Caiwei Chen
@CaiweiC
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Internet, tech, China. Reporter @RestofWorld . Words @Wired @SCMPnews @Protocol etc | Party caterer @ChaoyangTrap | alum @CU_OralHistory
Brooklyn
Joined May 2017
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If traditional masculinity is in crisis, who are the new icons young Chinese men look up to? To answer that, I profiled 3 thought leaders in today’s surreal urban China, each taking baby steps to redeem that ideal, with their own confusion and flaws. My latest for
@ChaoyangTrap
:
Here's our eighth issue: A critical contribution to the field of Manthropology. We profile China's equivalents to Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant and ask: are men in China okay?
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Outside of Haidian People’s Court, Beijing. “We ask for an answer from history”.
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This is the video everyone on WeChat has gone out of their way to keep alive today. It’s a collage of audio snippets circulating online lately, each recorded by a hurting civilian in Shanghai’s lockdown purgatory. An unprecedented strong public grievances.
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At a loss of word seeing how Chinese women outing their date-rape experience with celebrities started their recount with “I know I’ll be called a slut for life and even my future kids will be frowned upon” and “I have to isolate myself from feminism bc I don’t deserve it already”
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So Zhao Lijian’s wife deleted everything from her Weibo… what happened
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After the tragic death of one Pinduoduo's employee on the New Year's Eve, and the suicide of another employee on Jan 9, one brave former employee came out on internet after posting anonymously about a colleague being taken in by an ambulance and got fired soon after.
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I am obsessed with this trend on Xiaohongshu, which seems to start as a running gag within the study-abroad students community. Now the term has expanded to mean any low-effort, minimally-prepared and under-seasoned meal that goes against everything good Chinese food usually are
China’s internet has recently been buzzing with a new trend — the so-called ‘White People Food.’
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Excited to share that I’m joining Rest of World as their China Reporter! I cannot wait to write more stories that explore how technology impacts spciety in a region that I feel so deeply connected to. I will be based in New York City for now. Here’s to new beginnings! 🥂
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Seriously, my white friends say the word 马马虎虎 more times than all the Chinese people I know combined.
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Gender issues remain one of the few fields where you can still make provocative discourse and progressive changes happen without being completely censored. Female stand-up comedians are capitalizing on that. My latest for
@supchinanews
:
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Words are spreading on Weibo that a trans woman was just found dead stripped off clothes outside of a male bathroom in Wuhan’s Paradise Walk, a major shopping district of the city. Posts are simultaneously trending and taken down.
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“I hope my case will help progress China’s legal system.” said Xianzi, “success or not, I hope you do not get disappointed by my personal setbacks. The history will do us justice” (roughly translated)
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Ahead of a potential TikTok ban, we spoke to over a dozen current employees to reveal what it's really like working there. Yes, it's more Chinese than you think, and it's less about politics and more about profit. My latest with
@violazhouyi
:
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Police, politely asking the crowd to leave room for passengers and lose the posters and slogans.
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My people is hurting so I am hurting, and I urge you to at least not look away from the gnawing pain of Chinese people, who are stripped of their basic needs, and endure separation, loss, starvation and degradation in a top-down campaign in the name of collective good.
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Having a hard time processing everything going on in China right now, and wanting to be in those crowds more than ever.
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I’m just so so done with someone with little knowledge of China (usually a white expat in a bar) trying to explain what I do or think with some bullshit concepts and imagined eastern-western binaries saying oh you’re Chinese woman of course you do that no wonder blah blah blah
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For my latest
@restofworld
, I try to find out why all of a sudden there are so many users, all named "momo", on the Chinese internet.
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The Chinese side of Twitter is known for two things to many: political dissent and adult content. With the blue check policy, sextortion scammers are flooding the platform and preying on the lonely. My new report for
@restofworld
, featuring
@wangzhian8848
:
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I don’t know who need to know this, but there is a TikTok live streaming channel of the Immortals in Chinese folk lore. They are sitting in heaven palace and will give a toast to whoever gifted.
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Having interacted with some of these people, I feel like it takes a very specific mindset to be a foreign vlogger targeting Chinese audience in the current political/cultural climate. Anyone interested in reading a story about them?
For research purposes, here is an (incomplete) list of foreign vloggers who have made videos about the Xinjiang/Cotton debate. Most of them are on Chinese platform bilibili, many have YouTube channels too. (1) 歪果仁研究协会 (feat. Raz Gal-Or aka 高佑思):
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Amazed by how important a role shared docs have been playing in Henan’s flood relief. Tencent docs and sheets containing infos of missing persons, supplies requests, emergency shelters are co-created and shared by countless individuals and formed a powerful support network.
