‘What is wrong with society?’ Li Chengpeng, a widely followed commentator, wrote, ‘A seven-month baby can think already. I want to ask the murderer, how do you face your own mother when you go home? If this evil policy is not stopped, this country will have no humanity.’

Part of the complexity about being a big Chinese company is that it’s not clear what information related to your relationship with the government counts as a secret.

Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now.

Then it got weirder.

So for the vast majority of the Chinese population, Facebook is the tech equivalent of dark matter: a force that everyone senses is of great importance but which remains, so far, unseen.

China is moving backwards. In fifteen years of studying and writing about this place, I’ve rarely had reason to reach that conclusion without one qualifier or another dangling off the end of the sentence—qualifiers that leave room, for instance, for ‘halting progress’ or ‘mixed signals.’ But this week the evidence is unambiguous: for the first time in thirteen years, China has kicked out a foreign correspondent. In doing so, it revives a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine its own efforts to project soft power and shows a spirit of self-delusion that does not bode well for China’s ability to address the problems that imperil its future.