Acceptable Protest: The 2019 workplace meme that’s thriving on China’s internet

May 21, 2019 by Jason Li

Photo of a booklet of China's labor laws taped onto the glassdoor of Ant Financial — Anonymous selfie of person giving Ant Financial/Alibaba a booklet of China’s labor laws. Source: 996action GitHub repo.

Internet memes about social issues have a spotty history on China’s internet, where netizens have had to evade, obfuscate and mask their posts in an evolving game of censorship cat and mouse. This was the case with the infamous…

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Chinese Comics Review

An illustrated love letter to the Beijing underground music scene

May 7, 2019 by Jason Li

Cover image of Open All The Buddha Boxes (excerpt)

This early excerpt from Open All the Buddha Boxes chronicles the rise of two seminal Beijing bands, Hang On The Box and Chui Wan, as they carve out a space for themselves in and outside of China. We follow members of the two bands as they develop their sounds, identities and aesthetics, and we see how they affect and are…

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Stop Calling It A Cold War

February 18, 2019 by Graham Webster

From Technology Review’s The US and China aren’t in a “cold war,” so stop calling it that, by Graham Webster:

Unlike the US and USSR, in which science and technology developed on largely independent tracks, the US and China are part of a globally intertwined ecosystem. As an example, ZTE, the Chinese maker of network equipment and smartphones, was…

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An Anthology of Naked Underground Chinese Comics

February 13, 2019 by Jason Li

I started working with Orion at Paradise Systems a few months ago, and ICYMI we launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish an anthology of semi-illicit, nudity-flaunting comics from China:

Naked Body is a 100-page, full color anthology edited by Yan Cong. It began life a few years ago when Yan Cong was told by…

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The Internet’s Warring States Period

January 29, 2019 by An Xiao Mina

From Foreign Policy’s The War-Torn Web, by Sean McDonald and An Xiao Mina:

Contention on how the internet should be run isn’t new. Some have identified this as a world of parallel internets, or rifts in the vision of how the internet should operate. But the gulfs in governance and action opening up and the active efforts to influence…

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Chinese Comics Review

Night Bus: journey through the fantastical Chinese countryside

January 15, 2019 by Jason Li

Cover image of Night Bus

A young woman with big, circular glasses is nudged out onto the platform by the rivers of the passengers going in and out of the train. She finds herself at an unfamiliar stop, but close to home, and she is forced to take the night bus to complete her journey. The bus, and its inhabitants, have other ideas, taking her on a…

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The coming cold war of internets between China and the US in 2038

November 14, 2018 by An Xiao Mina

By 2038, there won’t just be one internet — there will be many, split along national lines in the midst of a tech cold war between China and the U.S. That’s the prediction of writer and technologist An Xiao Mina, who joined Intelligencer’s new podcast 2038 this week.

Click/tap above to listen to the episode,…

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Ethnography of Tech

Chinese tech globalizing like the US, with drones and bikeshares leading the way

May 1, 2018 by An Xiao Mina

Photo of bike share in front of the Eiffel Tower

Dockless bikeshares in Europe predated the arrival of Chinese companies like Ofo and Mobike, at least in Berlin, but it was a recent trip in Shenzhen and Beijing that I saw their potential at scale. I am used to seeing Chinese tech phenomena remain just that, ie, limited to China. But the near omnipresence of these bikes in major cities — I…

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China Meme Report

From rice bunnies to grass mud horses, an interview with An Xiao Mina

April 16, 2018 by An Xiao Mina

In this Refinery 29 podcast, host Elisa Kreisinger speaks with An Xiao Mina about how internet memes and social movements are intertwined in China.

Topics cover include:

How the #MeToo movement tripped up trying to cross the Great Firewall only to emerge as a series of cute homonymic emojis: 🍚🐰 (rice bunny)
How An’s…

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Melon Festival Year 2: emphasizing the science in science fiction

March 29, 2018 by Jason Li

The second Melon festival about “science fiction, innovation and the future” took place in Hong Kong on March 17 and was markedly more packed, slick and diverse than its predecessor. Festival organizers added a third set of speakers – scientists – to their roster this year on top of the previously-featured science fiction authors and…

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Tag: China