China Books & Literature
Nineteen Eighty-Four Turns 70: Orwellian China and Orwell in China
“We still need independent, courageous thinkers like George Orwell. We still need 1984.”
China Arts & Entertainment
The Reunification with Taiwan is Hitting Chinese Cinemas This Summer
A new state-backed epic about the Qing conquest of Taiwan is stirring debate. Plus: the Shanxi mine disaster, a controversial prison film, hukou reform, and China’s top 5 rising books.
China Arts & Entertainment
Su Chao Fever, Mo Yan’s “Scrollable” Book, and Why Li Xiaoran is China’s New Office Icon
This week in China: Grassroots football fever, a Nobel laureate writes for the TikTok era, France’s cultural relic bill, and a 19-year-old’s blind box obsession bankrupts her father’s company.
🔥 China Trend Watch (week 16/17 | 2026) Part of Eye on Digital China by Manya Koetse, China Trend Watch is an overview of what’s trending and being discussed on Chinese social media.
Dear reader,
Hope you’re having a good week. Time for an update on what’s been trending.
In this newsletter:
👉Victor Hugo’s day has come
👉China’s grassroots football couldn’t get more viral
👉A scrollable new book by Mo Yan
👉The Chinese office meme of the moment
..and more.
Let’s dive in.
Quick Scroll
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- 📱 China’s National Security Ministry has joined Chinese Tiktok app Douyin. The high-profile Douyin debut is part of a broader trend of Chinese government agencies and security bodies joining the app.
- 🐺 A feel-good wildlife story from Inner Mongolia: a pregnant wild wolf descended from the mountains to give birth at a wildlife conservation station where she had been previously fed. The noteworthy move shows she had apparently developed trust in the station workers, and felt safe there.
- 🐖 Pork prices hit historic lows but spare ribs still cost 20 yuan (US$3) – this became a topic of discussion this week. Despite the drop in pig prices, retail pork still feels expensive because added costs across the supply chain haven’t changed.
- 🍿 Movie alert. The May Day (五一) cinema content explosion is incoming. Seventeen films have already been slotted for the Golden Week holiday window.
- 🚔 A 31-year-old man from Guangzhou has been detained under anti-cyberbullying regulations after repeatedly posting insulting comments targeting Olympic champion diver Quan Hongchan (全红婵) on WeChat.
- 🤖 Unitree’s humanoid robot is almost as fast as Usain Bolt. The company announced that the H1 humanoid robot achieved a peak sprint speed of 10 meters per second during a 100-meter test.
- ⚡️ Another robot, “Lightning” (闪电) by Honor, also went viral because he won the Beijing Yizhuang Half Marathon on Sunday, April 19, running a half-marathon distance faster than any human ever has, completing it in 50 minutes and 26 seconds (the human record: 56:42). (See video here).
- 🎁 A 19-year-old woman from Zhengzhou has made headlines for allegedly embezzling around 17 million yuan (nearly $2.5 million) from her father’s company, spending it on blind boxes and livestream tipping (dashang 打赏). Her father, now bankrupt, ended up taking his daughter to the police himself.
What Really Stood Out
The Jiangsu Super League (Su Chao) Fever
The Jiangsu…
Eye on Digital China is a reader-supported publication by
Manya Koetse (@manyapan) and powered by What’s on Weibo.
It offers independent analysis of China’s online culture, media, and social trends.
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Ed Sander
June 12, 2019 at 8:17 pm
It’s really not that strange that the book isn’t banned in China, since it was never written with China in mind. Orwell wrote 1984 imagining a war-time Great Britain ruled by Stalin. It was written in a time before the Communists seized power and founded the PRC and way before the Cultural Revolution.
Having said that, the opposite, that 1984 at times eerily similar to China, is definitely true. As a matter of fact, when my Chinese wife saw the movie for the first time and watched the scene with Winston Smith changing news articles she muttered ‘shit … this is just like China’. And I hadn’t given her any leads before watching the film.
Still, the term Orwellian is sometimes appropriate when used in combination with China (think Xinjiang, censorship and the all powerful rules that bestows fear in everybody) but unnecessary in other cases like the social credit system, which is a lot more mundane than most mass media might have you believe.