As The Coronavirus Rages On, Cartoonists Lash Out With Irony, Quiet And Candor

February 10, 2020 by Jason Li

A muscular half person, half snake has wrapped a bunch of doctors and journalists in its arms and is gesturing for them to be silent. — Created by 撒旦君 Sadan via Weibo.

Despite dramatic measures taken to stem the tide, the coronavirus is still spreading across China and the rest of the world. Confined to their homes, independent cartoonists in China continue expressing their views around the epidemic through their works. Some creators have reached a state of detached irony, while others are…

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China Meme Report

Acceptable Protest: The 2019 workplace meme that’s thriving on China’s internet

May 21, 2019 by Jason Li

Photo of a booklet of China's labor laws taped onto the glassdoor of Ant Financial — Anonymous selfie of person giving Ant Financial/Alibaba a booklet of China’s labor laws. Source: 996action GitHub repo.

Internet memes about social issues have a spotty history on China’s internet, where netizens have had to evade, obfuscate and mask their posts in an evolving game of censorship cat and mouse. This was the case with the infamous…

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The Internet’s Warring States Period

January 29, 2019 by An Xiao Mina

From Foreign Policy’s The War-Torn Web, by Sean McDonald and An Xiao Mina:

Contention on how the internet should be run isn’t new. Some have identified this as a world of parallel internets, or rifts in the vision of how the internet should operate. But the gulfs in governance and action opening up and the active efforts to influence…

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China Meme Report

Has the Grass Mud Horse been defanged?

January 6, 2017 by An Xiao Mina

The Grass Mud Horse （草泥马） emoji in Sina Weibo appears alongside other harmless puns like the “Spirit Horse” （神马）, a pun for “What”, and jiong （囧）, a character that looks like a sad face.

A few years ago, I observed a curious addition to the emoji set on Sina Weibo: a Grass Mud Horse. It was a little…

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Occupy Hong Kong one year later: the coming colonization of cyberspace

September 29, 2015 by Jason Li

Governments are increasingly playing catch-up and sometimes even leapfrogging ahead of social movements in the use of digital tactics.

A recent paper by Lokman Tsui, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and longtime member of Global Voices, offers a chilling look at how authorities in Hong Kong outdid…

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Phone maker Xiaomi’s incredibly charismatic (and trilingual) Twitter account

October 17, 2013 by Jason Li

Much has been stated about Xiaomi as the rising star in China that’s making premium-but-affordable phones with its own UI for Android. But it seems like they’re also a formidable force on social media.

The tweets below come from their official account:

…

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How a bookstore evolved into becoming a banned books center in Hong Kong

April 15, 2013 by Jason Li

PeoplesRecreation1

From the Atlantic, In Hong Kong, a Sanctuary for Banned Books:

Later that year we began to get mainland visitors from cities like Beijing and Tianjin who were traveling on their own. Our sign said “People’s Commune” in Chinese, and our logo was Mao Zedong’s face, so maybe that caught their eye. Sometimes, customers would ask…

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Ethnography of Tech

Hacking for Pleasure, not Politics

March 11, 2013 by Tricia Wang

Editor’s note: Below are excerpts from Tricia’s article on Makeshift, Pleasure Hacking:

Lao Bing is doing what most males at the Internet cafe are doing, have done, or will be doing later on that night—searching for porn. Users across the world are drawn…

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