China’s Global Times Chinese edition is well known for being a nationalist paper owned by the Communist Party. The Chinese edition is often peppered with official jargon and an attitude to Western countries that can be summarized as a pugnacious...
CATEGORY: China
China: Tibetan singer released from prison
Tibetan singer Tashi Dhondup, who was sentenced to 15 months hard labour in January 2010 for recording political songs, has been released a few months early, according to Radio Free Asia. RFA's source, who was not named but who is cited as a close...
Controversial Chinese journalist Chang Ping talks to Index
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...
Gory video celebrates the year of the rabbit
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....
China’s microblogs censor the words “Egypt” and “Tunisia”
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...
China’s mobile censorship
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,...
Dissident Writer Li Hong Dies During Medical Parole
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...
Top blogger Han Han forced to shut down magazine
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,...
China’s Ministry of Truth
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...
How not to win friends on China’s internet
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,...
