Tea Leaf Nation

Tea Leaf Nation

With Chinese State Media Quiet, Social Web Alive with Trump Victory Talk

On Nov. 8, following an protracted campaign rife with personal attacks, Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become President-elect of the United States. Despite ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Why Chinese Elites Endorse Hillary Clinton

The United States, China’s largest trading partner but also its greatest geopolitical rival, faces an election that threatens domestic instability. A Donald Trump victory would ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Why Chinese Netizens Cheer Trump

BEIJING — The U.S. Presidential election on Nov. 8 will be more closely observed in China than any in history. That’s because Chinese people have more ...

Tea Leaf Nation

In Xi’s China, Everything Old Is New Again

In late October, wearing a dark suit and a maroon tie, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood before an audience of thousands of veterans, soldiers, and ...

ChinaFile

Meet China’s State-Approved Muslims

LINXIA — Driving through the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu province, in China’s northwest, minarets puncture the sky every few minutes. Many rise out of ...

ChinaFile

Will Duterte’s Pivot to China Start a Chain Reaction Across Asia?

Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines since June, visited China last week and signaled his interest in shifting Manila’s allegiance away from Washington toward Beijing. While ...

Tea Leaf Nation

I ‘Went Back to China’ — and Felt More American Than Ever

On Oct. 9, New York Times metro reporter Michael Luo revealed that he and his family had been subject to a racist outburst on the streets ...

Tea Leaf Nation

I Broadcast Myself on the Chinese Web for Two Weeks

Chinese live-streaming is a bizarre and rapidly growing phenomenon that feels strangely necessary. It’s home to countless young women with impossibly long eyelashes and painted, ...

Tea Leaf Nation

What Is Going on in Hong Kong?

There’s a bit of a nanny state in the city of Hong Kong. The government is quick to issue advice and admonitions about all matter ...

Tea Leaf Nation

What Do Chinese in South Africa Think of the Ivory Trade?

JOHANNESBURG — Ms. Zhu does not seem particularly villainous. In her breezy Johannesburg office, encircled by neat stacks of newspapers, the petite 30-year-old from the southern ...

Tea Leaf Nation

A Crack of Daylight Enters Chinese Court Proceedings

Transparency; sunlight; public oversight. These may not be words one associates with China’s judicial system, with its publicized history of sham trials, forced confessions, and backchannel Communist ...

Podcast

300,000 Chinese Students Attend U.S. Colleges. What Will They Learn About American Life?

[audio mp3="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/160928_thebackstory_mixdown.mp3"][/audio] In the fall of 2016, hundreds of thousands of overseas Chinese assembled on U.S. campuses and classrooms to kick off the new school ...

Tea Leaf Nation

How to Fix China’s Crooked Congress

Nearly four years into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, Chinese citizens could be forgiven if their eyes glaze over at the news of yet ...

eslite_bookstore_kaohsiung_chiayi_store_2015

Tea Leaf Nation

A Taiwanese Literary Landmark Comes to China’s Venice

A sprawling brick-and-mortar bookstore may seem like a risky investment in one of the world’s most tightly censored nations. And yet in November 2015, the ...

ChinaFile

Coming to America: the Most Beloved Chinese Novel Ever Written

Welcome to my dream,” says a Chinese monk pacing along the stage of the San Francisco Opera. So begins Dream of the Red Chamber, a new opera based ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Beijing Wants More Baby-Making

On Sept. 18, officials in the central Chinese city of Yichang sent an open letter urging Communist Party members to have a second child and ...

Tea Leaf Nation

The Brangelina Divorce Just Broke the Chinese Internet

When news of the divorce of Hollywood’s most glamorous power couple, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, or “Brangelina” for short, hit the airwaves on Sept. ...

Tea Leaf Nation

China’s Organics Market, Beset by Obstacles, Is Still Taking Off

Wan Li, a young Beijing professional in her late 20’s, is at her desk when her cell phone rings. She picks up. “North entrance?” She ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Act Fast! This Can’t-miss Investment in Shanghai Won’t Last Long

China's dizzying growth and Wild-West business culture have led to a profusion of fraudsters, speculators, and Ponzi schemers. That's nowhere truer than in Shanghai, the country's ...

