ selective outrage at the destruction of mosques in China and those in Gaza, arguing that this undermines U.S. criticism of the former.

As on the four previous anniversaries marking Dr. Li’s passing, many Chinese netizens left messages in the comments section under his final Weibo post, a venue that has become known as China’s “Wailing Wall.” (CDT has published extensive translations of these comments from the Chinese public, including this in-depth article and translation from 2021. Our editors also periodically archive new Wailing Wall content in Chinese and English, and produce a Chinese-language post and video feature monthly.)

This week, CDT Chinese editors have archived yet another collection of articles, online comments, and tributes to Dr. Li Wenliang and his legacy. One interesting remembrance is an emotional video interview with Dr. Li’s parents in Liaoning province, which was posted by a video blogger who goes by the name of 周叔走农村 ( Zhōu Shū zǒu nóngcūn, "Uncle Zhou, traveling through the countryside.") Zhou has apparently kept in touch with Dr. Li’s parents over the years. The short video reveals that even now, five years after their son’s untimely death, his parents are still mired in grief. Dr. Li’s father told Zhou that when he and his wife were taken to Wuhan by car in 2020, they were not allowed to see their son in person while he was in the hospital, nor to view his body at the funeral home—they were only able to peer at him through a pane of glass. Dr. Li’s mother added tearfully, “To not even let us take a look at our son … it was so inhumane.” Dr. Li’s wife Fu Xuejie also appears to be present in the video, at times comforting her parents-in-law, but remaining silent throughout. In the video, when Li Wenliang’s name appears on screen, it is rendered not in Chinese characters, but with the abbreviation “LWL.” Later, after the video attracted a fair amount of attention online, some Chinese netizens noticed that several related videos had been deleted from the WeChat video platform.

WeChat blogger Princess Minmin, who pens an annual tribute to Dr. Li Wenliang, wrote this year about the importance of individuals of conscience who are willing to risk speaking the truth in order to benefit their fellow human beings. She mentions Dr. Zheng Minhua, the director of general surgery at Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, who recently deleted his WeChat account after he was attacked by online trolls for expressing his well-founded concerns about the quality of bulk-purchased generic medications in China. Some of the problems Dr. Zheng pointed out were "anesthesia that does not put patients to sleep” and “blood-pressure medication that does not lower blood pressure”:

Dr. Zheng from Shanghai was attacked by many people online, just for saying a few words about centrally-procured medications. The bad people are still as bad as ever, and it’s harder than ever to be a good person. These shit-stirring losers are so blatant that those who would tell the truth are cowed and intimidated.

"Health is at stake, and life is in your hands," [as the medical oath reads.] Doctors should tell the truth. If doctors lie, particularly in the field of public health, many people will die.

Honesty is a valuable quality indeed. There are far too many people who are willing to tell bald-faced lies that even they don’t believe, which makes honesty a more precious commodity than ever.

We cherish Dr. Li Wenliang because he told the truth.

People tend to be forgetful. Maybe people are already starting to forget what happened during those [pandemic] years. Maybe in a few years or a few decades, there won’t be many who still remember what happened in the spring of 2020. But those words spoken by Dr. Li Wenliang—“There should be more than one voice in a healthy society”—will not be forgotten. [Chinese]

CDT has also compiled and translated some of the many comments left by Weibo users on Dr. Li Wenliang’s Wailing Wall between February 6-7, 2025:

槟榔南瓜子03: Doctor Li, it’s been five years. Back then, I was still an ignorant high-school student, in awe of your courage and outraged by your tragedy. It was then that the idea of studying medicine really took root in my heart. After many setbacks, I was finally able to follow my dream of studying clinical medicine. It wasn’t an easy path, but the belief that I could "become a person just like you" always inspired me to keep moving forward. I hope everything is well with you over there, and I also hope that all the people encouraging and confiding in each other here can get the life they want. Good night!

此情此L老把: This afternoon I’ll go to Central Park West 96th Street to visit your park bench.

为什么你总一个人在走廊上看月亮: QQ suddenly reminded me of some things I posted five years ago, so I came here to visit you. I remember waiting up late into the night for news about you. They said it happened on the 7th, but it was actually the 6th, wasn’t it? I was still a high-school student at that time, and I saw and experienced far too many things in the space of just a month or two. These last five years have gone by in a flash. Nowadays, I rarely express my opinions on social media, but I hope the flame won’t die out. May you rest in peace, Dr. Li.

