As 2025 draws to a close, CDT editors are compiling a series of the most notable content (Chinese) from across the Chinese internet over the past year. Topics include this year’s most outstanding quotes, reports, podcasts and videos, sensitive words, censored articles and essays, “People of the Year,” and CDT’s “2025 Editors’ Picks.”
CDT Chinese editors’ introduction to the most notable censored articles and essays this year describes some of the key censorship trends we observed in 2025:
In 2025, the state of censorship on the Chinese internet was characterized by ubiquity, unpredictability, and the blurring of boundaries. Just a few years ago, Chinese netizens might have been able to discern which topics, positions, or viewpoints were most likely to cross red lines, and to fine-tune their online strategies accordingly in order to walk the “tightrope” of censorship. Today, however, this accumulated wisdom has become much less effective, because censorship is no longer targeted solely at “dissenting voices,” but has broadened to include any and all content that might lead to uncontrolled, or uncontrollable, online discourse.
In other words, censorship is no longer merely a governance tool aimed at eliminating content deemed to be “incorrect,” nor is it focused solely on suppressing individual expression and content from certain civil-society accounts. Rather, it has evolved into a proactive, content-blocking juggernaut capable of anticipating what type of information might “spin out of control.” Under such a mechanism, any form of expression may be viewed as a potential threat, because even analysis and explanation poses an inherent risk, and heated online discussion is perceived as a loss of control. Thus does the censorship apparatus mold an online public-opinion environment that appears spontaneous, but is in fact highly selective and intensely filtered.
[…] When the censorship apparatus is able to operate indiscriminately, not only does it suppress dissent, but also inevitably leads to negative fallout and unforeseen consequences. While it may succeed in creating an online environment that appears “perfectly safe and perfectly correct,” the concomitant self-censorship and enforced silence quickly drain what little online space and vitality remains, thus sucking the life out of societal discourse.
[…] This year’s censored articles and essays reflect this strange state of affairs and its frequent absurdities in which content “revisiting old news” is quashed, “netizen voices” are stifled, detailed analysis is deemed “subjective speculation,” reasonable connections are dubbed “malicious associations,” and even the mildest “constructive opinions” are verboten—not to mention long-standing targets such as direct calls to action and the voices of resistance.
These CDT archives are a record of the relentless, systematic attempt to shrink the boundaries of online discourse, as well as a testament to the unextinguished flame of “memory-driven resistance.” Too many authentic voices have been systematically erased, but these archives, these memories, these voices of resistance live on. [Chinese]
This compilation of the main monthly topics and most notable deleted articles and essays from 2025 represents but a fraction of the online content that disappears each day from the Chinese internet, either via targeted deletion by platform censors, or voluntary or forced deletion by the individual who posted it. For this reason, and because we closely monitor sources known to be frequently targeted for censorship (and are therefore more likely to identify and archive their content before it is deleted), trends found in CDT’s deleted content archive may not map exactly to trends on the Chinese internet at large.
From December 14, 2024 to December 10, 2025, CDT Chinese editors added 425 new articles, essays, and other pieces of content to our “404 Deleted Content Archive,” which now stands at over 2,320 items. Our publicly available and fully searchable Chinese-language “404 Deleted Content Archive” is an invaluable resource for preserving online Chinese discourse and for identifying topics that the Chinese government, Chinese Communist Party, and censors deem “too sensitive” not to suppress.
This fall, we also launched a new series, in both Chinese and English, featuring a roundup of key deleted content from the preceding month. (See past CDT English posts for September; October Part One and Part Two; and November Part One and Part Two.) This deleted content, often yielding the message “404: content not found,” is sourced from Chinese platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (TikTok’s counterpart in the Chinese market), Xiaohongshu (RedNote), Bilibili, Zhihu, Douban, and many others.
The highest proportion of deleted content added to CDT’s archive in 2025 was related to public safety incidents, including a number of accidents:
The second main category was scandals involving nepotism, privilege, wealth-flaunting, and school bullying:
Many of this year’s deleted memes touched on sensitive socio-political issues and economic inequalities:
“800 Brother,” the man who set fire to a textile factory that reportedly owed him 800 yuan ($114 U.S.) in back wages
“Huang Chao Rebellion,” referring to “eat-the-rich” populist sentiments driving a resurgence of interest in a late Tang Dynasty uprising led by Chinese rebel Huang Chao
“Credential-Flashing Sister,” a Mercedes-driving woman in Guangxi who flashed borrowed official credentials to try to intimidate another driver into yielding
“Sister Lanlan,” referring to Yang Lanlan, a young Chinese woman living in Sydney, charged with four criminal offenses for crashing her Rolls-Royce Cullinan SUV into another vehicle in July, seriously injuring the other driver
“Three Major Theories” that prevailed on Chinese social media this year reflect some of the travails and insecurities afflicting lower-income men: the “Unified Theory of Sexual Repression, the “Laborer Mindset Theory,” and the “Apple vs. Android Theory.”