ChinaFile

The Twilight of Shenzhen’s Great Urban Village

A Chinese megacity is preparing to sweep away the tangled thicket of alleys that enabled its rise.

Chinese Hui Muslims Mark Last Friday Prayers Of Ramadan

Tea Leaf Nation

In China, Fears of ‘Creeping Sharia’ Proliferate Online

Over the past six months, Chinese social media outlets have been electrified by Chinese Muslim calls for a statute to regulate halal food production. On ...

ChinaFile

What Is Going on with this Flagship Hong Kong Newspaper?

In December 2015, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba bought the Hong Kong media group of the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the leading English-language newspaper in the former ...

Tea Leaf Nation

The Chinese Democratic Experiment that Never Was

Protesters in southern China are up in arms. They feel that Beijing’s promises that they’d be able to vote for their own local leaders have ...

Senior Citizens At A Hostel For The Elderly In Xian

Tea Leaf Nation

My Grandfather Survived China’s Cultural Revolution. Why Does He Still Love Mao?

“How have you been recently?” I asked my paternal grandfather, Yao Guoxiang, during my summer vacation this year. “Very bad,” he answered on the other ...

ChinaFile

Mao the Man, Mao the God

Mao Zedong was dying a slow, agonizing death. Diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in July 1974, he gradually lost control of his motor functions. ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Meet the Young Leaders Shaking Up Hong Kong Politics

In late 2014, Hong Kong protestors used umbrellas to shield themselves as police soaked them with pepper spray. Student leaders demanded elections free of intrusion ...

Tea Leaf Nation

China’s G-20: The Most Censored Day of the Year

On Sept. 4 and 5, heads of 20 of the world’s wealthiest nations convened in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou for the annual G-20 ...

ChinaFile

Anxiety in the Air, World Leaders Converge on China

In September 4 to 5, heads of the world’s major economies will meet in the southeastern Chinese city of Hangzhou (pictured above) for the G20 ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt?

On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at ...

ChinaFile

It’s Time to Rethink the World’s Approach to Human Rights in China

When world leaders touch down in early September in the city of Hangzhou for this year’s G20 leaders’ summit, which China will they see? The ...

Tea Leaf Nation

The Solution to Beijing’s Soft-Power Deficit Is Staring it in the Face

China and the United States are engaged in a long-term strategic competition, each seeking to shape the security architecture of Asia and to bring the ...

Tea Leaf Nation

China Rules E-Sports

China may have come third in this year’s Rio Olympic medal count, but the country just emerged as world champion in another major international event. ...

Tea Leaf Nation

The New Face of Chinese Nationalism

The just-completed 2016 Rio Olympics didn’t just mark the ascendance of major Chinese athletes like swimmer and internet darling Fu Yuanhui -- it also showed, in real time, ...

Tea Leaf Nation

It’s Time for China Analysts to Stop Talking Past One Another

On August 12, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued its annual report card on China’s economy and gave the country mixed grades, finding that its ...

US President Ronald Reagan (R) and Chinese Premier

ChinaFile

An Alternative History for China

In late July, the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong released a trove of previously unpublished documents about Zhao Ziyang, the bold reformer who served ...

PHILIPPINES-CHINA-MILITARY-DIPLOMACY-MARITIME

Tea Leaf Nation

Here’s How the Philippines Can Win in the South China Sea

The Philippine Islands has a problem. It has international law on its side in its quarrel with China over maritime territory, but no policeman walking ...

ChinaFile

What Could China’s ‘Social Credit System’ Mean for its Citizens?

China’s authoritarian government is using big data to develop credit scoring systems and a so-called social credit system, while urging data-sharing between companies and governments. ...

Tea Leaf Nation

China’s High-Pressure Network of Cram-Schools for Tots

SHANGHAI -- When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten. Her mother, ...

China U

Chinese Universities, Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

In an architect’s rendering of the Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) in Seattle, imaginary students in light-filled rooms huddle over computers or chat in clusters, presumably ...

China Holds Military Parade To Commemorate End Of World War II In Asia

Tea Leaf Nation

China’s PLA Gets Smarter (and Bigger, Faster, Stronger)

“Good iron isn’t used for nails, and good people don’t become soldiers,” the old Chinese phrase goes. That’s changing, and at the speed of warfare. ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Why China’s Internet Millions Suddenly Hate One Australian Swimmer

Sun Yang is the golden boy of the Chinese Olympic swim team. He was the first Chinese to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming, ...

