TIME's Beijing bureau received a note this week from the customs department that 62 copies of its May 14, 2012 issue entitled The People’s Republic of Scandal were being "safeguided by customs" to be "dealt with". Read Hannah Beech's account of their fruitless attempts to get their magazines back: more ›

Al-Jazeera's Melissa Chan, whose press visa was recently revoked by Chinese authorities, in comments made on the latest edition of Listening Post which takes a look China's new media and soft power strategy: "This is the first expulsion in more than a decade. So I think to look into it as the beginning of any kind of a pattern or shift would be premature. But there is a Chinese saying that you "kill the chickens to scare the monkeys" and in this case I may have been the sacrificial chicken to warn other foreign journalists from looking at sensitive stories." more ›

"We have been attempting to block a whole load of Western things -- Western values, hostile Western forces, Western hegemony, and the Western cultural invasion. Our firewall is the world's most advanced. Strangely though, we've never heard of the West trying to block Oriental values, hostile Oriental forces, and the Oriental cultural invasion. Our CCTV4 has landed in the United States, and even The Founding of a Party is being shown on screens there. This illustrates a truth: Where there's freedom, there's no need for firewalls." more ›

Oops of the Day: CCTV anchor He Jia mistakenly declares (at 1'35"): "As we all know, the Philippines is Chinese territory. China has unquestionable sovereignty over the Philippines." The video went viral shortly after it first appeared on Sina Weibo, and was quickly scrubbed off the CCTV website. more ›

The Beijing Bureau of Al Jazeera English has been forced to shut down, because Chinese authorities have revoked the visa of Melissa Chan, its Chinese correspondent, and refused to allow any replacement. more ›

On Friday morning, four of China's prominent state-backed newspapers released scathing editorials of the United State's involvement in the Chen Guangcheng case. As the clock struck midnight that very same day, one of those papers, The Beijing News, succumbed to online criticism and offered a brief apology on its Sina Weibo account. more ›

Today is World Press Freedom Day but instead of celebrating the freedom of the press, Chinese netizens have decided to mark the "Tweet Deletion Festival" (删帖节) because the date 5-3 sounds like "I delete" ("我删") in Chinese. more ›

Zhao Pu, an anchor at the state-owned China Central Television (CCTV) is said to have been booted from his routine program after advising people on his Weibo not to eat solid yogurt due to contamination scares. more ›

The London Book Fair opened -- and closed -- this week amid harsh criticism of the decision by the British Council to allow China’s General Administration of Press and Publications, the government body that regulates and censors print media, to have full say over which writers to invite to the fair. One writer, Ma Jian, whose work has been banned here since 1987 and who now lives in London, has slammed the fair as “giving tacit approval to China’s suppression of free speech” and "giving the Communist party a stage on which to perform its propaganda show.” more ›

Sina recently launched a new microblogging platform only to have it immediately shut down. The platform, called Weibo Expose, allows users to submit news tips and pictures corresponding to their physical location. More telling, it also features the Holy Grail of Chinese Internet functions: the anonymous submission. more ›

Despite backlash over government censorship of Kate Winslet's boobs, the 3D re-release of Titanic had a huge opening day in China on Tuesday, according to Box Office Mojo. The film reportedly took in US$11.6 million (or RMB 73 million) from 2,400 3D screens and 66 IMAX 3D screens throughout the country. more ›

Chinese moviegoers hoping to catch the re-release of Titanic in 3D won't get to see two very important characters from the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster: Kate Winslet's boobs. more ›

Well that didn't last long. Just 46 hours after Ai Weiwei set up four live webcams around his Beijing home to commemorate the first year anniversary of his 81-day arrest, the outspoken artist was told by government authorities to take them down. more ›

As you may have heard, China's two biggest micro-blog services Sina and Tencent Weibo have been forced to suspend their comment functions from 8 a.m, March 31 to 8 a.m, April 3. While microbloggers have been restricted from commenting on tweets, they are still free to post their own original tweets and retweet what others have posted. more ›

Following coup rumors a few weeks ago, popular social networking sites Weibo and QQ enforced a 72-hour ban on comments Saturday morning. more ›

China's ruling Communist Party is mulling a series of political reform measures, including the reassessment of the 1989 Tiananmen student protests, multiple Hong Kong media outlets, including the Apple Daily have reported. more ›

It turns out the Chinese government isn't the only one feeling insecure about online criticism, with a number of public relations firms regularly charging private companies to remove negative comments from websites such as Weibo, QQ and Tudou. For as little as 1,000RMB you too can censor the population and avoid being disgraced nationwide for violating consumer rights! more ›

Ever wondered what exactly the Chinese government is censoring? Well, thanks to a study by Carnegie Mellon University, we now have a better idea of the words and phrases The Great Firewall forbids us from using is heroically protecting our impressionable minds from. more ›

"I have an idea. There should be someone managing the web as well. We can't just let people do whatever they want. [The Internet] should be like the People's Daily. Foreigners are messing up [the Internet]. We can't be like this. We should make the Internet in accordance with our principles. We should not make a good thing turn bad and become a place where people can say whatever they want. Our country is a socialist country under the leadership of the Communist Party." more ›

Today is Losar, or the Tibetan New Year, the single most important day in the Tibetan calendar. But for many living in the province, now closed off to the outside world, as well as other Tibetans around the world, there will be no singing and dancing this year. more ›

After featuring the political calligraphy of Bo Xilai prominently on its front page for two consecutive days on Feb 8 and Feb 9, Chongqing Daily appears to have done an about-face in its treatment of the municipal Communist Party chief. Today, it was Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan that occupied much of the paper's front page. more ›

We heard the bad news yesterday -- Weibo users on Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Tencent have until March 16th to register with their real names and identities, failing which they will no longer be able to post or retweet updates. Sina Weibo, the market leader in the microblogging segment, appears to be already feeling the heat. more ›

The Weibo accounts hosted by Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Tencent will require real name and ID number registration from all users by March 16th, with unregistered users to be denied posting and forwarding capabilities. The announcement was made at the Beijing Weibo Development Management Regulations Seminar held today in Beijing. more ›

US billionaire Warren Buffett may have appeared on this year's chunwan (春晚), CCTV's Chinese New Year gala show, but even that wasn't enough to turn around the long-standing decline of the annual affair. Barbara Demick and John Lee of the Los Angeles Times write that increasingly heavy-handed censorship has caused several heavyweight celebrities to drop out of the show and driven viewers away: more ›

Evan Osnos of The New Yorker does a wonderful job summing up Chinese reactions to the controversial and much-debated Stop Online Piracy Act which many have likened to China's "Great Firewall": more ›

American broadcast news icon Charlie Rose speaks with Gary Locke. It's one of the first interviews we've seen Locke give since he was appointed US ambassador last summer. more ›

The Beijing municipal government announced new rules yesterday requiring internet users to register on Chinese microblogging platforms with their real names before they are allowed to publish posts. Under the new so-called "Weibo Development and Management Regulations", microblog users would still be able to continue to post under nicknames, but each account can now only be activated if they are first tied to a real identity. Users who do not register within the next three months may find their accounts frozen and unable to publish new posts. more ›

The State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) may move to ban all cut-in advertisements during soap operas on all TV channels, including CCTV. more ›