At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism;...
Due to the “present complicated geopolitical situation,” the Hong Kong government has decided the city needs even more national security. New legislation was introduced in the Legislative Council on Tuesday and rapidly...
In response to reports that India and Pakistan have agreed to a tenuous ceasefire following...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
The 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders last week highlighted...
I’m just an ordinary guy who made the wrong choice and got involved in this war. My role is to be a grunt, or maybe more accurately, to be cannon fodder."
— From a video interview between investigative journalist Chai Jing and "Macaron," a Chinese citizen who was fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
In response to reports that India and Pakistan have agreed to a tenuous ceasefire following several days of intense military conflict between both nuclear-armed nations last week, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed support for the ceasefire, commenting that it “serves the fundamental and long-term interests of both countries [and] contributes to regional peace and stability." Tensions ignited last month when militants, whom the Indian government claimed were supported by Pakistan, killed 26 tourists, mostly Hindus, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The Indian government then...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
Amid signs that U.S. tariffs are starting to bite into China’s exports, the country’s...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected a U.S. peace plan that would freeze territory...
As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are statistics from official Chinese sources? Recent media pieces have highlighted the deepening lack of government transparency and accuracy when it comes to important data, and its implications for research related to China. The latest example is from Rebecca Feng and Jason Douglas at The Wall Street Journal, who wrote this week about how “Beijing has stopped publishing hundreds of statistics, making it harder to know what’s going on in the country”: Land sales measures, foreign investment data and...
On Friday—right before World Press Freedom Day—Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2025...
The ever-growing list of government pro-natalist initiatives at local and national levels has so...
This week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published “China...
Global tributes poured in following the death of Pope Francis on Monday, as world leaders and...
On Saturday, Beijing hosted the world’s first half-marathon in which humans competed alongside...
On Friday—right before World Press Freedom Day—Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, which showed a notable drop in the rankings of China (from 172 to 178 out of 180) and Hong Kong (from 135 to 140 out of 180) compared to last year. The results reveal that for the first time in the history of the RSF index, the global average state of press freedom has deteriorated to a “difficult situation”: Although physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom, economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem. The...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
This week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published “China...
Recent reports detail ways in which the Chinese government has instrumentalized digital...
Last week, Chinese state media reported that Wu Yingjie, the former Party chief of the Tibetan...
In response to reports that India and Pakistan have agreed to a tenuous ceasefire following several days of intense military conflict between both nuclear-armed nations last week, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed support for the ceasefire, commenting that it “serves the fundamental and long-term interests of both countries [and] contributes to regional peace and stability." Tensions ignited last month when militants, whom the Indian government claimed were supported by Pakistan, killed 26 tourists, mostly Hindus, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The Indian government then...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
Amid signs that U.S. tariffs are starting to bite into China’s exports, the country’s...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected a U.S. peace plan that would freeze territory...
At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism; Li even attributes a substantial slice of homegrown AI champion DeepSeek’s public adoption to demand for AI-generated fortunes and horoscopes. 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...
In response to reports that India and Pakistan have agreed to a tenuous ceasefire following...
The 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders last week highlighted...
As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
Amid signs that U.S. tariffs are starting to bite into China’s exports, the country’s...
Due to the “present complicated geopolitical situation,” the Hong Kong government has decided the city needs even more national security. New legislation was introduced in the Legislative Council on Tuesday and rapidly enacted on Wednesday. It expands upon Hong Kong’s homegrown “Article 23” national security law (the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance) from last March that targets treason, insurrection, sabotage, external interference, sedition, theft of state secrets, and espionage. All of this adds to the city’s already draconian 2020 National Security Law imposed by Beijing. As the...
On Friday—right before World Press Freedom Day—Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2025...
The latest political development in Hong Kong underscores the extent to which authorities have...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
A recent WeChat post reveals that some Chinese schools and universities are using special software...
In the two weeks since the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China...
A pair of recently surfaced screenshots appear to offer unusual detail about a special month-long...
On September 12, 2003, John Battelle published the first post on chinadigitaltimes.net: Here’s what a Google Search on “china weblog” yields, I’m looking forward to seeing ours at the top soon! China’s online population at the start of that year was nearly 60 million. Ten years later, it was fast approaching 600 million, and now, after 20, it is well over a billion. This new completely revised and hugely expanded update to our ebook series, formerly known as “the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon,” aims to capture something of the enormous explosion of online speech that accompanied this growth, with...
