What Lies Behind The Great Firewall: A Vast Great Shopping Mall Internet Complete With Mall Cops Moderators

February 1, 2021 by An Xiao Mina

An Xiao Mina and Xiaowei Wang write in the Knight First Amendment Institute blog:

In the West, we’ve become accustomed to reports of censorship in China as the result of a menacing authoritarian regime that threatens the core tenets of free expression. While a convenient construction, this centers authoritarianism as the guiding force for China’s social media platforms, missing…

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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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The coming cold war of internets between China and the US in 2038

November 14, 2018 by An Xiao Mina

By 2038, there won’t just be one internet — there will be many, split along national lines in the midst of a tech cold war between China and the U.S. That’s the prediction of writer and technologist An Xiao Mina, who joined Intelligencer’s new podcast 2038 this week.

Click/tap above to listen to the episode,…

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China Meme Report · Ethnography of Tech

Follow the Magpie, a rare stream of primary research about social media in China

November 17, 2017 by Jason Li

Christina Xu, Tricia Wang, and Pheona Chen just launched a new newsletter about the conversations and trends happening on the internet in China today and we should all subscribe now.

In their opening essay about the project, they write:

Our goal is to create something…

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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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Online translation communities in China, a brief overview

May 31, 2016 by Jason Li

From Chuan Yu’s Online Translation Communities in Chinese Cyberspace [we’ve added screenshots of the sites mentioned for extra context]:

Since the arrival of the Internet about 30 years ago, the practice of translation has also moved online. A number of online translation communities have been established for various purposes. In general, there are two types: audio-visual and text-oriented translation communities.…

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Multi Entry

Are You Scanning Me, or Am I Scanning You?

January 25, 2016 by Christina Xu

Photo of QR code tattoo — Sol, a film producer, shows me her QR scanner tattoo in Beijing.

During a ten week trip through China, I added over 150 contacts on WeChat, China’s overwhelmingly dominant messaging app. If we weren’t being introduced by mutual friends online, we usually used the most common way for people to add each…

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The Translation Detail Everyone Missed in the China Internet’s Incredibly Surreal Anthem

February 20, 2015 by Jason Li

In case you missed it, the New York Times, ProPublica, the Guardian and the Atlantic all wrote about this incredibly surreal but voted best of event anthem celebrating China’s glorious internet. Thanks to ProPublica we have a subtitled, Youtube video above.

As James Fallows at the Atlantic pointed out,…

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The Human Flesh Searching Chinese explained in Jessi Levine’s Tea Leaf Nation/The Atlantic article

December 3, 2012 by Tricia Wang

Yang-Dacai — Image from Tea Leaf Nation: Shaanxi Safety Supervision Bureau chief Yang Dacai became suddenly famous, with netizens rushing to caricature him.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed along with citizen reporter, Tufu Wugan aka “The Butcher”, in Jessi Levine’s What a “Human Flesh Search” Is, And How It’s Changing China…

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What Chinese Government Ban On Lady Gaga? Her Chinese fans are alive and kickin’ it

November 25, 2011 by Tricia Wang

The Chinese cultural monitors over the summer enforced something that few other countries have done: ban Lady Gaga. Whereas Lebanon banned Lady Gaga as a threat to Christianity, China has blacklisted Gaga as a threat to “national cultural security.” But once again, the citizens of China continue to out wit the censors in their covert ways…

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Tag: internet