Zhai Xiaobing, the financial worker who was arrested on November 7 for tweeting under his @stariver Twitter account that the National Congress would be beset by calamity a la Final Destination the movie, is still in jail. To recap: a man -- not even an activist -- is in jail for tweeting -- that's behind the Great Firewall -- a joke culled from a terrible Hollywood movie. If you're as flabbergasted as the r ...

Advisory: highway signs are being covered up in Ningbo because of some reason. That reason does not concern you. The highway signs are covered up in a city somewhere for no reason. There is no reason. The signs in a place are on the highway. No highway, actually. Not a city. @jaytao says the highway is in Ningbo's Beilun District near Guoran Road. But what the fuck does he know? Soon the tarp will arrive, c ...

Another widespread protest against a factory in China has yielded, at least on paper, another victory, following the one in Shifang, Sichuan province in July. Does it matter that no one believes the city government's statement saying it'll halt its construction plans? First the background: In Ningbo, Zhejiang province, thousands of locals have clashed with police this week over plans to build a refinery tha ...

Reuters reports that more than a thousand people gathered in Ningbo, Zhejiang province yesterday to protest plans for a petrochemical plant that is a subsidiary of China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation. And according to the BBC, witnesses said authorities used tear gas and have arrested some people. Searches on Youku for "Ningbo" turn up nothing. Sina Weibo hasn't completely censored the incident, but it ...

People rioted in Luzhou, Sichuan province on Wednesday evening after they heard that police had beaten a truck driver to death in broad daylight. Tea Leaf Nation relayed several messages from incensed netizens who never doubted it, notably from a Sina Weibo user, @Aluo阿罗, who declared, "Luzhou police have beaten someone to death, causing tens of thousands of onlookers to gather ’round. …." Global Times, how ...

They're rioting again in Sichuan province. Tea Leaf Nation reports that yesterday evening, an anti-police protest turned violent after three police officers beat a driver to death in broad daylight in front of several witnesses. (Someone at the scene began filming after the driver was killed; the video is embedded here -- no matter who you are, it has to be disconcerting to see yourself surrounded by dozens ...

Back on August 24, weeks before people would double down on Diaoyu Islands senselessness, four protesters took to the streets in Shenzhen to urge "civilized patriotism, rational Japanese resistance." Three of them wore swimwear -- bikinis for the two girls, briefs for the man -- and attracted attention as much for their message as their appearance. We posted about it here, with a video. It was only a matter ...

Has unrest again hit Foxconn? New York-based advocacy group China Labor Watch reports that yesterday at about 1 pm in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, "three to four thousand production workers" went on strike after Foxconn demanded they work holidays and "raised overly strict demands on product quality without providing worker training for the corresponding skills." The majority of workers who par ...

On September 16, a man protesting demolition-relocation in Lianhua City in Changsha, Hunan province was crushed to death under a steamroller, possibly by order of the deputy mayor, as reported by KDNet on Sunday. The incident was posted onto Sina Weibo on Monday, where it has since been forwarded more than 16,000 times, eliciting comments such as, "Why should we love country?" (@manhengjie) and, "Spectacle ...

On September 15 in Xi'an, Shanxi province, an anti-Japanese protest got so out of hand that a Chinese man was partially paralyzed when someone clobbered him over the head with a piece of steel. Fifty-one-year-old Li Jianli's only crime? Driving a Toyota Corolla with his family. His wife futilely pleaded with the mob, "It was wrong of us to buy a Japanese car. We won’t buy one ever again, OK?" We knew it was ...

The Wukan protests that began last year over illegal land seizure might have seemed, at the start, unspectacular, merely another in the hundreds of rallies that happen every year in China. But with each passing day -- and each development reported breathlessly by embedded reporters -- the demonstrations revealed themselves to be a bit more unique, with the power to effect actual change. Most important, the ...

Picture via Beijing Youth Daily The violence and protests have been stowed away like a jack-in-the-box, some novelty toy to be brought back out at another politically opportune time. The carnival's over, folks. Time to go home. But there's a thing about violence. You might know it. Violence owes fealty to no one and nothing, and can as quickly turn against itself or its source, or innocents. Last Saturday i ...

On Tuesday, while most protesters were gathering around the Japanese embassy, about 50 people splintered off toward the US embassy, where they happened to catch Ambassador Gary Locke in his official black embassy car. Police very quickly came streaming in from two directions and walked the car down the street, where it took the next left and disappeared. The vehicle sustained minor damages. All else was pea ...

The more I think about it, the more I want to believe these anti-Japan protests are just an excuse for people to catch some fresh air and blow off steam. The genuine anger in some parts isn't reflected in the above video, taken today by Jacob of BeijingShenghuo (who you'll remember took this video of Saturday's more volatile protests). The chants of "Little Japan, fuck your mother" are said so nonchalantly ...

Global Voices reports that according to the Chinese NGO Canyu, "three human rights activists were arrested in September 16, 2012, during the anti-Japan protest." Quoting a translated Canyu post: (Canyu's news brief on 16 September 2012) This morning, the grand anti-Japan rally took place in the Shenzhen downtown area, around Huaqiang North and Citizen Center. Shenzhen democrats such as Jiang Weidong, Ziyuan ...

No two protests are ever the same, as the above video will show. In Changsha, people flip cars. In Dali, they sing the national anthem. In Qingdao, they chant. (Actually, they sing and chant everywhere, but you know what I mean.) There are a lot of banners that read "Japanese Devils," a term that originates from Japan's invasion of China last century. Other slogans are less kind. What's striking, however, i ...

Tea Leaf Nation has this amusing story of former Japanese AV star Sola Aoi, who has more than 13 million followers on Sina Weibo, trying to placate fans on both sides of the sea: Ms. Aoi recently tweeted two images via iPhone from her account (@苍井空)... the first reads “Japanese-Chinese Friendship,” with Ms. Aoi commenting in broken Chinese, “I hope there are good relations between we common people…I am [liv ...

We've gone way beyond civil disobedience. Who are the Chinese attacking? Chinese-owned Japanese restaurants, and Japanese people who may call China home, and now journalists. It is, as the proverb goes, shitting on your carpet to spite the neighbor. We've seen this line of indiscriminate violence in this country before -- it was called the Cultural Revolution. It was bloody terrible. I realize that the gove ...

Tension over Japan's purchase of the Diaoyu Islands appears to be escalating. Today, on what appears to be a gorgeous autumn afternoon in Beijing, thousands gathered outside the Japanese embassy to throw rocks, eggs, and bottles. Similar protests apparently happened in more than a dozen cities. Jacob, who runs the excellent YouTube channel BeijingShenghuo, was at the protest today and took the above video ( ...

In a cab yesterday evening, the first words the driver said to me were, "They gonna fight?" I was confused and signaled as such. He nodded at the radio. A broadcaster was in the middle of reporting on the Diaoyu Islands -- sold on Tuesday to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's administration from their Japanese owners -- and that's when I realized he really meant, "Might they go to war?" "Nah, I don't think so, ...