Posting about politics on Weibo can sometimes look like a game of Russian Roulette: without knowing where the pitfalls lie, at some point one is bound to run into trouble. Hot takes can lead to quick ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

This Communist Party slogan was heavily used during the Cultural Revolution, an era in which citizens were incentivized to spy on and even falsely accuse family and neighbors of being disloyal to ...

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 ...

Columnist and pop-psychologist Tang Yinghong employs his wide-ranging knowledge—and his public WeChat account—to analyze a host of social phenomenon in China: the mass appeal of the pollution ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.