Last month top columnist Chang Ping lost his job as senior researcher for the edgy Southern Daily Group. He says his dismissal was part of a crackdown on domestic media. Chang, 42, is well known for his outspokenness. In 2008, he wrote a famous...
In the Chinese Horoscope, 2011 is the year of the rabbit. In the lead up to New Year's Day on Thursday (3 February), a subversive "Happy Chinese New Year” video is making the rounds. Kuang Kuang is a cartoon character famous for blowing up houses....
Terms like Falun Gong, the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the names of high profile Chinese dissidents have long been censored in China, but now it’s the turn of country names. A search on Weibo --- a twitter-like service owned by Sina --- for the...
There has been a lot of bans in China recently, including what's alleged to be a list of banned SMS words. The register first circulated by Shanghaiist can be grouped into six major categories including: 1. National security and political terms,...
The sad death of jailed writer Zhang Jianhong went by with hardly a blip from the foreign media. Zhang, 52, died 31 December in hospital while on medical parole from a rare neurological disease. He leaves behind a wife and daughter. A few months...
Party, a new edgy magazine with contributions from film directors, artists and novelists has been indefinitely shelved because no publisher was willing to run it, confirmed founder and chief editor Han Han on his blog. Han, best-selling novelist,...
The Ministry of Truth is an Orwellian notion. But in China directives dictating what newspapers can and cannot write about actually exist. China Digital Times (CDT), an excellent online publication co-ordinated by Xiao Qiang, director of the China...
One of the main men behind China’s Great Firewall recently got a taste of his own medicine. Fang Binxing, credited with building a system which is used to block websites in China, shut down his microblog earlier this week after Chinese netizens,...
His 15-year jail term for spying and separatist activities is finally over, but Chinese dissident Hada, (who is ethnically Mongolian) is missing, along with his wife and son. The 55-year-old writer was scheduled to be released last Friday, while...
With less than a day to go before the Nobel Committee awards Chinese imprisoned dissident (or convicted criminal if you are the Beijing government) Liu Xiaobo this year’s peace prize, China has been stumbling over itself to create diversions, block...