Media/Tech

posts related to Chinese media (tv, internet, social media, etc.) and technnology

On Youtuber Li Ziqi

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Source: Public Books (11/12/25)
China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
By Thomas Chen

Li Ziqi.

One year ago today—on November 12, 2024, after a three-year and four-month hiatus—China’s most popular YouTuber resurfaced. A woman in her mid-30s from the Sichuan countryside, Li Ziqi (李子柒) posted three new videos to her channel, which has over 28 million subscribers worldwide. In the first video, in order to lacquer her grandmother’s old wardrobe, she climbs up scaffolded lacquer trees to tap their sap. In the second video, she builds a large bamboo-themed hut for the display of her clothes. In the third video, with silk from silkworms she has cultivated herself, she makes a flower that she then wears, while playing the piano and singing a pop song. Each of these videos quickly garnered millions of views, as a global audience cheered her return, following the resolution of a legal and financial dispute with her former management company.

In Li’s videos, labor is not degraded but creative. Critics may argue that it is presented almost entirely as DIY: an individualistic rather than communal endeavor, even when traditionally communal activities like planting and harvesting are involved. What Li performs cannot be scaled up into a plan to mobilize the masses. But the vision she offers is, at the same time, emancipatory. In The German Ideology, Marx famously sketches this one day in the life of the man of the future:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Except for post-dinner debate, we could say that Li Ziqi realizes this passage in visual form (if not in reality). She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities. She does not restrict herself to one sphere of activity; indeed, she is masterful in numerous spheres, from making shoes, paper, and furniture from scratch to practicing woodblock printing and sericulture. Continue reading On Youtuber Li Ziqi →

You Xing Bookstore gets reprieve

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Source: China Digital Times (11/10/25)
Translations: As Tributes Pour In, Chengdu’s You Xing Bookstore Gets a Reprieve From Feared Closure
By Cindy Carter

The entrance to You Xing Bookstore is welcoming and well-lit. The exterior walls are painted white, and there are two broad double-doors with large inset panes of clear glass, and rounded canopy-style awnings above them. Between the doors, on the exterior wall, is an illuminated grey and white sign with the store’s name in both English and in highly stylized Chinese characters. Inside the entrance, at left, are some comfortable looking wooden chairs with white cushions, and a band of curved, blonde-wood bookshelves filled with various books. Two men stand between the shelves and the door, talking and smiling. One of the men—dressed in boots, rolled-up blue jeans, a black sweater, and glasses—smiles directly at the camera.

The entrance to You Xing Bookstore: a clean, well-lighted place (source: WeChat account 麦客自留地)

Following more than a week of speculation that Chengdu’s You Xing Bookstore (有杏书店, Yǒu Xìng Shūdiàn) would soon close, amid an outpouring of tributes from customers and supporters, it appears that the beloved bookstore and events space has been granted a reprieve and will remain in business. Started in August 2023 by former financial reporter and prolific blogger Zhang Feng and a group of friends, You Xing Bookstore has become a vibrant public space, providing books, coffee, free public events, and a much-needed sense of community following three years of “zero-COVID” policy-induced isolation.

On October 29, the bookstore’s founder Zhang Feng published a WeChat post announcing that due to “force majeure” (unspecified reasons beyond his control, likely referring to official pressure), the bookstore would be closing its doors on November 28. When an online commenter asked, “Why? The bookstore has always had such good events,” Zhang Feng replied, “That’s exactly the reason.” Zhang’s initial announcement, which he quickly deleted, has been archived by CDT Chinese editors, and a portion is translated below:

I had imagined many ways that the bookstore might end. The most likely scenario was force majeure—and now, this has come to pass.

You Xing Bookstore will close on November 28.

I nearly smiled when I heard the news. I always knew this day would come, I just wasn’t sure when it would happen.

My attitude towards managing a bookstore has always been: If you only had one day, how would you run that bookstore? You should live every day as if it might be your last. Continue reading You Xing Bookstore gets reprieve →

Stop complaining, Hu Xijin

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Source: China Digital Times (10/24/25)
Netizen Voices: “Stop Complaining, Hu Xijin. You Played a Part in This.”
By Cindy Carter

Two posts from nationalist pundit and former Global Times Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin criticizing what he describes as a “collective silence” on Chinese social media have sparked intense discussion on Chinese and overseas websites. The posts, published earlier this month by Hu on his personal WeChat account and his Weibo account, respectively, lament this lack of robust societal debate, and place the blame, variously, on bureaucratic formalism, self-censorship, employer-driven censorship, online trolls, and society in general.

