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Featured Article
5 Places to Experience Chinese New Year at Its Best (February 18, 2026, The World of Chinese)
This Spring Festival, China is taking a well-deserved pause with an extra-long nine-day holiday. With work stress usually running high across the country, it’s a rare chance to take a proper break and unwind. It’s also the perfect time to hit the road—soak up festive traditions, and experience a side of China that only comes alive during the New Year.
Government / Politics / Foreign Affairs
Where Did China’s ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’ Come From (and Where Did It Go)? (February 18, 2026, The Diplomat)
The label was drawn from two popular jingoistic action films both titled “Wolf Warrior.” It was the sequel that became a box office smash hit. This 2017 action film tells the story of a lone wolf soldier battling foreign mercenaries in a fictional African country to protect Chinese civilians and confront China’s enemies. It popularized the term, making “wolf warrior” synonymous with heroic Chinese patriot. Where did wolf warrior diplomacy come from and where did it go?
Chinese Surveillance Gets the AI Treatment (February 24, 2026, China Media Project)
Reading between the lines, a dry little document released by the Fujian Police Academy in December last year is a small window into the future of authoritarianism.
The academy, which is directly under the Fujian provincial government and conducts research to improve public security mechanisms, proposes a new method for detecting an abnormal build-up of people into “potential mass incidents” (潜在群体性事件) — referring to an oft-used official bureaucratic euphemism for collective protests, riots, demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of organized public unrest. The academy’s new method uses AI that is fed data from sound sensors, cameras, and official reports.
Religion
When the Spring Festival Meets Lent (February 17, 2026, ChinaSource)
Friends who follow the church calendar may have noticed that this year—2026—Lent overlaps with the Chinese New Year. On the second day of the Lunar New Year, which falls on a Wednesday, Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. This is a collision between two ancient traditions. The universal tradition of Lent stretches back at least 1,700 years. The Chinese New Year, established according to the traditional calendar, dates back over 2,100 years.
Fellowship in Suffering (February 19, 2026, China Partnership)
In the final part of this interview with “Preacher Du,” he and his wife share how fellowship carried them through years of suffering. They talk about what it was like for his family when he spent several years in jail. Imprisonment can be even harder on family outside than on the one inside. It can be isolating, discouraging, and scary. But Preacher Du’s wife was not alone during her husband’s years in prison, because other churches sent women to care for her, love her, and pray with her.
Beyond Proclamation (February 24, 2026, ChinaSource)
The ways in which the Gospel has been proclaimed in contemporary China have varied over time, from itinerant evangelism in the 1970s and 1980s to social media today. While these and other methods have been instrumental in the exponential growth of China’s church, the witness of Chinese believers goes beyond mere proclamation, encompassing on a deeper level how their faith finds expression in their lives. As restrictions on opportunities for public proclamation increase, the nature of this witness takes on greater significance.
Society / Life
Inside Chunwan 2026: China’s Spring Festival Gala (complimentary article) (February 16, 2026, What’s on Weibo)
Watch the CGM Spring Festival Gala with us. It’s that special annual evening show that captures millions of viewers on the night of the Chinese New Year. Loved by many, hated by some, it always generates social media buzz. We’ll bring you the ins & outs of the 2026 Gala and its social media frenzy, with updates before, during, and after the show.
China’s Erasure of Ethnic Minority Languages (February 21, 2026, The Diplomat)
How is the Chinese government marking international mother language day on February 21? By legalizing the erasure of mother languages. In December 2025, according to the NPC Observer, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee signed off on revisions to the Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language, originally adopted in 2000. The revisions remove a provision that allowed speakers of “minority languages” to use those as the medium of instruction in schools, stating simply that such education is “no longer necessary.”
Rural Spaces of Digital Labour (February 23, 2026, Made In China Journal)
As I walked through the village of Junpucun in Guangdong Province, I was struck by how different rural China was from idyllic images of the countryside as a peaceful, natural space. In the narrow streets of the village, tuk-tuks zipped between courtyard houses, with packages stacked everywhere. Shutters were slightly lowered, and the sound of sewing machines echoed in the background. A chicken wandered among the packages next to a brand new Porsche, which seemed to be the latest model. It was evident that this rural area was undergoing significant changes. What stood out the most was not the speed of these transformations, but their consistency: the way infrastructure and domestic rural lives were intertwined in their ordinariness.
This Spring Festival, China’s Bus Drivers Cosplayed Emperors (February 24, 2026, Sixth Tone)
More than 2,000 years after Qin Shi Huang built China’s first imperial highway, the emperor was spotted navigating traffic in the northwestern city of Xi’an. And in southwestern Chengdu, Tang dynasty poet Li Bai was driving a bus where classical poems echoed through its speakers. During this year’s nine-day Spring Festival holiday, bus drivers across China dressed as historical and fictional figures, turning ordinary sightseeing routes into theatrical rides.
