As there is much talk about the Chinese government signalling a change of position on Putin's war of aggression, I put to use a sample of Weibo posts that contain the keywords "Ukraine"(乌克兰) or "Russia"(俄罗斯), collected since the China-Russia joint statement on Feb 4. I was curious how Chinese official sources refer to the war, and if the terms have changed. To answer this question, I singled out government- and media accounts from localities all over China based on their screen names and descriptions.

They actually might believe themselves in this position. They haven’t given Russia any hard support and can gradually or suddenly increase the pressure. The more crucial their intervention becomes, the better for them, they might think. But there are two problems. First,

https://twitter.com/neysunm/status/1504581256838893574

this will be a hard sell domestically after they whipped their nationalists into a frenzy. Hence, maybe, the signs of a changed media narrative. Second, their moves reveal their unwillingness, and perhaps even inability, to act as a responsible world power, and their adherence to

The current situation in Xi'an #Xian illustrates how important it is to “disaggregate China", at least when trying to understand what caused the difficulties that are reported these days. A thread. 1/ When I looked at lockdown coverage on Chinese social media, I made out four broad types of posts:
1) government propaganda on the logistics of delivering food to 13 million people (sometimes reposted with satirical undertones, sometimes with commenters mocking the content); 2/

As someone who has studied government responsiveness in China for almost a decade, I would like to address some of the points made in this thread. 1/n

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1467672536695525380

First of all, are 12345 hotlines, and their online counterpart, mayor's mailboxes, in principle, a good thing? Absolutely! Should we have them in Europe? Definitely! Are they in any way related to democracy? No. 2/n

How fast it all happend. Dec 6, 1:25pm Weibo account with 39k followers posts this video. 11:01pm, Sanxing Township issues a statement on WeChat, which Dianshi News shares 1 hour later on Weibo. Other news agencies follow, lots of posts through the night. Haimen District

https://twitter.com/Chri5tianGoebel/status/1468314408472526850

publishes its statement on Weibo at 5:15 on December 7, People's Daily Online reacts to this only 15 minutes later. Many posts yesterday, apparently there was another elderly sugarcane seller whose merchandise was seized. 200 citizens organised to help elderly sell sugarcane.

Current developments have implications on China-related research that go far beyond the self-censorship debate that had people at their throats a couple of months ago. Then, the stakes were losing access to China. Now, the stakes are being detained, possibly for a very long time. Of course, not many scholars have been detained so far (and not so many seem to have lost access, for that matter), but what matters are the signals and the precedents.