At The East is Read, Yirui Li and Yuxuan Jia offered a full translation of Hu’s first post, “How to continuously advance tolerance and freedom under the constitutional order,” a portion of which is excerpted below:

It is worth noting that the West has long touted its “freedom.” If China, drawing on growing hard power and rising confidence, also advances tolerance and freedom under its constitutional order, that would puncture the remaining sense of Western arrogance, complete the core elements of China’s soft power, and in turn foster a new level of societal confidence. From a higher platform of development, many long-standing problems that have plagued China would be resolved.

In fact, democracy and freedom are explicitly listed among the core socialist values [prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendliness], serving as important goals in the construction of Chinese society. However, the real reason for the insufficient development of social tolerance and freedom lies in bureaucratism and the practice of formalities for formalities’ sake. [Source] Continue reading Stop complaining, Hu Xijin →

Hard times for the face of ‘Wolf Warrior’

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Source: China Media Project (9/5/25)
Hard Times for the Face of the “Wolf Warrior”
Film star Wu Jing is well-known as the rough, tough face of China’s “Wolf Warrior” spirit. So what does it mean if Chinese netizens see his ridiculous side—especially during a week when Beijing staged a massive military parade to showcase the nation’s muscularity?
By Alex Colville

The Chinese film industry takes Wu Jing (吴京), the macho lead in some of the country’s biggest propaganda blockbusters, very seriously indeed. In the tub-thumping Battle at Lake Changjin series (co-produced by the Central Propaganda Department), he plays a commander leading his men to victory against the Americans in the Korean War, meeting his end in a fireball of patriotic glory. In the smash-hit Wolf Warrior franchise he is a gun-toting crack PLA marine, smashing his boot into the cheek of drug lords and rescuing Chinese citizens from a failed African state, treating the PRC flag as a protective talisman with his own arm as its pole.

Flag waving for box office success. A poster for the released of Wolf Warrior II in 2017.

In many ways, Wu is the face of the government’s ideal of a more assertive Chinese nation, one that is ready to stand tall in the world and fly its flag high — the same muscular nationalism on full display this week as state-of-the-art weaponry rolled through Beijing and soldiers goose-stepped to commemorate the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end. Not for nothing were the methods of a new generation of more pugnacious Chinese diplomats christened “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy.” A recurring quote from the film that spawned the label ran, “Whoever offends China will be punished, no matter how far away they are” (犯我中华者，虽远必诛). The line is well known across the country.

But last week, in the run-up to this week’s display of military might in Beijing, mocking videos of Wu that inexplicably went viral had state media pundits furiously scratching their heads. It was perhaps for some a jarring reminder that not everyone in China takes what Wu Jing represents as seriously as propagandists would like. Continue reading Hard times for the face of ‘Wolf Warrior’ →

AI straight-washes gay couple in ‘Together’

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Source: China Digital Times (9/23/25)
Netizen Voices: AI Straight-washes Gay Couple in Imported Horror Movie “Together” [Updated: Film Withdrawn]
By Samuel Wade

The critically acclaimed U.S.-Australian body-horror movie “Together” launched in China on September 19. Some viewers noted, alongside cuts to sex scenes, a less familiar and overt form of alteration: one male character in a scene originally depicting a same-sex wedding was digitally replaced with a woman. [Updated on September 25, 2025: The film’s global distributor has blamed its local distributor for the changes, saying “Neon does not approve of Hishow’s unauthorized edit of the film and have demanded they cease distributing this altered version.”] The exact circumstances surrounding the change are unclear, but the following comments, compiled by CDT Chinese editors, illustrate the resulting storm of indignant criticism on film-focused corners of platforms like Douban, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu (RedNote). Several refer to the Chinese government’s longstanding stance toward homosexuality of 不支持不反对 bù zhīchí bù fǎnduì, or “neither supporting nor opposing.” That purported balance has increasingly tilted toward opposition in recent years, with LGBTQ+ content and organizations facing mounting suppression. Other comments express fear that the face-swapping heralds a new wave of more technologically advanced and less readily identifiable censorship.

rockiron99: The mainland Chinese version of “Together” uses AI technology to “face swap” a same-sex couple from the original film into a straight couple. If they just deleted scenes, we could work it out by watching BluRay or streaming versions, and even scene alterations like cropping, dimming, or photoshopping in skirts could be fairly readily identified. But the evolution of alteration methods like this AI face-swapping is terrifying … in the future, we won’t even be able to tell if we’re watching the original film or not.

Superbia: We’ve reached the point where it’s not a matter of cuts, but of falsification and misrepresentation.

