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

318 dispatches found

September 2026

Painted illustration of the Nine-Storey Pavilion set against the cave-pocked cliff of the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang

Culture

The Library in the Sand at Dunhuang

In 1900 a caretaker at a half forgotten Buddhist cave complex in the Gobi Desert chipped through a sealed wall and found a library that had not been opened for nine centuries.

Painted illustration of Ming-era Jingdezhen, with racks of drying porcelain, saggars and a kiln chimney beside the river and a blue-and-white bowl in front

Culture

Jingdezhen Built a City of Clay and Fire

For centuries, Jingdezhen did something more consequential than make beautiful porcelain.

Painted illustration of giant ultra-high-voltage pylons crossing the desert at dawn beside solar panels and wind turbines

Science & Tech

How China Built a Continental Power Grid

There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of modern China. Many of the country’s greatest sources of energy are found far from the places that consume the most electricity.

Painted illustration of a giant gantry crane straddling a dry dock where a container ship hull is being assembled in a Chinese shipyard

Economy

How China Came to Dominate Shipbuilding

At the start of the 1980s, according to a New Zealand Asia Institute study of the industry’s restructuring, China’s shipyards ranked seventeenth in the world by output and delivered about 300,000 deadweight tons a year.

Painted illustration of a large AI accelerator chip with memory stacks on a circuit board in a server tray, with data-centre racks behind

Science & Tech

Alibaba’s New AI Chip Takes Aim at NVIDIA

On September 22, 2026, at its annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba did something that would have been unthinkable for a Chinese online commerce company just a few years ago.

Painted illustration of the Thirteen Factories on the Canton waterfront in the 1830s, a row of pale Western-style buildings above a river crowded with junks and sampans

Places

From Canton to Guangzhou

For more than two thousand years, the city that the world once knew as Canton has stood at one of the great meeting points between China and the sea.

Painted illustration of a banyan-shaded avenue of ochre colonial office buildings on Shamian Island, Canton, in the nineteenth century

History

The Great Foreign Hongs of Imperial China

The history of foreigners in imperial China is not only a history of missionaries, diplomats, explorers, and adventurers.

Painted illustration of Nanking Road in 1930s Shanghai, with a tram, rickshaws and ornate department store towers

Places

Old Shanghai and the International Settlement

Old Shanghai was a city that seemed to have been designed by contradiction.

Painted illustration of the grey-brick Ming city wall of Xi'an at dawn, with the long timber arrow tower standing above its arched gateway

History

The History Behind China’s Fear of Chaos

To understand modern China, it helps to begin with a word that appears constantly in Chinese political language but is easy for outsiders to misunderstand: chaos.

Painted illustration of a small grey quadcopter drone hovering over misty green rice terraces at dawn

Science & Tech

DJI and the Machine in the Sky

There is a moment, now so familiar that it barely seems remarkable, when a small machine rises from the ground and suddenly the landscape changes. A construction site becomes a three dimensional model.

Painted illustration of West Lake in Hangzhou with the willow-lined Bai Causeway and the slender Baochu Pagoda on its wooded hill

Places

Hangzhou Between West Lake and AI Labs

There are cities that advertise their arrival in the future.

Painted illustration of a red sandstone European-style hall on Huawei's Ox Horn campus in Dongguan, with a small red tram passing

Places

Huawei’s European Dreamscape

There is something deeply disorienting about Huawei’s vast research campus in southern China. Technology companies usually want their buildings to look like the future.