TOPSHOT-HONG KONG-CHINA-POLITICS-DEMOCRACY

Tea Leaf Nation

How Chinese Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Their Military Again

BEIJING -- Every evening, as regular and obstreperous as a rooster, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers sing from the barracks outside my Beijing home, ...

ChinaFile

Was Uber’s China Exit a Failure or a Success?

In early August, news broke that Uber would sell its China business to Didi Chuxing, its largest rival on the mainland, in a $35 billion deal. Uber ...

China U

Watch: Chinese Students in America Try to Find Meaning, and Fit In

More than 300,000 Chinese students currently study at U.S. universities – almost one in every three international students. The surge in Chinese international students Stateside represents the ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Ivanka Trump Posted 650 Times on Chinese Social Media

Ivanka Trump, daughter of Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump and a full-throated advocate for his candidacy, is surely familiar with her father’s statements about China, ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Chinese Online Videos: The U.S. Wants to Start a Color Revolution Here

August has begun with two more entries in an ongoing campaign to convince Chinese netizens that Western values are existential threats to their country. In two ...

Tea Leaf Nation

The Paradox at the Heart of the South China Sea Ruling

On July 12, an arbitration tribunal at The Hague delivered what is widely regarded as a landmark ruling on the maritime territorial dispute between the ...

Chinese children prepare to board a trai

Tea Leaf Nation

China Has Its Own Birthright Tour

Young overseas Chinese can now go on an (almost) free two-week trip to China. Since 1999, the Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs (OOCA), an office ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Mapped: China’s Skyrocketing Housing Prices

Rapid housing price growth raises concerns about a housing bubble in China’s largest cities. Over the past year, residential real estate prices in 10 Chinese ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Are China's Most Extreme Nationalists Actually Foreign Agents?

Two weeks have passed since an international tribunal at The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines and rejected many of China’s claims in the ...

Republican National Convention: Day Three

ChinaFile

How Should the Republican Party Approach China Policy?

On Tuesday, delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, chose Donald J. Trump as their nominee for President of the United States. We ...

TO GO WITH AFP STORY IN FRENCH : “DE TER

Tea Leaf Nation

‘Security Is Only as Good as Your Fastest Computer’

China has, for the seventh time in a row, taken the top prize as the global leader in supercomputing. The Sunway TaihuLight, at the National ...

Tea Leaf Nation

Chinese Web Users: Keep the Huddled Masses Out

In June 2016, China was accepted as a formal member of the International Organization for Migration, a Geneva-based intergovernmental organization. Wang Yaohui, director at the ...

A Chinese paramilitary policeman (R) wat

Tea Leaf Nation

Report: More Than 100 Chinese Muslims Have Joined the Islamic State

Chinese state-backed media has claimed that 300 Chinese Muslims are fighting with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and authorities have blamed the violence ...

Tea Leaf Nation

China’s Legal Scholars Are Less Credible After South China Sea Ruling

Prior to the July 12 ruling of an international tribunal in the Hague, which many observers correctly predicted would reject China’s sweeping territorial claims in ...

An US sailor raises the US flag on the U

Tea Leaf Nation

The South China Sea Is the Reason the United States Must Ratify UNCLOS

The July 12 ruling by a tribunal of the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in the case brought by the Philippines ...

Rallies In Manila Over The South China Sea Dispute

ChinaFile

What Is the Future of the South China Sea?

On July 12, a court based at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague rejected China’s sweeping claims over much of the South China Sea. The ...

Tea Leaf Nation

After South China Sea Ruling, China Censors Online Calls for War

July 12 was a dark day for fervent Chinese nationalists. An international court based in the Hague issued a long-awaited ruling, rejecting many of China’s ...

Tea Leaf Nation

China’s Bizarre Stereotypes of the United States

Carp consumption and Anne Hathaway are not topics one would expect to feature prominently in the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Yet both are among ...

About Tea Leaf Nation

Tea Leaf Nation decodes Chinese media, analyzes social trends, and features Chinese voices, all to illuminate the country from within.

David Wertime | @dwertime

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