有劳犬子费心了： This is nauseating because it not only interferes with the integrity of the plot, it disrespects the sexual orientation of the actors. Congrats to those Chinese with thin skins for pioneering this new mode of film import. Next time, they might as well straight-swap “Call Me by Your Name” for hetero screenings. Continue reading AI straight-washes gay couple in ‘Together’ →

The Remote Chay Podcast

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New Podcast Alert: Remote Chay

This podcast brings together researchers and experts to explore two tightly linked topics:

  1. Remote Ethnography – how do we study places that are physically or politically inaccessible due to surveillance, state control, or other restrictions?
  2. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (China) – a critical case at the intersection of geopolitics, anthropology, ethics, and research methodology.

Each episode dives deep into the challenges of conducting research under extreme constraints. From inaccessible field sites to global surveillance regimes, Remote Chay invites guests to reflect on what it means to produce knowledge in such contexts, in particular for Uyghur studies.

Explore all episodes here 👉 remote-xuar.com/podcast

Very Best,

Vanessa Frangville <Vanessa.Frangville@ulb.be>

How to silence dissent

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Source: NYT (9/22/25)
How to Silence Dissent, Bit by Bit Until Fear Takes Over
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In China, journalism and public debate were opening up, and then a leader took over and used a series of steps to dictate speech.
By Li Yuan

Credit…Dongyan Xu

In early March, I asked a lawyer, a naturalized citizen living in Texas, whether he shared the unease among Chinese immigrants that American politics under President Trump was beginning to echo the China we left behind: fawning officials, intimidation of the press and business leaders currying favor with leadership.

He shrugged. As long as late-night talk show hosts can still make fun of the president, he said, American democracy is safe.

For those of us who grew up under strict censorship, late-night comedy always felt like an emblem of American freedom. The idea that millions of Americans could go to bed each night having watched their presidents mocked felt almost magical, something unimaginable where we came from.

That’s why ABC’s suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show after pressure from the Trump administration, amid the president’s public threats toward critical journalists, felt so jarring. To many Chinese who have endured the relentless erosion of speech by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, it felt ominous. Free speech rarely vanishes in a single blow. It erodes until silence feels normal.

“Coming from a dictatorship, people like me are sharply attuned to these things,” said Zhang Wenmin, a former investigative journalist in China better known for her pen name Jiang Xue. “We can sense how freedoms are chipped away little by little.”

Ms. Zhang was repeatedly harassed and threatened for what state security agents called her “negative reporting” on China. She now lives in the United States. Continue reading How to silence dissent →

Zhang Zhan sentenced a second time

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Source: The Guardian (9/22/25)
UN and rights groups condemn reported jailing of Wuhan Covid citizen journalist
Zhang Zhan sentenced to four years for second time on charge often used by China to target government critics
By  Senior China correspondent

Zhang Zhan provoked the ire of the authorities after she travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the initial response to the Covid-19 outbreak. Photograph: YouTube/AFP/Getty Images

The UN, human rights groups and media freedom watchdogs have condemned reports that Zhang Zhan, a Chinese citizen journalist, was sentenced to jail for the second time last week.

Zhang, 42, is thought to have stood trial in Shanghai on Friday on a charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a charge often used in China to target critics of the government. Western diplomats were reportedly turned away from observing the trial.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a media freedom NGO, said on Saturday that Zhang had been sentenced to four years in prison.

The sentencing came 16 months after she was released following a four-year sentence on the same charge. Zhang provoked the ire of the authorities after she travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the initial response to the Covid-19 outbreak. She was one of a number of independent journalists to be detained for broadcasting reports about the severe lockdown at ground zero of the pandemic. Continue reading Zhang Zhan sentenced a second time →

Unemployed youths pretending to have jobs

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Source: BBC NEWS (8/11/25)
China’s unemployed young adults who are pretending to have jobs
By Sylvia Chang, BBC News Chinese, Hong Kong

BBC Shui Zhou, a young adult who pretends to have an office job, makes the victory sign with both hands that he is holding up in the air

Shui Zhou pays to go into an office every day.

No-one would want to work without getting a salary, or even worse – having to pay to be there.

Yet paying companies so you can pretend to work for them has become popular among young, unemployed adults in China. It has led to a growing number of such providers.

The development comes amid China’s sluggish economy and jobs market. Chinese youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, at more than 14%.

With real jobs increasingly hard to come by, some young adults would rather pay to go into an office than be just stuck at home.

