Huaxia Click

Latest dispatches · page 11 of 14

Search all dispatches

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.

17 min read

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.

19 min read

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.

17 min read

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.

16 min read

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.

23 min read

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.

23 min read

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.

27 min read

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.

23 min read

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.

19 min read

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.

17 min read

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.

20 min read

Painted illustration of the Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai World Financial Center and Shanghai Tower rising beyond the lawns of the Lujiazui Central Green

Places

How Pudong Rose From Shanghai’s Farmland

Stand on the Bund in central Shanghai after dark and look east across the Huangpu River and it is difficult to imagine that the forest of towers on the opposite bank is a relatively recent creation.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a red book, reading glasses and a desk globe turned to East Asia in a London study

People

Martin Jacques and the End of Western Certainty

When Martin Jacques published When China Rules the World in 2009, China was already impossible to ignore.

18 min read

Painted illustration of a white and red passenger train crossing a concrete viaduct over the red-earth savanna on Kenya's standard gauge railway

Economy

China’s Railways Across Africa

Across the African continent, railway tracks stretch through mountains, deserts, crowded cities, agricultural regions and vast open landscapes, carrying passengers and freight between places that were once separated by journeys lasting many hours or even days.

16 min read

Painted illustration of an empty meeting table set for talks, with matching rows of chairs, closed laptops and a teapot

Science & Tech

The Limits of US–China AI Cooperation

A question that refuses to sit still Every few weeks, the same question returns in a slightly different form. The United States and China hold talks on artificial intelligence.

28 min read

Culture

Why Chinese Has Two Official Scripts

A mainland newspaper and a Hong Kong magazine can carry the same news in the same spoken Mandarin, but the printed characters look like two different languages. The mainland page reads 报纸, the Hong Kong page reads 報紙.

18 min read

Painted illustration of a coastal nuclear power station with two domed reactor buildings and a third under construction as a crane lifts its dome

Science & Tech

How China Became the World’s Biggest Nuclear Builder

China runs the largest nuclear construction programme on earth.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a grey J-20 stealth fighter flying over misty green hills in Sichuan at dawn

Science & Tech

How China Built the J-20 Stealth Fighter

The Chengdu J-20 is the fighter aeroplane that changed the shape of air power in Asia.

15 min read

Painted illustration of Yan'an in the 1940s, with the nine-storey pagoda on a loess hill above cave dwellings and the Yan River

History

Red Dawn Over China and the Communist Victory

In February 2026 Bloomsbury published Frank Dikötter’s Red Dawn Over China, a book with a question baked into its subtitle: how communism conquered a quarter of humanity.

16 min read

Painted illustration of Keelung harbour in 1949, ships unloading soldiers and families beneath steep green hills in the drizzle

People

Chiang Kai-shek From the Mainland to Taiwan

Chiang Kai-shek was born in a Zhejiang market town in 1887, while the Qing still governed China, and died in Taipei in 1975 as president of a republic that had lost the mainland a quarter century earlier.

16 min read

Painted illustration of a vast new chip fab under construction in the Arizona desert, long grey buildings beneath low brown mountains

Science & Tech

Three Paths Back to Western Chip Fabrication

The argument of this essay is narrow. The West is rebuilding chip fabrication on its own soil. The build-out is real, partly funded, partly producing, partly still a press release.

15 min read

Painted illustration of a low modernist electronics plant among blossoming orchards in the Santa Clara Valley in the 1960s

Science & Tech

Chip War and the World’s Chokepoints

Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, published by Scribner in 2022, is not a gadget book.

18 min read

Painted illustration of a semiconductor fab building with a curved glass facade on a tree-lined street in Hsinchu Science Park

Science & Tech

How TSMC Came to Underpin the Chip Race

The argument of this essay is narrow and specific.

18 min read

Painted illustration of a tunnel boring machine breaking through into a new metro station under construction

Science & Tech

How Fifty-Four Chinese Cities Built Metros

By the end of 2024 fifty four cities in mainland China were running some form of urban rail transit, according to the Ministry of Transport.

17 min read