This Week in China is out | June 13–19, 2026
Xi Jinping turned 73 and marked it with a national conference convened to study his own thought. But our two most exclusive stories this week were about ordinary Chinese being silenced — which is the core of what this network does: sourcing the realities of Chinese life that go untold, especially the ones the state is working to bury.
The case of Xiao Luoxi. A five-month-old girl died after heart surgery that an official inquiry found had "no clear surgical indication," ruling it a grade-one medical accident. Her parents kept pressing for the full truth — until June 15, when police summoned them and they lost contact. What followed was extraordinary: "electronic mothers" across the country relayed the family's name through the censorship in shifts, keeping it visible no matter how fast it was scrubbed. Substack
Wuhan, again. Residents of Wuchang's Gongzheng Road spent the week protesting a ¥205 million hazardous-waste lab slated to rise some 27 meters from their homes. Police massed, people were hurt, and the crowd sang the national anthem at the officers — and then the whole story was scrubbed into near-invisibility online.
Also inside: the censorship around Xi's birthday and a new sub-doctrine on Party building; a unanimous US Senate resolution condemning Xi; Taiwan's new website inviting intelligence from inside China; and the end of easy capital squeezing both ends at once — SpaceX and OpenAI shutting the door on Chinese investors while construction shed roughly 7.6 million jobs in a single year.
Being silenced does not make these stories any less true. The full week:
https://t.co/JWgIGtcivw