Marta Cooper

Latest posts by Marta Cooper

China: Social media as political subversion tool

  29 July 2010

This past month has been an interesting one in the cat-and-mouse game between Chinese Internet censorship and its non-conformists. Microblogs in the People's Republic had begun to feel the weight of a heavier government crackdown, following the publication of a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) claiming...

China: Expat views of the Shanghai Expo

  9 July 2010

The Shanghai World Expo is already two months in to its half-year residency. Bloggers have been active in trying to decipher the purpose of the extravaganza, as well as keep track of the lightning-speed developments few corners of Shanghai have been able to avoid in preparing for the event. The...

China: Debating hukou reform

  15 March 2010

Earlier this month, 13 Chinese newspapers appealed to the National People's Congress' 3,000 delegates for social reforms. They attacked China's hukou (household registration system), which severely limits the access of rural migrant workers to basic services in China’s metropolises.

China: Draining the brain?

  2 December 2009

Both the blogosphere and the mainstream media in China have been alerting us to the country’s severe brain drain. According to the Global Times, around 1.4 million Chinese have gone abroad as students and scholars since 2007, with only a quarter returning after graduation. The Blue Book on Global Politics and...

Rape in China: a ‘temporary’ crime?

  10 November 2009

A prominent topic circulating throughout China’s blogosphere is the light sentencing on 29th October of two civilian police assistants charged with the rape of a young girl in Huzhou, in Zheijang province. What netizens have been rampantly discussing is not the crime itself, but the court’s ruling that the convicts were guilty of a “temporary crime on a whim”, drawing important attention to how rape is dealt with in the People’s Republic and its vibrant online communities.

China: Bridging the gap? Interviewing bridge bloggers

  30 October 2009

The Chinese blogosphere, as we all know, is booming. As one of the largest on the planet, it is constantly evolving and simultaneously being set back by the all-too-famous governmental censorship. According to Li Datong, the country’s civil society is being reborn online through the intense cyber-dissent and the breaching...