MyPreciousburden: I still remember anxiously reading the news about you on Weibo, in the early hours of the morning five years ago. In the blink of an eye, so much time has passed, and the world still disappoints. But people like you are the light in the fog, and your words (“There should be more than one voice in a healthy society”) still echo in my heart. Best wishes, Dr. Li! I don’t understand, and I won’t forget.

常笑94468: Wow, it’s been five years. It was snowing the day you left us, and now outside my window, it’s snowing again. Since you left, so many things have been torn apart, and we can never go back to the way it was. I hope you’re safe and sound.

抬頭尚有天空_敲不碎: So it’s been five years. I hope you’re now a carefree, active, happy little five-year-old child. The world hasn’t improved, but it hasn’t collapsed, either. We haven’t forgotten you.

裕泰王掌柜: Five years later, and the words you spoke haven’t yet come true.

跳跃的灵魂077: We will see that day for you.

用户6227760699: Has it really been five years? We will always remember you—both as a sincere, kind, upstanding, and courageous doctor, and as a lively, lovely, vital, and authentic ordinary person.

育人大业: In the past five years, I wonder how many people’s Weibo posts have disappeared, “gone with the wind.”

用户7748022176: Five years have passed and I still miss you. The world hasn’t gotten any better. If anything, it’s even more insane. To borrow a bit of online slang, I hope everyone gets the life they want! Remember Shanghai, 2022: NEVER FORGET. NEVER FORGIVE! [Chinese]

CDT’s Wailing Wall archive is compiled by Tony Hu.

On the death of Doctor Li Wenliang of Wuhan Central Hospital, only CCTV television reports and news app content may be republished. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

For now, do not repost the hot comment article on Li Wenliang published by CCTV this morning. Await instructions. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

Reminder: Do not use the concept of “whistleblower” in any reports. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

Cancel all publicity stories, without exception, related to special programs for the Lantern Festival, which should be handled in a low-key and cautious manner. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

1. Regarding foreign contributions to our fight against the epidemic, please stay in line with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statements and Xinhua news copy. Do not draw contrasts, interpret, hype, or give the erroneous impression that we are reliant on foreign donations to fight the epidemic. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

2. The standard name for pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus infections is “novel coronavirus pneumonia,” abbreviated as “NCP.” In English, it is known as “Novel coronavirus pneumonia,” or “NCP” for short. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

The Central Cultural Bureau will soon release a “Notice on Focused Development of Vigorous Cultural Education While Winning Victory in the Battle to Control and Contain The Epidemic.” The notice’s primary content has already been publicly reported. Please carry out online dissemination guidance work in accordance with the notice’s requirements, further strengthen dissemination and education of epidemic control knowledge, carry forward the new trend of joint construction of a happy life era, publicize exemplary model cases of epidemic control work, and mobilize the masses’ energetic participation in the fight to control the epidemic. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

Please promptly carry out reposting and coverage of reports and reasonable, correct public comments on foreign allies’ support against the virus, and increase online promotion. (February 7, 2020) [Chinese]

These directives were part of a recent stream of orders directed at limiting coverage of various aspects of the novel coronavirus outbreak. In particular, a similar directive on February 3 noted that reporting on foreign assistance to fight the virus should be “cautious and low-key.” The February 6 death of Dr. Li Wenliang, who was widely lauded as a whistleblower before the emergence of the virus was public knowledge, was the subject of several propaganda orders.  Li’s death became a rallying cry for those in China who were frustrated and angry at the government’s response to the virus.

The Lantern Festival marks the end of the two-week Spring Festival period in China. Previous directives had banned celebratory media content about China’s major annual holiday in the midst of the national health crisis.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011..

We are meeting in the summer of 2024 during a hidden-camera visit to the premises of Yanggu Jifa, the main employer in Sanzhiwang, a village in Shandong province, eastern China. The factory is the property of the Jifa group. Most people have not heard of it, yet it is Decathlon’s second largest textile manufacturer in China. A fact that the French sports multinational kept secret until an internal source at Decathlon shared a sensitive business file with Disclose: the list of its subcontractors around the world. In the document, Jifa is referenced as one of the French brand’s “key account suppliers”: Decathlon bought 43 millions euros’ worth of clothes from Jifa in 2022 alone.