Economics / Trade / Business
Many Countries Launch New Trade Measures – But China’s Exports Just Keep Growing (February 19, 2026, MERICS)
A remarkable fifty-two of the world’s 70 largest economies (including the EU-27) in 2025 responded to market distortions from China’s export glut by launching new trade defense measures and investigations, the MERICS Trade Defenses Map shows. But most of these moves proved insufficient, as China’s industrial overcapacity drove its trade surplus up 20 percent to a record 1.2 trillion USD – an especially striking increase given that exports to the US actually fell following Washington’s imposition of almost-uniquely muscular tariffs.
Podcast – Will Chinese EVs Drive on U.S. Roads? (February 23, 2026, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations)
As Washington and Beijing prepare for the upcoming Xi–Trump summit in April, one question has emerged: could Chinese automakers, particularly electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers, invest in the United States? Chinese firms like Geely and tech companies such as Xiaomi have expressed interest in partnerships or production on American soil and President Trump himself has publicly floated the idea that Washington might allow some form of Chinese auto or EV investment in the United States. On February 3, 2026, Ilaria Mazzocco and James Rowland joined Gregor Williams to explore the feasibility, challenges, and implications of such investment—from national security reviews and export controls to the broader geopolitical context.
Are China’s “AI Tigers” Cheating? US Rival Anthropic Alleges Some Are (February 24, 2026, CNN)
United States artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is accusing three prominent Chinese AI labs of illegally extracting capabilities from its Claude model to advance their own, claiming it raises national security concerns. The Chinese unicorns – DeepSeek, Minimax and Moonshot AI – created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and trained their models using over 16 million exchanges with Claude, a process known as distillation, Anthropic alleged in a Monday blogpost.
Arts / Entertainment / Media
Podcast – Hǎi Profile: A Conversation with Jiaoying Summers (February 18, 2026, ChinaFile)
Jiaoying Summers is a stand-up comic who is packing theaters around the U.S., and last year premiered a one-hour comedy special on Hulu. With three and a half million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, she owes much of her success to short video clips of her standup routines which began going viral as the COVID pandemic was shutting down live entertainment.
修: The Character That Builds and Repairs (February 20, 2026, The World of Chinese)
Almost anyone who has tried to lose weight knows the golden rule: Control your mouth and move your legs (or simply, diet and exercise). Sounds easy enough. But a few months into the new year, more and more young Chinese are discovering they cannot rely on willpower alone to sustain healthy habits. Enter 邪修 (xiéxiū, literally “heretical cultivation”), a term originating from fantasy novels whose protagonists used unorthodox, even immoral means to develop special powers or gain immortality. Now, it has been adopted by young internet users to refer to unusual lifehacks.
CDT’s “404 Deleted Content Archive” Summary for January 2026, Part One (February 22, 2026, China Digital Times)
CDT presents a monthly series of censored content that has been added to our “404 Deleted Content Archive.” Each month, we publish a summary of content blocked or deleted (often yielding the message “404: content not found”) from Chinese platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (TikTok’s counterpart in the Chinese market), Xiaohongshu (RedNote), Bilibili, Zhihu, Douban, and others. Although this content archived by CDT Chinese editors represents only a small fraction of the online content that disappears each day from the Chinese internet, it provides valuable insight into which topics are considered “sensitive” over time by the Party-state, cyberspace authorities, and platform censors.
Science / Technology
Inside China’s Historic Electricity Milestone and Clean Energy Revolution (February 20, 2026, Sixth Tone)
China crossed a historic threshold in 2025, consuming 10.37 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity—the first time the nation has surpassed the 10 trillion mark. The milestone caps a dramatic expansion, as power consumption has grown 2.5 times over the past 15 years, and stands at 7.7 times the level recorded in 2000, according to the National Energy Administration.
Education
China’s Vocational Degrees Rising as Students Seek Skills Over Prestigious Universities (February 21, 2026, South China Morning Post)
When the results of China’s grueling National Higher Education Entrance Examination—or gaokao—were released last summer, Lin Gangming was surprised to learn that he had scored high enough to attend some of the country’s top universities. But instead of chasing prestige, the student from Yangjiang, a small coastal city in Guangdong province, chose a different path: Shenzhen Polytechnic University—a public undergraduate vocational college in the province.
Travel / Food
China Seeks to Cultivate a Food Supply Immune to Geopolitical Shocks (February 22, 2026, South China Morning Post)
A single policy could redraw global food supply lines and scramble markets from the Americas to Southeast Asia. Covering grain, vegetables, livestock and fisheries, this document calls for stable, higher-quality and more efficient output while linking domestic production to trade. It emphasizes expanding high-standard farmland, strengthening disaster resilience, accelerating agricultural science and technology innovation, including biotechnology, stabilizing output and addressing labor shortages.