There was some deletion of content about international events with potential repercussions for China:
Lastly, CDT editors tracked rampant, indiscriminate censorship of a number of particular topics this year:
Below is a month-by-month summary of the main archived topics this year, along with examples of particularly notable or influential censored essays and articles.
This is the first half of 2025’s Most Notable Censored Articles and Essays; Part 2 will follow shortly.
January 2025
“Widespread ‘Data Duplication’ in Generic Drug Consistency Evaluations,” by Dr. Xia Zhimin, from Dr. Xia Zhimin’s official WeChat account
January 24, 2025
One of the most closely watched public-policy issues in early 2025 was the safety and efficacy of domestically produced generic medications purchased in bulk by China’s public health-care system. In January, twenty Chinese medical experts issued a joint statement noting problems with some of these generic drugs, such as “anesthesia that does not put patients to sleep, blood-pressure medication that does not lower blood pressure, and laxatives that do nothing to relieve constipation.” The experts called for greater protections of patients’ rights to choose which medications they will be prescribed, and suggested the need for further improvements to the government’s centralized procurement system for medications. Some of the physicians who expressed concerns were targeted for online censorship or ad hominem attacks from online trolls. Among these was Dr. Zheng Minhua, director of general surgery at Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, who reportedly deleted his WeChat account after a series of online attacks against him.
CDT Chinese editors archived a number of censored articles on the subject of generic medications, including the one above from Dr. Xia Zhimin. Dr. Xia pointed out numerous anomalies in data sets from clinical trials of domestically produced generic drugs—which he believed stemmed from third-party testing agencies fabricating or recycling data to help companies pass evaluations. He also warned that a “race to the bottom” in pricing and regulatory oversight is driving high-quality pharmaceutical manufacturers out of the Chinese market, and leaving patients with only substandard generic alternatives. After Dr. Xia’s article was widely circulated online, the original text was blocked by WeChat, for the stated reason that “this content has been reported and upon review is suspected of infringement and cannot be viewed.” The complaint type was listed as “infringement of reputation/goodwill/privacy/portrait rights.”
February 2025
Throughout 2024 and 2025, there were increasingly harsh crackdowns on writers of danmei, or “BL” online fiction—a popular genre of homoerotic literature featuring male protagonists, but typically created by and for women—by police in Anhui and Gansu operating across jurisdictional lines. Factors motivating the crackdowns included income-generation via for-profit policing (also known as “deep-sea fishing”), a desire to control women and censor content that the government considers sexually “deviant,” and the prevalence of outdated and overly restrictive legal definitions of obscenity.
Although arrests and fines of danmei writers reached a peak over the summer, with many related articles censored on Chinese social media, CDT also archived two important early WeChat articles (both censored at the time) about the targeting of these writers, particularly those who published on the Taiwan-based fiction platform Haitang (海棠, Hǎitáng, “begonia”). One was a December 2024 piece from freelance journalism collective Aquarius Era sounding the alarm about danmei writers across the country being arrested and fined by Anhui police; the other was WeChat account Midnight Sun Studio’s February 2025 interview with one of the earliest Haitang authors to be caught up in the dragnet. After being arrested, interrogated, heavily fined, and sentenced to several years in prison (the sentence was later suspended), the author describes how the experience resulted in unemployment, debt, depression, and fraught relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. A portion of her interview is translated below:
“Confession of a Haitang Author Arrested in a Cross-Provincial Pornography Sting,” by Wei Xiaohan, WeChat account Midnight Sun Studio
February 10, 2025
Sometimes I wish I would have stopped publishing my writing on Haitang sooner. When I think about the price I paid—a [suspended] prison sentence of several years and a criminal record—I just want to go back and stop myself from typing on the keyboard.
[…] Working all alone in a distant city was dull, but the process of inventing plots and writing stories gave me a sense of accomplishment. Whether I wrote well or not, just seeing those words on the page made me feel that my life had some meaning. During that period when I so longed to escape the city, the protagonist of my novel, much like me, became enamored of farming games that offered a return to simpler times when people planted crops and raised chickens.