[…] Decathlon’s supplier is in fact directly involved in a system of modern slavery in China, as revealed by Disclose in partnership with Cash Investigation, after a year-long investigation into the brand’s supply chain. Uyghur women are the main victims of this traffic in human beings. They are members of a predominantly Muslim ethnic group violently suppressed by Beijing. The workers are forcibly enrolled to make t-shirts, shorts and other items of clothing likely to end up in Decathlon’s 1 700 or so shops around the world. [Source]

“Decathlon couldn’t have not known,” wrote Libération, adding that a French Uyghur wrote for the newspaper in 2017 about how one of her friends who worked for Decathlon was arrested while on a work trip to Shanghai, sent to a detention center in Urumqi, and after Decathlon became involved, he was somehow rescued and allowed to return to Paris. Le Monde noted that Decathlon also made the official uniforms for 45,000 volunteers at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In response to the investigation, Decathlon said that the cotton it uses was being supplied by sources “committed to the most responsible practices, which guarantees the absence of all forms of forced labour.”

Last month, the Rand Corporation published a 197-page report on the impacts of and opportunities for enforcing U.S. laws on forced labor in global supply chains. The report found that businesses and consumers “remain exposed to goods made with forced labor through indirect supply chain linkages with limited visibility.” John Foote provided extensive commentary on the Rand report in his latest Forced Labor & Trade Substack. Later in the month, the U.S. government began to block imports from 37 additional Chinese companies in conjunction with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The Chinese Foreign Ministry called the move “completely unfounded.” Ana Swanson at The New York Times reported on the companies that were targeted:

The administration’s move is the single largest batch of additions to a list of companies that are barred from bringing products into the United States because of concerns about human rights violations.

[…] The 37 entities that were added on Tuesday to a special list created by the law include subsidiaries of a major supplier of critical minerals, Zijin Mining. The New York Times reported in 2022 that Zijin Mining had links with labor transfer programs in Xinjiang.

The additions also include one of the world’s largest textile manufacturers, Huafu Fashion, and 25 of its subsidiaries. It’s not clear which retailers Huafu currently supplies, but H\&M previously said that it had an indirect relationship with a mill belonging to Huafu Fashion and that it would cut those ties.

Companies in real estate, mining, solar and cotton production were also added to the list. Altogether, they bring the list to 144 entities. [Source]

The Trump administration was reported this week to be discussing whether to add Chinese e-commerce fast-fashion giants Shein and Temu to the U.S. forced-labor blacklist. Last month, representatives from the two companies were summoned to a British parliamentary hearing where lawmakers grilled them for evading questions about their companies’ links to Uyghur forced labor. (“You’ve given us almost zero confidence in the integrity of your supply chains,” one lawmaker concluded.) British activist group Stop Uyghur Genocide stated it will lodge a judicial review if Shein’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange is approved. Separately, an investigation by the head of the British parliament’s cross-party human rights committee found that three new cargo flight routes directly from Xinjiang to Britain may be trafficking goods made with forced labor. And as Christopher Knaus and Helen Davidson recently reported for The Guardian, Australia has become a destination for thousands of imports from Chinese companies blacklisted by the U.S. over links to Uyghur forced labor:

Using freedom of information laws, the Guardian obtained details of 3,347 import declarations that name eight US-blacklisted companies as suppliers of materials to Australian importers since 2020. The companies ship a range of products, including parts for car batteries and trains used by state governments; safety gear for tradespeople; spices and food additives; and laser printers.

The documents show Australia’s imports from the eight companies actually increased after the US introduced its ban, peaking in 2023.

