Following a hotly contested U.S. election that reverberated across Chinese social media, drawing hundreds of millions of views on Weibo and birthing myriad memes, many Chinese academics and ...

On Tuesday, Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States. The election had been closely observed from China, by both the government and the populace. The Chinese government’s ...

The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) boasting that WeChat automatically records user activity and shares it with law ...

The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is an online glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. Is the Internet acting as a “safety valve” to ...

In December 2023, we published a revised edition of the Lexicon as an eBook, which includes updated entries for 104 of the most salient terms we have collected over the past 20 years. Please ...

Vague descriptor that is often used as code for towing the Party line. “Positive energy” was meme-ified in China during the 2010 trial of Song Shanmu, the founder of a well-known vocational ...

Reference to Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei (Ài Wèiwei 艾未未). The use of this code lead to the phrase "love the future" being blocked from Weibo search results around June-August 2011.

Young, nationalistic netizen who attacks the social media accounts of people perceived to have slighted China, typically as part of a large "expedition" across the Great Firewall to Facebook.

Sun Liping is a prominent sociologist who has studied the rural poor, inequality, and the social transformations brought by the transition to a market economy. Sun argues that "social decay," such ...

Ermeiyaoxiaodao (@二枚腰小道): GFW (Great Firewall of China) has blocked all Google services, including Google Scholar, which is essential to research. If you think this is unacceptable, we ...

Teng Biao, born on August 2, 1973 in Jilin Province, is a human rights lawyer, activist, and former professor who is dedicated to exposing China’s human rights abuses and fighting against its ...

A self-deprecating description of individual investors who re-invest in the stock market after initial losses; also used to address youth disillusionment and endemic government corruption.