In the run-up to the Global Women’s Summit slated for October in Beijing, which will mark the 30th anniversary of that city’s influential 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women, some WeChat accounts focused on feminism and women’s empowerment have been blocked or had their content deleted. Earlier this month, feminist blogger Jiang Chan (姜婵, Jiāng […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
This is the full transcript, lightly edited for grammar and clarity, of an interview with Jessica Batke, ChinaFile’s senior editor for investigations, and Laura Edelson, assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University, on their report “The Locknet: How China Controls Its Internet and Why It Matters.” An abridged version of the interview, with an […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
Some popular social media accounts that depict “lying down”—eschewing the rat race in favor of a more frugal, less ambitious, low-consumption lifestyle—have recently been deplatformed, to the dismay of their many fans. Although the bans were ostensibly for “violating platform rules and regulations,” there is widespread speculation that they were targeted for deletion because their […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
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 […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
China’s National Bureau of Statistics published new data on Wednesday showing that urban youth unemployment rose to a two-year high last month. According to the data, the rate of unemployed youth aged 16 to 24 (excluding students) rose from 17.8 percent in June to 18.9 percent in August, nearing the historical peak of 21.3 percent […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
Some international students in China have taken to social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu) to complain about being excluded from obtaining free educational accounts for Quark AI, an LLM tool widely used by their Chinese university classmates. Using the hashtag #WeStudyInChina, these students have also set up an online “message wall” to lobby for inclusion in […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
This week, many organizations and media outlets commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 709 (July 9) or "Black Friday" crackdown, a coordinated detention of more than 300 rights lawyers and activists in 2015 that coincided with a marked authoritarian shift in the early Xi Jinping era. CDT has published a roundup of tenth anniversary coverage […]| China Digital Times (CDT)
