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Chinese Internet Company Gives Employees 12/21 “Doomsday Vacation”
From Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Museo del Prado/Wikimedia Commons) This article also appeared on The Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. How terribly inconvenient it is that the...
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Tongue-in-Cheek Nation: 10 Hilarious and Clever Chinese Internet Stories from...
It’s been a fascinating year in Chinese cyberspace. Chinese Internet users now number about 538 million, with hundreds of millions of those generating over 100 million posts per day on Sina Weibo,...
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Chinese State Television’s Helpful Online Announcement: World There Ends at...
Let the countdown begin. (Via Weibo) Chinese authorities may be busy cracking down on a “doomsday cult,” but end-of-days chatter is still dominating Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. A recent search early...
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Spotted on China’s Web: “Breeding Base” for Communist Party Members
The sign reads “Party Member Breeding Base.” (Via Weibo) A user on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter with the handle @醒来的大鸦 has posted this head-scratcher: A sign reading “Breeding Base for [Communist] Party...
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“Help Me Pay This Bill”: A Short But Incisive Send-Up of Chinese Corruption
“Even the food on the table was enough to wipe out three months of my income.” (InterContinental Hong Kong/Flickr) This article also appears on ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. It’s a social...
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Children, Who Is This Man?
Chinese author Mo Yan shot to international fame when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2012, and his success was wildly celebrated in his home country. No doubt many harbor hopes that...
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A Vocational School For Chinese Hackers — And Tractor Drivers
A picture from the Lanxiang Vocational School’s website When the New York Times reported yesterday that Chinese hackers had been attacking its computer system for months, one social media user in China...
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Gasp! Nudity on CCTV Newscast Goes Viral
What has the world come to? Is nothing sacred anymore? The venerable propagandist institution known as the 7pm newscast on China Central Television (CCTV) usually offers comfort to those drowning in...
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Why Chinese New Year Is Better — And Worse — Than Christmas
Red pockets, anyone? Via Wikimedia Commons [Ed: A version of this article was first published on Tea Leaf Nation on January 23, 2012] Ah the holidays. Chinese New Year is, of course, a wondrous...
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Spotted on China’s Web: Sometimes Money Does Equal Love
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. How about 52,000 RMB (US$8,300) worth of origami hearts? One husband in Wenzhou posted on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, photos of the Valentine’s Day gift he...
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Why 100s of Thousands of Chinese are Suddenly Searching for This Chow Chow
Where are you, Xiaoxiao? How much would you pay to get your pet back? For one man living in Chengdu, China, the answer is an apartment potentially worth one million RMB (about US$160,000). And that...
View ArticleWatch: An Animated Introduction to the Chinese Army Hacking Scandal
As many China-watchers know by now, a recent earth-shaking report from U.S. cyber security firm Mandiant has alleged that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is behind many cyber attacks against...
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Chinese College-Student Staple Positioned as “Luxury” Good on Gilt.com
Let’s call it “reverse luxury arbitrage” with a delicious–and throat-searingly spicy–twist. Luxury arbitrage, at least as it commonly relates to China, is the practice of Western brands charging more...
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Ministry of Truth and Harmony? Chinese Web Users Crowdsource Re-naming of Top...
(Issac Mao/flickr) Journalist Zhou Zhiyi (@周志懿) tweeted on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, the rumor that China’s two censorship organs, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) and...
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“Thanks, North Korea!” Web Users Reflect on the Chinese Family Dynasty That...
In a parallel universe, that could have been him keeping the world on edge with his outrageous antics and retro hairstyle. Indeed, what does North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un have has that he doesn’t?...
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Annals of Chinese Web Humor: Obama’s Secret Message to Xi
Text on the “note”: “All of America is already under our Party’s control. Please rest assured!” (Via Weibo/fair use) While American politicians scratch their heads over whether Edward Snowden is a...
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Old Photo of Tiananmen Square Has Netizens Asking ‘What’s Wrong with This...
Tiananmen Square in the 1960′s (Via Weibo) A rare old color photo of Tiananmen Square was posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter, and it was commented on hundreds of times as Internet users mused about the...
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Op-Ed: My Dream? Become the Son of a Chinese Official
(Via Bigstockphoto) [Note: The following is a Tea Leaf Nation op-ed, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors.] One might think that Beijing’s recent austerity drive, its...
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Robbed in China? Remain Calm — And Call a Foreigner
(Getty Images) In modern China, there is precious little that money can’t buy. Shoppers on the massively popular e-commerce site Taobao.com can hire a boyfriend to meet their parents, or pay someone to...
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