Shui Zhou, 30, had a food business venture that failed in 2024. In April of this year, he started to pay 30 yuan ($4.20; £3.10) per day to go into a mock-up office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in the city of Dongguan, 114 km (71 miles) north of Hong Kong. Continue reading Unemployed youths pretending to have jobs →

Chinese propaganda deflects criticism on Xinjiang

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Chinese propaganda efforts take many forms, to try to deflect world criticism on the Xinjiang atrocities against the Uyghurs and Kazakhs there. This includes new forms, especially online, where naive netizens outside China are lured into traps by professional propagandists, and then hung out to dry on Western social media like X.

Before I get to that new chapter, let’s first note the progressive evolution that has taken place.

They started with the old-style naked propaganda and denial by official Chinese media. This is still going on, of course, including in UN speeches, the People’s Daily, Shanghai Daily, etc. etc.

Now, these same state media are also cleverly flooding Youtube, Facebook etcetera with benign-seeming videos showing things like unspoiled wildlife in Xinjiang’s faraway mountains, or, Kashgar tourist streets with “happy” Uyghur performers.

Sometimes, the propaganda department recruits naive foreign Youtubers, often Westerners willing to be duped and to regurgitate the official picture, and who are kept well away from the camps, the forced labor, the children’s mass Gulag, and all that. Continue reading Chinese propaganda deflects criticism on Xinjiang →

Toxic Backlash

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Source: China Media Project (7/22/25)
Toxic Backlash
The expulsion of a Chinese student for appearing in videos posted online by Ukrainian gamer videos sparks a debate about sexism — and shameless exploitation amid the discussion.
By David Bandurski

Dalian Polytechnic University.

In a story that topped headlines and internet chatter in China last week, Dalian Polytechnic University in China’s northern Liaoning province sparked outrage by expelling a 21-year-old female student for appearing in videos posted nearly seven months ago to the Telegram account of a visiting Ukrainian esports player. Videos of the student in the visitor’s hotel room showed nothing sexually explicit, and it was unclear why the videos had become an issue now, but the university responded vehemently with a public statement naming the student and accusing her of “improper association with foreigners” (与外国人不当交往) that had “damaged national dignity and the school’s reputation” (有损国格、校誉).

The story ignited a fierce debate across Chinese social media over institutional overreach and gender double standards, trending on Weibo on July 13.

Media commentator Zhang Feng (张丰) criticized “sexual nationalism,” arguing that while Chinese men dating foreign women might be seen as acceptable or even deserving praise, the opposite invites fury among sexist males who see Chinese women as property of men and the state. Xiaoxi Cicero (小西cicero), a writer who posts on WeChat, asked whether the same nationalist uproar and expulsion would have followed had a young Chinese man been shown on video with a visiting foreign woman.

One Chinese Substacker summed up the toxic combination of sexism and state-driven nationalism with the pithy post headline: “National Dignity is Not a Penis You Can Brandish at Will.” Continue reading Toxic Backlash →

Video game plays to male resentment

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Source: NYT (7/17/25)
‘Who Killed Love?’ A Video Game Plays to Male Resentment in China.
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A popular and contentious game, Revenge on Gold Diggers, sheds light on misogyny, inequality and the feeling among many men that they are economic victims.
By Li Yuan

An illustration showing the backs of four women examining a close-up of an eye on a large screen or painting.

Credit…Lisk Feng.

A deliveryman falls for a female livestreamer. She seduces him, drains his savings, then vanishes. Heartbroken, he reinvents himself as a successful businessman seeking revenge on women like her.

This is the plot of Revenge on Gold Diggers, one of the most popular and contentious video games in China.

The interactive game, which debuted in June to enormous success, temporarily topped the charts on Steam China, the local version of the global gaming platform. Its tagline, “Who killed love? It’s the gold diggers who killed love,” has electrified Chinese social media. Players, cast as “emotional fraud hunters,” navigate romantic relationships, searching for deception while guarding their wallets — and their hearts.

One of the most liked comments on the game’s community board calls it “an elegy for our generation of Chinese men.” Another declares, “Men must never retreat — this is a fight to the death.”

The game has drawn the enthusiasm of disaffected young men, and fierce criticism from other corners. It has been decried as misogynistic. Some male gamers complain it panders to the Chinese government’s concerns about plummeting marriage and birth rates. Continue reading Video game plays to male resentment →

Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (7/10/25)
Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China
By Jie Li

Figure 1. A 1966 propaganda poster of a rural projectionist foregrounds the multi-lens slide projector over the film projector.

