Tea Leaf Nation

Tea Leaf Nation is a channel on ForeignPolicy.com that decodes Chinese media—mainstream, social, local, special interest—to illuminate the country from within.

Last Updated: February 10, 2016

Media

10.10.14

China Bans Law-Breaking Actors From Movies and Television

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
Amid an ongoing government campaign against drugs, prostitution, and other moral vices, a powerful government agency has reportedly issued new regulations banning actors with histories of drug use or prostitution from appearing in movies and...

Media

10.01.14

Media Portrays Hong Kong Protests as Either Inspiring or Dangerous

Rachel Lu
The second and third days of mass protests to demand broader democracy in Hong Kong ended with none of the violence and confrontation seen on September 28. Thousands of protesters continued to gather on the streets of the city’s busiest shopping and...

Media

10.01.14

They Can Take Our Freedom, But They Will Never Take Our Instagram

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
When thousands of Hong Kong protesters clashed with police on Sunday, September 28, many residents of the city immediately took to the photo-sharing platform Instagram. There, they uploaded images of police violence and demonstrations that shocked...

Media

09.29.14

In China, the Most Censored Day of the Year

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
Censors on Weibo, China’s massive Twitter-like microblogging platform, just had their biggest day of the year. And once again, it was events in the special administrative region of Hong Kong, not the Chinese mainland, that triggered it.Student-led...

Media

09.25.14

An Internet Where Nobody Says Anything

David Wertime
Here is what a court in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, concludes Ilham Tohti, a balding, thick-set, 44-year-old professor, did: “Using ‘Uighur Online’ as a platform, and taking advantage of his role as a university professor...

Media

09.18.14

‘What’s So Wrong with Splitting up?’

David Wertime
It reads like an Orwellian threat to all Scots: "The English government needs to immediately commence political thought education, and Scotland needs to be ruled by someone patriotic. Strike hard against separatist forces! Let every department...

Media

09.12.14

A New Definition of Chinese Patriotism

Rachel Lu
China’s ruling Communist Party has a message for Chinese citizens: You are for us, or you are against us.That’s the takeaway from a widely discussed September 10 opinion piece in pro-party tabloid Global Times, in which Chen Xiankui, a professor at...

Media

09.10.14

iPhone 6: Designed in California, Leaked in China

David Wertime
China’s cyberspace is bursting with anticipation for the iPhone 6—never mind that it promises to cost more than most citizens make in a month. Apple, the U.S.-based company that designs and sells the iPhone, had scheduled a major announcement about...

Media

09.02.14

Anti-Vice Click-Bait Spawns Popular Govt. Social Media Feed

Alexa Olesen
The Chinese government institution with the biggest social media following goes to...the nationwide anti-vice campaign called "Strike the four blacks, Eliminate the four harms." Da Sihei, Chu Sihai in Mandarin, the four blacks and four...

Media

08.27.14

A ‘School Bus and a Ferrari’

Communication between China and the United States can often resemble ships passing in the night—or planes passing through international airspace. But when it comes to this particularly fraught bilateral relationship, perhaps metaphors are best...

Media

08.07.14

Beards and Muslim Headscarves Banned From Buses In One Xinjiang City

A city in China’s remote western Xinjiang region has temporarily banned men with beards and women with Muslim headscarves from taking public buses. The extreme security measure—to be implemented for the duration of a sports competition slated to...

Media

08.06.14

The Bizarre Fixation on a 23-Year-Old Woman

On August 4, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake viciously struck Ludian County, a township in the southwest province of Yunnan, with a death toll surpassing 400. The news swiftly hit Chinese headlines, and images of the devastation circulated widely on...