Writing erotica was stress relief, pure and simple. The year before last, when I was under a lot of pressure at work, I’d come home late, grab some dinner, then turn on my computer and pound out stories for two or three hours straight. The resulting book was a bit more explicit than my usual writing; it was a way of blowing off some steam. I later wondered if I hadn’t written it, maybe I wouldn’t have been arrested. [Chinese]
March 2025
“Successful ‘Topping Off’ of Thailand’s New State Audit Office Building,” from China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group’s official WeChat account
March 28, 2025
Following a March 28 earthquake whose epicenter was 600 miles away in Myanmar, a 30-story office tower under construction in Bangkok collapsed, killing at least 95 people. The highrise, the only building in Bangkok to collapse during the quake, was the intended headquarters of Thailand’s State Audit Office and was under construction by a Chinese state-owned engineering firm. Comments and news about the building collapse were censored across Chinese social media; Weibo and Douyin blocked terms such as “Thailand’s State Audit Office Building Collapse”; and Weibo even deleted a short comment from nationalist pundit Hu Xijin suggesting that there would likely be an investigation into the building’s quality and design. Some Chinese netizens joked that the censors’ blatant attempts to conceal the truth was tantamount to admitting that the building was flawed.
Among the deleted articles archived by CDT were a short piece from Phoenix News confirming that the building’s primary contractor was China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group; a WeChat article speculating about what structural flaws might have caused the building to collapse; and screenshots of an older PR post praising the building’s safety and quality, and celebrating its “topping off” (the placement of the final beam atop the structure). That post, from China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group’s official WeChat account, was immediately deleted following the collapse, but screenshots were widely shared online.
A subsequent investigation by Thai authorities revealed that the collapse was due to multiple factors—design flaws, substandard steel, poor construction management, and regulatory loopholes—and that the China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group was but one link in the chain. In August, Thai prosecutors indicted 23 suspects, including senior executives of the Chinese firm and the chairman of the Thai contracting company.
April 2025
“Rebuttal to People’s Daily’s ‘The Sky Won’t Fall’: The Real Danger Is Believing You’re Omnipotent,” by Jing Ziku, from Weibo account New New Youth BLOG
April 7, 2025
In early April, with the U.S. and China mired in a tit-for-tat trade war, the Chinese government launched a PR blitz to project an attitude of defiant confidence, and to assuage public anxiety by downplaying the potential effects of President Trump’s threatened tariffs against China. Discussion of the tariffs was relentlessly scrubbed from Chinese social media, and a long list of related Weibo hashtags were either search-censored or limited to content from verified accounts.
A front-page commentary in People’s Daily, titled “Focus on Managing Our Own Affairs Well,” attempted to calm ruffled nerves by confidently proclaiming that even if the U.S. were to impose tariffs on China, “The sky won’t fall.” The article went on to reassure readers that the Chinese economy is stabilizing and improving, that China intends to focus on its own economic development, and that the government is well-prepared and has effective countermeasures in place. The breezy commentary was widely criticized, with many bloggers and commenters accusing People’s Daily of being unrealistic, overconfident, and out of touch with the economic realities of ordinary people’s lives.
A rebuttal to the “sky won’t fall” commentary, from Jing Ziku at WeChat account New New Youth BLOG, described it thus: “Empty and hollow, vapid and naive, this article speaks only of peaceful things, but does not condescend to look down and recognize the plight of the common people. It refuses to recognize the problem, and not recognizing the problem is the biggest problem of all.” An excerpt from Jing’s rebuttal is translated below:
“The Sky Won’t Fall” seems to radiate bravado, but its false optimism belies profound anxiety, and its linguistic stylings sugarcoat reality.
The article claims that “exports as a share of GDP are declining, domestic demand has enormous untapped potential, and the momentum for transformation is robust”—the same fine phrases they’ve been repeating for a decade. But have you ever cast your gaze down to see how people on the ground are actually living?
In 2018 they said, “Sino-American trade friction won’t have much of an impact on us.” And what happened? That year saw massive layoffs in manufacturing, and countless export companies went out of business.
In 2020 they said, “The pandemic is controllable.” Three years later, we all understand at what cost.
In 2024 they said, “Real estate is not a pillar industry,” then they turned around and bailed out the property market.
[…] This isn’t “the sky won’t fall.” This is pretending, each time after the sky does collapse, that no, it didn’t really happen. [Chinese]
May 2025
The Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) “4+4” scandal: What began as a tale of medical malpractice and an extramarital affair between a thoracic surgeon and a young resident at Beijing’s prestigious China-Japan Friendship Hospital later exploded into societal debate about medical and personal ethics, research and academic fraud, nepotism and intergenerational privilege, and whether it was unfair to allow “returnee” students with non-science degrees into PUMC’s four-year accelerated medical degree program.
Students’ “right to defecate”: Experts and netizens alike expressed concern about the “national disgrace” of junior-high school students at boarding schools being hospitalized and suffering health complications due to extreme constipation—in some cases, lasting as long as a month—brought on by stress, unrelenting class schedules, and school restrictions on bathroom breaks.
Widespread ridicule of a speech by Hunan University professor Du Gangjian claiming that Karl Marx was descended from Hui Muslims in China. Du’s speech was quickly deleted from social media platforms, but preserved by netizens and archived at CDT.
