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322 dispatches found

October 2026

Hand-painted illustration of the Chinese polar icebreaker Xue Long 2, with its red hull, white superstructure and orange cranes, moving through pale Antarctic pack ice, with a small research station and radome on a rocky snowy shore behind

Science & Tech

China’s Polar Research Comes of Age

In February 2024 a new Chinese building rose on Inexpressible Island, a wind-scoured rock in Terra Nova Bay on Antarctica’s Ross Sea coast.

Painted illustration of wartime Chongqing around 1940, its dense city on sandstone cliffs above the Yangtze with stilt houses, stone stairways, air-raid tunnels and moored junks

People

Rana Mitter and China’s Forgotten War

For most British and American readers, the Second World War in Asia used to be a story about Pearl Harbor, Burma and the atomic bombs, with China as a backdrop where a corrupt government waited for the Americans to win its war.

Painted illustration of the EAST superconducting tokamak in Hefei, a tall steel cylinder ringed with access ports and beam lines, inside its experimental hall

Science & Tech

China’s Race to Bottle the Sun

On the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, a large circular pit has been filling up with machinery. In October 2025 engineers lowered a 400-tonne steel base into it.

September 2026

Painted illustration of the Chinese Academy of Sciences headquarters in Beijing in morning light, its green-tiled entrance porch above broad stone steps, with trees framing the forecourt

History

The Academy That Counted

On 1 November 1949, in Beijing, the new government established the Chinese Academy of Sciences and appointed Guo Moruo its president. He was a poet, a playwright, and a historian of ancient scripts.

Painting of boats carrying Zhejiang University staff, students and crates of books upstream on the misty Fuchun River in 1937

History

The University That Walked

On the night of 11 November 1937, about two hundred people from National Zhejiang University went down to the Jianggan docks in Hangzhou and got on boats.

Painted illustration of the gateway of the Imperial University of Peking at the old princess's mansion in winter 1898, a tiled gate in a grey wall with scholars approaching

History

The Only Reform Left Standing

On the last day of 1898, in a house the neighbourhood still thought of as a dead princess’s, a university that was not yet a university opened its doors.

Painted illustration of the white classical gate of Tsinghua school in Beijing in spring 1911, with willows over old garden water and schoolboys walking toward it

History

The Garden the Indemnity Bought

On the morning of 30 March 1911, a sixteen-year-old boy from Shaanxi sat in a new hall on the north-western edge of Beijing and was told where his breakfast had come from. The hall had no famous name yet.

Painted illustration of a late-Ming woodblock printing workshop with carved blocks, drying sheets and bound books, one page showing a monk on horseback with a monkey companion

Culture

Ming Book of the West

Journey to the West (Xiyou ji) is usually introduced as a story about a monk, a monkey, and a road to India. That is not wrong. It is incomplete.

Painted illustration of the Gate of Divine Prowess, the north gate of the Forbidden City, its yellow-roofed tower above a red wall with three arches, reflected in the moat

Culture

Why China Is Red

If you have ever stood on the central axis of Beijing on a pale winter morning and looked at the north gate of the Forbidden City, you know the red I mean. It is not the thin, cheerful red of a London bus or a Coke can.

Painted illustration of an archive reading room with stacks of yellowed files, open folders and shelves of archive boxes

People

Frank Dikötter and the History of China

There are historians who write about China from the perspective of leaders and slogans and there are historians who try to write about China from the perspective of the people who had to live through those slogans.

Painted illustration of students gathering with plain banners before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing on 4 May 1919

History

The May Fourth Movement and Modern China

If you stand on the campus of Peking University in early May, when the willow trees around Weiming Lake are heavy and green and students gather in noisy discussion groups that seem to never end, you may notice a modest stone marker that does not commemorate an emperor or a victorious general.

Painted illustration of Chongqing East Railway Station, its long flat canopy with a warm wooden underside held up by white tree-like columns with lattice tops, seen from the approach road

Places

Chongqing East and the Lines Still to Come

Chongqing has never been a simple city to move through. It is a place of ridges and gorges, rivers and bridges, stacked neighborhoods and tunnels carved through stone.