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Every Huaxia Click dispatch, newest first. Find a story by topic or search the complete collection.

59 dispatches found

October 2026

Painting of Su Song's water-driven astronomical clock tower with its armillary sphere in Kaifeng, 1092

Science & Tech

The Water Clock of Kaifeng, 1092, and the Engineer Who Designed It

The Tower That Should Not Have Existed In the late spring of 1092, in the imperial capital of the Northern Song dynasty, an enormous tower of carved wood, bronze, and gold-leafed tile was raised on the eastern flank of the palace precinct at Kaifeng.

Painting of researchers working on laptops in a stone-walled European university computer lab

Science & Tech

Open Source Chinese AI in the West

For three quarters of a century the centre of gravity in computing research was a small constellation of American universities and American firms.

Painting of engineering postgraduates working with circuit boards and robot arms in a Beijing university lab

Science & Tech

How Many STEM Grads China Produces

On a Monday morning in late September 2026, in a fourth-floor lab on the Tsinghua University campus in north-west Beijing, a young Chinese postgraduate in a white coat pipetted a clear solution into a small vial.

Painting of labourers filling bamboo baskets with stones beside the Dujiangyan levee and rope bridge on the Min River

Science & Tech

The Dujiangyan Irrigation System Shaped Sichuan

On a bend of the Min River) about an hour outside Chengdu, a low concrete and stone dike angles into the current, dividing the river cleanly in two. There is no dam. The water does not back up behind it.

Painting of ground crew loading relief supplies into a grey Y-20 transport aircraft on an airfield

Science & Tech

The Y-20 Fleet Is Still Mostly Civilian

When a Y-20 took off from Tianjin on 13 March 2020, bound for Rome with nine tonnes of masks and ventilators, it was the largest Chinese-built aircraft to land in Europe since a 1960s-era Xian H-6 bomber diverted to a Soviet airfield.

Painting of technicians in lab coats working among long rows of DNA sequencers in a Shenzhen genome centre

Science & Tech

BGI Built a Genome Factory and Got Famous

BGI — the Beijing Genomics Institute — was the world’s largest genome sequencing centre for most of the 2010s, with annual capacity of more than 100,000 whole human genomes and a project portfolio including the International HapMap Project, the 1000 Genomes Project, and the Earth BioGenome Project.

Painting of Han scholars watching a lodestone spoon point south on a bronze diviner's board

Science & Tech

The Compass Did Not Point North at First

The Chinese compass was not a navigation instrument for the first thousand years of its existence.

Painting of Bi Sheng setting clay movable type in an iron frame in a Song printing workshop

Science & Tech

Bi Sheng Beat Gutenberg by Centuries

Bi Sheng — a Northern Song artisan working in Bianjing — invented the world’s first movable-type printing press around 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg’s 1450 metal press.

Painting of the FAST radio telescope dish with its cable-suspended receiver among misty karst hills in Guizhou

Science & Tech

China Built the World’s Biggest Telescope on Purpose

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope — FAST, nicknamed Tianyan — sits in a natural karst basin in Guizhou, its 4,450-panel dish covering an area the size of thirty football fields.

Hand-painted watercolour illustration of a robotics test courtyard on the edge of Hangzhou in pale morning haze, with white humanoid robots walking along a stone path, small engineers watching, a Jiangnan-style workshop hall, and a red-and-gold pavilion hung with red lanterns before misty hills

Science & Tech

China Teaches Its Robots to Walk

On 19 August 2026 Unitree Robotics began trading on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the first company built around humanoid robots to list on China’s mainland exchanges.

Hand-painted illustration of a Chinese satellite tracking station in pale morning haze, with large white parabolic dishes on conical pedestals among highland scrub and distant soft mountains, and a small red-and-gold visitor pavilion near the compound gate

Science & Tech

China Built Its Own Compass

On 31 July 2020 China declared its third-generation BeiDou Navigation Satellite System open for global service.

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.