Over this past weekend, many of China’s queer activists were dismayed to find that the #les “super topic”— a special hashtag used to build online communities by creating specialized “megathreads”—appeared to have been censored on widely used social media platform Weibo.
Who knew that China’s National People’s Congress had so much street cred? The annual Chinese legislative gathering, often referred to as the Two Sessions, since it also involves a meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference advisory body, serves as rapper Su Han’s muse in a new music video posted by state media agency Xinhua over the weekend.
With his cellphone in one hand, and two wooden meditation balls in the other, Zhang Siqi queued up alongside throngs of fellow retirees that make up the morning rush at a small Beijing grocery store. Zhang, a Beijing native, then opened the WeChat mobile pay tab on his phone and scanned it at the automatic register to pay for some fruit and a pack of cigarettes with a savviness that belied his age.
