By Chang Ping, July 18, 2017     On July 7, the German professor Markus W Büchler, Chairman of the Department of Surgery, University of Heidelberg, traveled to Shenyang to take part in diagnosing the condition of Liu Xiaobo. Media reports noted that it was the first time in almost a decade that Liu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had seen [...] Keep reading »

Li Aijie, April 29, 2017 This is the second and last installment of Li Aijie’s account of her trip. Zhang Haitao was sentenced to 15 years in prison on January 15, 2016, for “inciting subversion of state power” and 5 years for “providing intelligence to foreign organizations.” He’s currently imprisoned in Shaya Prison in remote western [...] Keep reading »

Li Aijie, April 23, 2017 Born in 1971, the Urumqi-based Zhang Haitao (张海涛) was arrested on June 26, 2015 for his online speech: to be precise, 69 WeChat posts and 205 Twitter posts, including retweets of others’ tweets. On January 15, 2016, Zhang was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and 5 years in [...] Keep reading »

China Change, November 21, 2016   Zhang Haitao (张海涛) is a 45-year-old Han Chinese man living in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. He is originally from Henan Province, and relocated to Xinjiang after being laid off from state employment in the 1990s. Since 2009 he’s been an active participant in rights defen [...] Keep reading »

Published: 9:25 pm, April 28, 2016 The views expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent those of China Change. – The Editors   According to reports, Mr. Harry Wu (known as 吴弘达, or Wu Hongda, among Chinese) died suddenly on April 26, 2016, in Honduras while vacationing with friends. We wish [...] Keep reading »

By Yaxue Cao, April 17, 2016 This story has been updated.    On Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the new managing director of Twitter for the Greater China region. By Saturday the news had excited a fierce reaction among Twitter users in China. It’s well known that Twitter, YouTube, Google and other major social media networks ar [...] Keep reading »

China Change, March 24, 2016. In no particular order and with a couple of exceptions, we sample Chinese netizens’ thoughts on March 21, 2016, Twitter’s 10th anniversary. We don’t know who else will be touched by this, but we certainly are. – The Editors   乌鸦哥哥 ‏@wuyagege : Twitter is like a small cafe that never closes. Peo [...] Keep reading »

China Change, March 23, 2016 Social media is by nature subversive in a country like China, where totalitarian rule depends on monopolizing the narrative and suppressing free speech. The Chinese Communist Party is well aware, and worried: state propaganda calls social media an “opposing sphere of opinion,” and hawkish PLA generals refer to it a [...] Keep reading »

China Change, March 16, 2016   At around 8:15 p.m. on March 15, the Chinese columnist Jia Jia (贾葭) disappeared, after going to the Beijing airport in the afternoon for a flight to Hong Kong. The incident is believed to be connected to an open letter to Xi Jinping published on the website www.watching.cn (无界新闻). Jia Jia told to frie [...] Keep reading »