In 2014, Leta Hong Fincher published her first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender...
Starting in March 2008, Tibetans across the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), Qinghai, Gansu, and...
Surveys have shown that Xi Jinping’s hardline foreign policy is increasingly unpopular abroad....
Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of Government at Cornell University, joined CDT to discuss his...
Evidence of human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang has...
At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism; Li even attributes a substantial slice of homegrown AI champion DeepSeek’s public adoption to demand for AI-generated fortunes and horoscopes. 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...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
The 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders last week highlighted...
As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
Amid signs that U.S. tariffs are starting to bite into China’s exports, the country’s...
At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism; Li even attributes a substantial slice of homegrown AI champion DeepSeek’s public adoption to demand for AI-generated fortunes and horoscopes. 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...
In response to reports that India and Pakistan have agreed to a tenuous ceasefire following...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
The 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders last week highlighted...
As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism; Li even attributes a substantial slice of homegrown AI champion DeepSeek’s public adoption to demand for AI-generated fortunes and horoscopes. 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...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
On Saturday, Beijing hosted the world’s first half-marathon in which humans competed alongside...
More than five years after the Wuhan lockdown and the death of COVID whistleblower Dr. Li...
Recent weeks have seen a mounting chorus of praise from Chinese companies and other organizations...
The Open Technology Fund published a report earlier this month highlighting the rise of...
Due to the “present complicated geopolitical situation,” the Hong Kong government has decided the city needs even more national security. New legislation was introduced in the Legislative Council on Tuesday and rapidly enacted on Wednesday. It expands upon Hong Kong’s homegrown “Article 23” national security law (the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance) from last March that targets treason, insurrection, sabotage, external interference, sedition, theft of state secrets, and espionage. All of this adds to the city’s already draconian 2020 National Security Law imposed by Beijing. As the...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
This week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published “China...
Recent reports detail ways in which the Chinese government has instrumentalized digital...
The latest political development in Hong Kong underscores the extent to which authorities have...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was...
A recent WeChat post from oft-controversial entrepreneur, publicity hound, and philanthropist Chen...
Even before the lifting of China’s long-standing “zero-COVID” policy in early December of last...
After conducting nucleic acid testing on its 26 million residents this week, Shanghai remains...
On Friday—right before World Press Freedom Day—Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, which showed a notable drop in the rankings of China (from 172 to 178 out of 180) and Hong Kong (from 135 to 140 out of 180) compared to last year. The results reveal that for the first time in the history of the RSF index, the global average state of press freedom has deteriorated to a “difficult situation”: Although physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom, economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem. The...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
CDT noted last month that recent Chinese naval exercises around Australia had sparked a spike in comments on Chinese social media advocating the conquest of Australia. While some may have been a joke, others appeared serious, and were taken seriously by commentators such as current affairs and science blogger Xiang Dongliang, who wrote: “Popular sentiment really has shifted. My heartfelt prayer, as a humble science blogger: May Buddha bless and protect us.” While the occupation of a three-million-square-mile island nearly two thousand miles from China might charitably be described as...
The first reaction by China’s state-media apparatus following the escalating U.S.-China trade war...
Hu Dehua, the third son of former General Secretary Hu Yaobang, died in Beijing on March 30. The...
In recent days, the capture of two Chinese soldiers fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine has highlighted the role of foreign fighters in that conflict. In a post to his X account, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested that there might be growing numbers of Chinese fighting on the Russian side. Officials in Beijing responded by calling Ukraine’s claim “totally unfounded” and denying that there are significant numbers of Chinese citizens fighting on Russia’s behalf. The first two captured Chinese citizens. Today, investigators from the Security Service of Ukraine spoke with...
This week, 20-year-old American influencer Darren Watkins Jr., better known as IShowSpeed,...
A 7.7 magnitude earthquake recorded on Friday near the Burmese city of Mandalay has killed at...
The Trump administration’s recent tariff measures triggered a geopolitical earthquake that has shaken world markets and set Chinese media ablaze. In a dramatic escalation, the U.S. increased tariffs on China from 54% to 104% last Wednesday, then to 125% later that day, and again to 145% on Thursday. (On Wednesday, amid plunging global stock markets, Trump announced a pause in tariffs on most other countries, except for China. Further exemptions on phones and other electronics manufactured in China have since been announced.) In response, China announced retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., which...
Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison and its owner Li Ka-shing have found themselves in the...
Despite troubling jurisdictional issues, the Urumqi Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau in...
Due to the “present complicated geopolitical situation,” the Hong Kong government has decided the city needs even more national security. New legislation was introduced in the Legislative Council on Tuesday and rapidly enacted on Wednesday. It expands upon Hong Kong’s homegrown “Article 23” national security law (the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance) from last March that targets treason, insurrection, sabotage, external interference, sedition, theft of state secrets, and espionage. All of this adds to the city’s already draconian 2020 National Security Law imposed by Beijing. As the...
A series of state-media reports on the theme of the May 1 International Workers Day provide a...
In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 2025, a lone protester lashed three long white...
Over the past two weeks, the Biden administration has issued a series of regulations intended to halt China’s development of advanced technologies. The measures restrict the export of advanced chips, design software, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment that are crucial to China’s military, AI, and supercomputing initiatives. While the impact of these regulations remains to be seen, this “major watershed” demonstrates a significant U.S. policy shift towards a more aggressive approach to China, and risks accelerating technological and economic decoupling between the two countries across...
Popular online writer Shen Maohua, who writes under the pen name Wei Zhou, is known for his...
As citizens revolt against never-ending lockdowns and local governments “resolutely struggle...
At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism; Li even attributes a substantial slice of homegrown AI champion DeepSeek’s public adoption to demand for AI-generated fortunes and horoscopes. 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...
The 2025 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders last week highlighted...
Despite troubling jurisdictional issues, the Urumqi Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau in...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central Party authorities to state media at the beginning of that year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020 through the early weeks of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, and shed light on the propaganda machinery’s efforts to grapple with the outbreak. They were originally published between September and December, 2020 as the Minitrue Diary series, after the censorship and propaganda organs’ Orwellian online nickname 真理部 Zhēnlǐ bù, or "Ministry of...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
On March 16, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the Chinese economy was...
At Project Sinopsis, Ansel Li examines how many young Chinese are seeking solace in mystical crystals and spirituality-based scams. Superstitious elements have blended with livestream- and app-driven hyperconsumerism; Li even attributes a substantial slice of homegrown AI champion DeepSeek’s public adoption to demand for AI-generated fortunes and horoscopes. 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...
A viral scandal that started out as the tale of one doctor’s extramarital affairs and medical...
On Saturday, Beijing hosted the world’s first half-marathon in which humans competed alongside...
As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are statistics from official Chinese sources? Recent media pieces have highlighted the deepening lack of government transparency and accuracy when it comes to important data, and its implications for research related to China. The latest example is from Rebecca Feng and Jason Douglas at The Wall Street Journal, who wrote this week about how “Beijing has stopped publishing hundreds of statistics, making it harder to know what’s going on in the country”: Land sales measures, foreign investment data and...
An acidic waste spill by a Chinese company in Zambia has created a massive environmental crisis...
On Tuesday morning, a county in Tibet experienced one of its strongest earthquakes in years....
Due to the “present complicated geopolitical situation,” the Hong Kong government has decided the city needs even more national security. New legislation was introduced in the Legislative Council on Tuesday and rapidly enacted on Wednesday. It expands upon Hong Kong’s homegrown “Article 23” national security law (the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance) from last March that targets treason, insurrection, sabotage, external interference, sedition, theft of state secrets, and espionage. All of this adds to the city’s already draconian 2020 National Security Law imposed by Beijing. As the...
On Friday—right before World Press Freedom Day—Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2025...
The latest political development in Hong Kong underscores the extent to which authorities have...
Global tributes poured in following the death of Pope Francis on Monday, as world leaders and admirers of all faiths mourn a figure of peace in a time of growing conflict. However, as Italy’s Corriere della Sera bitterly noted, Chinese media largely ignored the pope’s death, with most Chinese newspapers relegating that news to short briefs buried behind front pages saturated in Xi Jinping hagiography. Nectar Gan at CNN described how the China’s muted official response to Pope Francis’ death reflects its historically tense relationship with the Vatican: Chinese state-controlled media’s...
Following China’s unannounced naval exercises off the coast of Australia late last month, there...
In late 2020, CDT acquired and verified a collection of propaganda directives issued by central...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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