Arson case in Pingshan county, Sichuan province: A worker reportedly owed 800 yuan ($114 U.S.) in back wages set fire to the textile factory where he worked, causing significant property damage but no deaths or injuries. The incident rekindled online discussion of the widespread structural problem of unpaid wages. Although Pingshan police denied the existence of wage arrears and arrested three people for “spreading rumors” about it, many on social media expressed sympathy for the man, who came to be known as “800 Brother” (800哥, bābǎi gē). “It’s heartbreaking that when he needed his wages, the law wouldn’t help him,” wrote one user of the Q&A site Zhihu, “but when he burned down the factory, the law came after him.”
The Huang Chao Rebellion (a late Tang Dynasty uprising led by Chinese rebel Huang Chao) becomes an internet meme, reflecting popular disgust with recent scandals (“4+4,” Huang Yang Tiantian’s earrings, etc.) involving nepotism and wealth flaunting
June 2025
Lingering suspicions about the death of medical resident Luo Shuaiyu, who died after falling off a high building in Changsha, Hunan province. A few years earlier, Luo had reported Liu Xiangfeng, a senior doctor at the same hospital, for serious malpractice violations. Liu was later investigated, fired, and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Cross-provincial arrests of writers of danmei erotica who published on the Taiwan-based website Haitang
Controversy over actress Na Er Na Xi (“Nashi”) having lied about where she went to school, in order to garner extra points on the gaokao college entrance exam
The torture death of Bao Qinrui during RSDL (residential surveillance at a designated location)
Bai Bin, a former assistant judge at Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court, reportedly embezzled 300 million yuan (approx. $42 million U.S. dollars) in court funds and absconded to Japan. Bai Bin responded online that he was a whistleblower and was unfairly scapegoated.
“A Death Under RSDL: When Will Confessions Extracted by Torture End?” by Wang Heyan, from Caixin News
June 18, 2025
In recent years, numerous deaths of people being held in RSDL (“residential surveillance at a designated location”) pending trial have revived public debate about abolishing the reviled RSDL system once and for all. Criminal defense lawyers and legal experts have argued that the system is rife with exploitation and abuse, and should be abolished rather than reformed. A 2022 report by Safeguard Defenders noted that the authorized use of residential surveillance has expanded dramatically during the Xi era, and cited 270,000 documented instances of RSDL since 2013, although the actual number is believed to range between 560,000-860,000.
The Caixin article above focuses on the death of 34-year-old Bao Qinrui, who died on the 13th day of RSDL, after being subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and restrictive stress positions for long periods. (In September of this year, 11 police officers involved in Bao’s case were convicted of intentional injury and the crime of extorting confessions by torture, with the heaviest punishment being 16 years in prison.) In another article, defense lawyer Hao Chen wrote that in his years of legal experience, “I have never once encountered an example of what you might call normal, civilized, or genuinely legal RSDL. The experiences of my clients in residential detention have been a litany of cruelty, with suffering ranging from bad to worse. I follow a lot of criminal defense lawyers of all stripes on WeChat, and we disagree on many issues, but the one thing we can all agree on is that the RSDL system is a scourge on our profession—we’ll all be relieved when it’s dead and gone.”
July 2025
“A 6000-Word Report Exposes the Failure of an Entire System,” WeChat account Duanduan Jiang
July 20, 2025
This article, written by a former reporter covering medicine and health, discusses how the many failures that led to Tianshui kindergarten lead poisoning case expose “the failure of an entire system.” The author dissects the investigative report and enumerates the many institutional failures—on the part of the school, educational authorities, local regulators, hospitals, and the provincial CDC—that allowed the lead poisoning of kindergarten students to snowball for over a year. A portion of the article is translated below:
But the weighty content of the report could not paper over the public’s anger and disappointment. I believe that many, like me, are left wondering: When we can’t trust data from top-tier hospitals, or testing results from the CDC, or inspections and oversight by regulatory authorities, or quality control by the educational system, who can we rely on to protect our children’s health?
This was no mere “local disaster,” but an institutional stress test. It proved that tragedy arises not from “mistakes made by a small number of individuals” but is an “institutional outgrowth” of an entire system that condones, overlooks, or even facilitates such misbehavior.
The places people once thought were the safest—schools, hospitals, and regulatory insititutions—have turned out to be cesspools, the first to be poisoned and the last to respond. And although the truth has now been brought to light, there needs to be a great deal more accountability, reparation, and systemic reconstruction if these institutions are to regain the trust of the public.
This report lays bare the tragic predicament of an entire system. The real question is not where those [lead-contaminated] pigments came from, but how our supposedly “rigorous” public health system failed to address the problem for over a year.
We prefer to believe that the world we inhabit is not some gimcrack, amateurish operation. But every time the truth is revealed, it hits us like a slap in the face, reminding us just how threadbare our illusions really are. [Chinese]