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New investigation from
@restofworld
's China team:
@violazhouyi
and I spent the past month talking to students, data vendors, vocational school staff, a recruitment agency, and labor researchers to learn about the new underclass of China's AI industry
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Douyin has finally cracked down on the Chinese migrant influencers trekking through Latin America to enter the U.S.. Sources told me that their Douyin accounts, some only even implicitly discussed “trail walking” (code name for migration to the U.S.), have been blocked.
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Via WeChat. Anonymous people sending warm pads to outside of the courthouse, addressing to “Xianzi’s friends”. “Who are Ms.Xian’s friends?”, asked the delivery man. “We all are”, the crowd said.
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A new born baby forced to separate with parents. A corgi beaten to death. A sobbing community officer confessing she would wish she had choice to not enforce the new rules. A chemo treatment recipient locked out of their own home. A mom crying begging for medication for her kid.
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State of journalism in China: no local media even attempted to report on the recent fire in Nanyang, Henan, in which 13 people died. Journalists in China have internalized the reporting restriction so much that they automatically turn away from tragedies and disasters.
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Wrote about my latest obsession for
@RadiiChina
, in which a Russian dude embodies the latest iteration of China’s sang culture: hostage energy.
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Chinese influencers are mass blocking their fans, if not quitting social media at all to get away with the new social media real name disclosure mandate. My latest for
@restofworld
, featuring analysis from
@mindyjiang
and
@EricLiu_USA
:
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I want to end this thread with something Wang said in his video. "Internet companies are becoming the new sweatshops in China, only the people they enslave are the smartest in this county". When investing in Chinese big techs, please do consider the people who are building them.
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Epoch Times, the Falungong backed paper is now the No.3 Right Wing news site in the U.S
A fact to remember: In the conservative web world, there's Fox News and everybody else.
In March, traffic to Fox News' site was 15x the traffic to the No. 2 right-wing site (Outkick, at least nominally a sports site).
Sites like Daily Wire and Daily Caller are rounding errors.
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A protester is wearing a pig mask bc “pig” (zhu) in Chinese sounds the same with Zhu Jun’s last name.
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As someone who enjoyed Uncle Roger videos and even made a podcast episode on it I understand his anxiety when faced with the "Anti-China" label but got to say the bigotry and disowning behavior is of the exact opposite spirit from what Nigel has been promoting with his videos.
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Is there a prevailing sense of malaise in China? For those who are consciously feeling and expressing, sure, I do think this article captures a general "China mood" that marks a drastic shift from the 2000s unbridled optimism.
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For decades, China has been the world’s factory. Now it’s the world’s mall, too. As part of
@restofworld
's stunning China e-commerce special project,
@violazhouyi
,
@lais_fmartins
, Ester and I wrote about the ferocious rise of Chinese e-commerce globally:
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For
@restofworld
, I visited a TikTok livestream studio in NYC to see the earliest adopters of livestream e-commerce in the U.S. at work. These studios, staffed with Chinese experts, are training American TikTok Live sellers with the Chinese playbook.
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If you are on the Chinese language side of Reddit, fringe political groups have never felt so mainstream. I wrote about the curious rise of Chinese groups on Reddit, who migrated from places like Hupu, Douban and Tieba and found a new life being censored.
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The first Chinese state-affiliated podcast has appeared. Chinese authority, have finally evolved from censoring podcasts to making its own podcast.
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Heard from a source that a census register of LGBTQ+ student group at Chinese universities across from the country was started about a month ago. The process is usually led by branches of Communist Youth Leagues at universities, which directly controls student club's legitimacy.
Today WeChat permabanned most public accounts of college LGBTQ student groups in China. (Beida, Tsinghua, Fudan, etc.) Apparently coordinated decisions, but no explanation yet. Most these groups were already struggling to be recognized by their respective schools.
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Every time I see SixthTone putting out great new content I cannot help thinking how well China journalism would flourish once my people are given the voice the right institutional support and even a slightly more loosened environment to tell our stories. Keep up the great work!
Today,
@SixthTone
is proud to launch Sixth Tone ×, a new section featuring edited translations from China’s most respected media outlets.