Language / Language Learning
China’s Erasure of Ethnic Minority Languages (February 21, 2026, The Diplomat)
A years-long trend of replacing Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uyghur-medium instruction with Mandarin Chinese-medium instruction is now codified in law. Students in these communities will now only be taught their mother tongue as a single, standalone class; all other classes will be taught in Chinese.
Spaced Repetition Software: What It Is and How to Use It to Learn Chinese (February 23, 2026, Hacking Chinese)
Spaced repetition means that you review words you want to learn in certain intervals to maximize learning efficiency. Since this involves keeping track of much data, a computer program is needed to handle it properly. Spaced repetition software is very powerful and can be used for many things, but learning vocabulary and characters are perhaps the most important applications.
History / Culture
Revelers Welcome Year of the Horse With Fireworks and Feasts (subscription required) (February 17, 2026, New York Times)
With fireworks, lion dancing, temple visits, and even robots, more than a billion people across Asia and in diaspora communities welcomed the Year of the Horse on Tuesday. The Lunar New Year marks the arrival of spring and the first new moon of the lunisolar calendar. It is the most important holiday in many Asian countries and is known as Spring Festival in China, Seollal in South Korea, and Tet in Vietnam. Traditions vary across and within countries, but common threads run throughout: family gatherings with marathon feasts, and rituals to honor ancestors and seek prosperity. Many people flock to temples to make offerings of traditional food, and light incense at altars for ancestors and elders.
Events
ChinaSource Connect Dinner in Dallas
Andrea Lee and Joann Pittman will be hosting a ChinaSource Connect Dinner in the Dallas area on Friday, March 13, 2026. If you are in the Dallas area, please join us for an evening of food, fellowship, and hearing stories of what God is doing in China. Space is limited, so please RSVP early.
For details and registration, go here: https://signupforms.com/registrations/45501
Public Lecture: Christianity in China Beyond the Headlines (ChinaSource)
In this lecture, Joann Pittman will provide an introduction to the complexity of the church in China, moving beyond common headlines and narratives to look at key issues and challenges that Christians face today. This will include a historical overview of Christianity in China, as well as gospel-centered stories of what God is doing among his people despite the challenging social and political environment. Finally, we will consider lessons that Christians in the West can learn from Christians in China. (Joann Pittman is Vice President for Partnerships and China Engagement at ChinaSource)
Date: March 26, 2026
Time: 6:15 – light refreshments
7:00 – Lecture & Q&A
Location: Nazareth Hall, University of Northwestern – St. Paul,
3003 Snelling Avenue North, Roseville, MN 55113
East Asian Christianity Conference: Christian Witness and Presence Among East Asian Religions (Gordon-Conwell Seminary)
As an annual gathering, this event brings scholars and practitioners together to engage comparative research on Christianity’s development and significance in East Asia, with implications for church ministry and mission today. The theme of this year’s conference is Christian witness and presence among East Asian religions. Church leaders from Asia and the West will come together to foster creative Christian discourse on outreach and leadership, drawing on current academic research and the lived experience of those in frontline ministry.
April 9-11, 2026
Hamilton, MA
Pray for China
March 1 (Pray For China: A Walk Through History)
On Mar. 1, 1941, Wu Yifang (吴贻芳女士) was elected to the Executive Committee of the Third National Political Consultative Conference along with President Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石). Wu’s life was marked by a number of impressive firsts. She was one of China’s first female college graduates and served as president of the national Chinese Students’ Christian Association in 1925-1926. In 1928 Wu became the first Chinese female college president when she assumed that role at her alma mater, Ginling Women’s College, and she held that position until the communist government abolished Christian education in 1951. She was the first female to head the National Christian Council and was the only Chinese woman to sign the UN Charter in 1945. Pray for Christian women to seek those things which are above where Christ sits at the right hand of God. “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” Colossians 3:1
Activating Prayer for China (February 23, 2025, ChinaSource)
Our family moved to China in the early years of the Reform and Opening Era. We were part of a business as mission multinational team in a major city. Some on our team had been born in China and were returning after many years away. Some had ancestors born in China and were moving there for the first time. More were lǎowài (老外, foreigner) with varying degrees of language competency. All on the team knew we would accomplish nothing without the Lord’s amazing grace.
Lunar New Year Prayer Calendar (February 13, 2026, ChinaSource)
Prayer 2026: Off the Beaten Path (January 1, 2026, China Partnership)
Praying Through the ChinaSource Journal (October 13, 2025, ChinaSource)
Praying Through ZGBriefs (August 29, 2025, ChinaSource)
Operation World (April 21, 2025, ChinaSource)
Pray for China (prayforchina.us)
Prayer Walking as a Rhythm of Life (May 30, 2025, ChinaSource)