Thanks to Daisy Yan Du’s invitation to lecture for the Association for Chinese Animation Studies Distinguished Lecture Series, I had the opportunity to extend an underdeveloped topic in my recent book Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023). The cover image (figure 1) is a 1966 propaganda poster of a female rural projectionist with a pair of bamboo clappers and two projectors. While relegating the film projector to the backdrop, this model image foregrounds a lantern slide projector with four lenses to facilitate animated special effects. In addition to exploring the history referenced by this image, the current essay also brings together the two parts of my book—“Projectionists as Media Infrastructure” and “Audiences as Creative Agents”—to focus on projectionists as creative agents. Given the considerable creative collaboration that went into animated slideshows, I propose that projectionists in Socialist China were not merely machine operators, but also inventors, artists, writers, and performers.

Largely forgotten by the 21st century, the lantern slideshow (huandeng 幻灯) was an important form of local propaganda and entertainment from the 1950s to the 1980s. Technically simple to produce from cheap and locally available materials, lantern slides could be projected using gas lamps in areas without electricity. Grassroots propaganda artists and film projectionists thus wrote, drew, projected, and narrated their own slideshows, creating local audiovisual media content when film production was centrally orchestrated. Whereas rural audiences celebrated cinema for being “live” or “animated” 活的 and slideshows for being “still” or “dead” 死的, innovative experimentation with slideshow animations launched a “Three Sisters Projection Team” 三姐妹放映队 from a rural county to nationwide fame by the mid-1960s (see figure 2). Over the next two decades, local cultural cadres from all over China recruited artists, writers, performers, and technicians to develop similar animated slideshows until the rise of local television.

Figure 2: Clip on animated slideshows from a 1966 newsreel on the Three Sisters Movie Team.

Continue reading Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies →

University expels woman for ‘improper contact’ with a foreigner

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Source: NYT (7/14/25)
Chinese University Expels Woman for ‘Improper Contact’ With a Foreigner
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The university published the student’s full name and said her behavior had “damaged national dignity.” The move prompted an online debate and accusations of sexism.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

A man with a headset staring at a computer monitor.

Danylo Teslenko, who goes by the nickname Zeus, at a gaming event in Poland in 2019. Mr. Teslenko had shared videos of himself with a Chinese woman that led to her expulsion from university. Credit…Norbert Barczyk/PressFocus, via MB Media, via Getty Images

A Chinese university said that it would expel a student because she had had “improper contact with a foreigner” and “damaged national dignity,” after videos circulated online that suggested she had been intimate with a Ukrainian video gamer.

The announcement set off heated debate in China. Some commentators applauded the decision and said that Chinese people — particularly women — were too enamored of foreigners. But others said the expulsion smacked of sexism and paternalism, and compared it to examples of people accused of rape or sexual harassment on campus who had been punished more lightly.

Many also criticized the university, Dalian Polytechnic University, in northeastern China, for publicly shaming the student by posting its expulsion notice on its website last week and identifying the student by her full name.

“If there is anyone who truly undermined national dignity in this case, it was not the woman whose privacy rights were violated,” Zhao Hong, a professor of law at Peking University in Beijing, wrote in an opinion column, “but the online spectators who frantically humiliated an ordinary woman under the banner of so-called justice, and the educational institution that used stale moral commandments.” Continue reading University expels woman for ‘improper contact’ with a foreigner →

National Internet ID System

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Source: China Digital Times (6/26/25)
Rights Defenders Criticize Upcoming Rollout of National Internet ID System
By Arthur Kaufman

Last summer, the Chinese government released a proposal for a national internet ID system. The proposal was met with strong opposition, which was heavily censored online. (See CDT’s past coverage for examples.) The final rules for this new system were then released in May of this year, will be implemented on July 15, and remain largely similar to the original draft that was widely criticized. As the rollout date approaches, experts and activists voiced concern about the impact of these centralized internet controls.

On Wednesday, Article 19 and Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) released a joint analysis calling the new internet ID system a threat to online expression. They predicted that the system would negatively affect human rights defenders as a result of increased state surveillance and reduced anonymity; privacy concerns and lack of government accountability; and state control without borders.

Shane Yi, researcher at CHRD said: “Internet users across China already endure heavy censorship and control by the government. The new Internet ID regulations escalate Beijing’s attack on free speech, putting human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and anyone who questions authority at even greater risk.”

[…] Michael Caster, ARTICLE 19’s Head of Global China Programme said: “Anonymity provides for the privacy and security fundamental to exercising the freedom of opinion and expression. In further chipping away at potential online anonymity through the creation of a national internet ID, in an ecosystem where the Cybersecurity Law already mandates real-name identity verification, China is clearly seeking to intensify its efforts at silencing critical voices. And as China continues to position itself as a global digital governance standard-setter and cyber superpower, the risk is furthermore that we see such repressive policies gain traction beyond China’s borders.” [Source] Continue reading National Internet ID System →