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AI tutoring tablets are gaining ground in China, at a time when the Beijing’s tutoring crackdown meets Generative AI craze. I explored this trend for
@restofworld
:
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Still remember my first boss asked me “which side would you take if you have to” in a low key threatening tone. Where I stand is against people who raise such questions.
Reading all the comments on Eileen Gu and wondering, why do people look at Chinese Americans with this mentality of "choose China over the U.S." or "choose the U.S. over China"
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This is so interesting because I would argue that the biggest use case of AI chat bots in Chinese general public is probably learning English. It's very telling that Americans see AI translation and go like "oh great we don't need to learn foreign languages anymore" and Chinese…
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For a generation of Chinese youth who came of age under the most open time of Chinese internet, but grew up to smother the last corners of free speech, cyberspace is an embattled field of both enchantment and disillusionment. My latest
@trumplandiamag
:
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Upper west side gained one new resident today and she hopes everyone hang out with her 🥺
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And yes, I know that Pinduoduo is a high-paying client of almost all small tech new outlets but still, I want to urge my fellow tech reporters friends to focus on this issue. Human beings are dying and I don't think this should be framed as a "PR crisis" or merely "996 culture".
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The trial is set to be private, despite both Xianzi and Zhu Jun petitioned for it to be public.
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Almost two hours into the trial, less than 100 people are remaining at the South Gate. The police started to ask each demonstrator for their ID for registration, starting from the man in the pig mask.
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10:30pm. People are still waiting. Some delivery men send food and drink to the crowd.
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Maimai and Kanzhun, both Glassdoor-like Chinese platforms, have all been alleged to take down negative reviews of companies and leak personal informations before per companies' request.
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After being fired, Wang made this video disclosing that Pinduoduo requires most employees to work at least 300 hours a month. For staff on the new grocery e-commerce team, if one's working hours sum fewer than 380 hours/moth, he/she will be questioned by supervisors.
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Sharing some food that I made yesterday for the Tiger to the Bunny dinner and wishing everyone a happy, joyous Chinese New Year!!🧧
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OMG My Weibo account just got “bombed” for the first time. This is a memorable day people I literally cannot figure out what I said triggered that. 💣 Goodbye to the 1057 posts I made since I was 17 🙂
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Accusation of sexual harassment on WeChat of Nobel Prize laureate Pillip Dybvig starts to draw attention today, with a female formal student of WUSTL claimed Dybvig called multiple Chinese students “sweet girl” and initiate inappropriate physical contact.
In the comment section under a WeChat post on Philip Dybvig (one of this year's Nobel Economics laureates), someone alleged that she had been sexually harassed by him, and that he is a serial harasser preying on female Chinese students. Screenshot of said comment:
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People who are willing to speak to a western journalist in China already undergo significant self-selection. This is something that I think not enough people understand: as a reporter you always anticipate skepticism or even hostility from Chinese respondents.
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I also want to point out that Bilibili, the video sharing site took down Wang's video once and then, after receiving serious backlash, made the video available again. Both Pinduoduo and Bilibili are Shanghai-based internet upstarts that are listed in the US.
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There was no solid proof yet but the popular suspicion is that Maimai, the self-proclaimed safe and anonymous online community of working professionals, leaked his personal information to Pinduoduo.
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Reasons this episode is worth listening (in Mandarin)
1. It's a Loud Murmurs Production
2. It's an audio reportage, a rare-seen format in Chinese podcasting scene.
3. It's solid, thorough and in my view the best-rounded coverage of the in-and-outs of the Xianzi case
4. I'm in it
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In the meantime, Pinduoduo's stock price remains stable. Why? As someone who used to work as a tech reporter who covers the internet giants for a living, I know the insane amount of money/efforts the company has spent on international PR.
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Blizzard’s exit from China not just leave nostalgic gamers in limbo, but shook up the underground dailian (substitute player) industry that has long feed on the giant ecosystem. My latest for
@restofworld
:
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Two decades into the 21st century, it is time to revisit the idea that tech could and should be a liberating force for all. My latest Op-ed for
@SCMPNews
, with edits from
@knowsnothing
.
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This is extremely outrageous. Yale Daily News staff needs to understand that not everyone is born with the privilege of freedom of speech, of being credited for their work, and newsroom rules should not facilitate "freedom of expression" of some while suppressing others.
Hi
@yaledailynews
, let's talk.
Your decision to publish a report conducted by two Chinese student journalists after they requested repeatedly to remain anonymous greatly concerns Chinese journalists, including me. (Thread)
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Excited to join CUNY's first ever AI Journalism Lab to explore AI reporting and use in newsrooms with this amazing cohort!