Separate records obtained from the fisheries department show Australian seafood importers are receiving hundreds of shipments from Chinese-based processors publicly linked to the use of Uyghur labour during an exhaustive investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project, a not-for-profit investigative reporting group based in Washington DC. [Source]

“Bullet-screen” comments (弹幕, dànmù, literally meaning "a barrage") originated on Japanese video-sharing sites and rapidly became popular in China. They appear as a stream of comments, purportedly in real-time, scrolling across the screen from right to left, sometimes obscuring the video that is being commented upon. Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili is particularly known for its danmu comment function, beloved among Bilibili users for allowing them to interact with one another and fostering a sense of community. Thus the excitement about Bilibili’s announcement that it would be live-streaming the 2025 Gala on its platform—and the subsequent disappointment when Bilibili users realized that the comments streaming across their screens were canned “prefabricated” comments, likely written by Bilibili staffers rather than actual audience members.

CDT Chinese editors have archived two articles about what it was like to watch this year’s Gala with the new ersatz onscreen comments. A WeChat article titled “‘Prefab’ Bullet-Screen Comments for Spring Festival Gala Signal a Lack of Confidence,” from blogger Mu Qi, was highly critical of the use of pre-vetted (or very likely fake) comments on Bilibili’s broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala. The author points out that it completely undermines the point of live on-screen comments, and shows a lack of “cultural self-confidence” on the part of the broadcaster:

I watched the Spring Festival Gala again this year, just like I have in years past.

I had planned to write about some of my post-viewing impressions, but then I remembered that even before the Spring Festival holiday, the relevant departments had issued repeated warnings not to “over-exploit” topics such as the Spring Festival Gala or Spring Festival-related movies and TV shows.

So whenever the urge to comment arose, I swallowed it down.

For example, I said nothing about that skit starring Shen Teng and Ma Li—just when you thought the story was reaching its peak, it ended on an abrupt note.

Although I hadn’t planned to comment, something that the Spring Festival Gala director said provoked a desire to express myself.

She said, "We have tried our very best, and we hope that our audience will be a bit forgiving.”

I think that statement is much too self-effacing, because during this year’s Spring Festival Gala, the audience is literally not allowed to be “unforgiving.”

Take, for example, my personal experience watching the Spring Festival Gala on Bilibili.

On a screen filled with comments, there wasn’t a single “unforgiving” comment, only high praise.

Even the [frequently panned] skits received rave reviews.

Later, I did some research and discovered that these bullet-screen comments were actually "prefabricated."

There were dozens of bullet-screens with exactly the same content, scrolling across the screen over and over.

[The commenters’] individual user IDs have now been replaced by the words "place-name" + "netizen.”

When I tried to send out a random critical comment, it didn’t even show up on screen.

The so-called "Spring Festival Gala bullet screen" isn’t interactive at all, and it’s been completely overshadowed by tech and AI.

Later, I searched on Weibo and found out I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

A lot of netizens who watched the Spring Festival Gala live broadcast on Bilibili weren’t able to see the comments they’d sent on screen, or weren’t even able to send them at all.

You couldn’t even send a simple question mark.

All of the comments shown on screen were positive reviews.

Also, the international version of Bilibili has completely done away with interactive functions like bullet-screen comments and Q\&A, although you can still send gifts [“digital red envelopes”].

A few years ago, Douban disabled ratings for the Spring Festival Gala, so people were no longer allowed to rate the show.

Now, Bilibili has taken that a step further by denying you the opportunity to be “unforgiving.”

What’s more frustrating is that you can’t turn off the bullet-screen comments even if you want to, so you’re forced to watch a barrage of “prefab” onscreen comments.

Bilibili later explained that its use of these comments was a response to the "regulatory pressures" of live broadcasting. In order to ensure a smooth broadcast, the platform said it would use the prefabricated comments to avoid potentially sensitive and controversial content.

Bilibili’s explanation was very good, if you agree that “good” means only allowing “good” comments.

[…] As an early Bilibili user, I watched everything from "Jinkela" [a fertilizer advertisement that spawned many memes] to "The [poisoned] chicken soup’s ready!” [a memeable, slapstick portion of a TV-show episode].

Now, ten years later, the core spirit of Bilibili has undergone a huge transformation.

That’s understandable, given that the platform’s founder sold his shares, and it’s only natural for a listed company to become more commercialized and profit-driven.

But I have no appetite for this new fare they’re offering; this so-called "innovation" fills me with mixed emotions.

Bullet-screen comments are the essence of Bilibili.

Many people watch Bilibili just for the excitement, authenticity, and humor of the comments.

But now it appears that future bullet-screen comments may be artificially generated.