💥🧑💻We are so excited to announce the 25 journalists, media leaders, and academics from around the world that have been selected for the inaugural AI Journalism Lab cohort with support from
@Microsoft
!
Let's get to know them ↓
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As many people I interviewed at the scene can testify, the camaraderie formed between “friends of Xianzi” was life-changing. Trying to document that day here in my latest for
@supchinanews
, with pictures by
@OahYunn
, and thoughtful edits from
@anthonytao
. Give it a read!
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字节跳动这家最有“美国梦”的中国科技公司终于再次来到了被迫失去美国市场的关头。我在端��播客聊了“不买就禁”法案通过参议院之后，TikTok不确定的命运，和字节跳动的发家史。
Tiktok是賣還是退出美國市場？
美國參議院通過法案，要求其限期剝離母公司字節跳動，賣給一個美國實體。
脫胎於中國的Tiktok在短短幾年風靡世界，它如何成為「美國國家安全威脅」？字節跳動會如何權衡？Tiktok真的會被完全禁止？
「端聞」最新一期，在美科技記者為你解讀。
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And this. Is this bad cooking? Or is it exotic for the Chinese palette?
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Wang Taixu (pseudonym), a former front-end engineer of Pinduoduo's newly formed e-commerce grocery team, posted on Maimai, an "anonymous workplace sharing platform" after he saw one co-worker taken away by ambulance, saying "the second Pinduoduo-er has fell". The post went viral.
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First issue of
@ChaoyangTrap
features my little heartfelt essay on a special groups of audience that keeps Chinese podcasting moving, besides
@tianyuf
’s scoop on IG’s Chinese meme boom. Give it a read, subscribe and share! 👋
Here's our first issue. A new type of China Tinder Guy + China's podcasting boom + meme page alignment charts + "Rich Kids English Police:"
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Like this one: “Oh Chinese people are collectivists whereas westerners are individualists that’s why I think Chinese women make good wives”
💅 please don't talk to me about how my culture is a collectivist culture and yours is an individualist one. that is a false binary you've constructed for yourself buddy and i'm sorry that you have to live trapped in it.
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Hi! I am working on a piece about China's crypto scene (especially the bros in it) for
@ChaoyangTrap
that I know very little about. If you are a self-identified crypto bro, would you care explaining it to me? DMs open! 🤖
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For
@WIRED
, I wrote about China’s response to ChatGPT — how people are using it, how big techs and entrepreneurs are imitating it, and what opportunities and risks it unveils. Ft.
@jjding99
@mattsheehan88
with edits from
@PeterGuest
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More than excited to introduce
@ChaoyangTrap
to everyone on Twitter, a project founded by my dear friends
@krishraghav
and
@tianyuf
. It explores China's marginal subcultures, tiny obsessions, and unexpected connections, and will feel like the best group chat you've ever been in.
Hi! Welcome to Chaoyang Trap House, a newsletter about everyday life on the Chinese internet. It’s a regular exploration of contemporary China, one important niche at a time. Read our intro here, subscribe, and spread the word!
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Thrilled to announce that I’m launching my personal podcast 定向跳转 at the first day of 2021 in partnership with
@marcastmedia
. It’s in Mandarin and I will mainly be talking about the intercultural transmission of internet culture and digital trends from a gen Z perspective.
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Soon after that he was approached by his supervisors and the HR team with threats about his future career. He was offered a deal to leave the company "voluntarily" if he promised to never mention this again, but he refused and was immediately fired and escorted out.
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Just found smth uncanny: I seem to be able to read Chinese and listening to 2x English podcast at the same time without a noticeable drop in comprehension? Could do the same switching the two languages but when I’m multitasking in the same language it doesn’t work as well
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Bilibili needs to find the fine line between growing users and killing individuality when going mainstream. The tight-knit subculture communities that made it successful in the first place are already seeing a declining sense of belonging. My latest:
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So glad someone finally wrote about Hu Xijin! Hu’s rhetoric has such a distinct style and I cannot get over how he refers to himself by nickname in third person in each and every post
For
@gdnlongread
, I wrote about the ubiquitous
@HuXijin_GT
, his online fights and his inner battles.
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Chinese authorities have updated the export catalog for the first time in 12 years. China's
@XHNews
pointed out that the revised catalog may restrict TikTok from selling its US operations because the deal must be approved by China.
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