The comment sections of Weibo and Douyin are already swamped with AI-powered “water armies” [i.e. bots and sockpuppets].

Will other platforms such as Bilibili follow suit?

[…] This year’s Spring Festival Gala is the first since the Gala made UNESCO’s Intangible World Heritage list.

Logically speaking, we should be more culturally confident.

I sincerely hope that in addition to having confidence in our "bullet-screen comments,” we can consider other ways to express and promote national self-confidence.

It’s just like what [TV pundit and scholar of international relations] Zhang Weiwei once claimed about China: "We can talk about anything we want. No topics are off-limits.”

Now that would be true self-confidence. [Chinese]

A screenshot shows vague, repetitive comments such as “Hahahaha” and “How cute!” during the generally well-received “Borrowing an Umbrella” operatic performance.

A WeChat article from the film-and-television focused blog Xia Meng Screening Room talked about what it was like to witness, for the first time, these prefabricated bullet-screen comments. The author focuses on the use of danmu as a core part of Bilibili’s platform culture, and bemoans what the rise of bland prefabricated comments will mean for the online sense of community:

The audience share for this year’s Spring Festival Gala hit a ten-year record high of 39.1%.

Having watched the whole thing from beginning to end, I have to say that I thought this year’s show was pretty good. Although the skits were as crappy as ever, I was pleased to find that there was a lot less “preaching,” a lot more content about traditional culture, and the quality of the song and dance numbers were greatly improved.

The only displeasing thing about the 2025 Spring Festival Gala—something I groused about from beginning to end—were the bullet-screen comments on Bilibili.

This year, Bilibili bought the live broadcast rights to CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala. This was the first time that Bilibili broadcast the annual cultural gala live, and the first time since Bilibili’s founding 15 years ago that the social media platform has been part of the Gala. It even promoted the slogan, "Watch the Spring Festival Gala with 300 million other young people!"

I was really excited when I heard about this, so on Lunar New Year’s Eve, I logged into the Bilibili homepage at 8:00 p.m. on the dot, looking forward to trying out the combo of Gala watching + real-time bullet-screen commenting. But I hadn’t expected that all of the evening’s real-time comments would be “prefabricated.” The experience was so awful that it kind of pissed me off.

[…] The show that I’d been so looking forward to was flooded with prefab comments.

Put it this way: seeing all that canned commentary on Bilibili’s Spring Festival Gala broadcast straight-up sucked.

There are reasons why we like to post real-time bullet-screen comments on Bilibili:

First, it gives us the chance to interact in real time. By posting bullet-screen comments, I can communicate with other viewers. This interactivity makes me feel more closely connected to the Spring Festival Gala, and heightens the sense of participation and social interaction—but only if the audience is made up of real people! It doesn’t work if the comments are preselected snippets of text written by some copy editor.

Also, danmu culture makes the experience of watching videos more interesting, like you and the other viewers are inhabiting the same moment.

With prefabricated comments, even if they’re scrolling across the screen supposedly in "real-time,” their robot-like templates simply cannot replicate the joy of true interaction.

Second, danmu culture promotes a social atmosphere within online communities.

Bilibili’s user base is mainly young people, especially Gen Z and Millennials. The content and community atmosphere on the platform is geared toward the needs and interests of young people, which encompasses cultural trends, progressive ideas, and various online subcultures.

Not only can Bilibili users watch videos, they can also interact and take part in discussions, which fosters a unique sense of community.

When it bought the broadcasting rights for the Spring Festival Gala, Bilibili promoted the slogan, "Watch the Spring Festival Gala with 300 million other young people!" And that’s what they did, but for the many people (including me) who showed up to try it, the prefab bullet-screen comments left us feeling frustrated and duped.

[…] At any rate, after experiencing those canned comments this year, I definitely won’t be going back to Bilibili to watch the Spring Festival Gala next year. Because who wants to start the New Year feeling sick to your stomach? [Chinese]

A screenshot shows some of the dull, anonymous bullet-screen comments, along with one comment (circled in red) that seems skeptical.
Jiangxi netizen: This is great!
Hubei netizen: Um, are these the right comments?
Cold, bright: This is great!
Shandong netizen: I’m so proud!
Hebei netizen: Happy New Year!