Science & Tech
The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze
China does not build small.
17 min read
Latest dispatches · page 12 of 14
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Science & Tech
China’s Private Rockets Bet on Methane and Reuse
China’s private launch sector opened with a 2014 State Council investment note, took its first orbital flight in July 2019 with i-Space, won the global methane-to-orbit race with LandSpace’s Zhuque-2 in July 2023, and is now closing in on booster recovery while state-backed constellations drive demand.
17 min read
Places
How Chongqing Became a Province-Sized City
Chongqing is often introduced with a number that sounds impossible: more than thirty million people, an area the size of Austria, larger than many countries, skylines that look like science fiction layered onto cliffs.
16 min read
Economy
Why China Tops the Container Port Rankings
Open a ranking of the world’s busiest container ports and the pattern is hard to miss. Shanghai sits at the top. Ningbo-Zhoushan, Shenzhen, Qingdao, Guangzhou and Tianjin fill much of the rest of the upper table.
16 min read
Places
How Chengdu Became a Hub Without a Seaport
The standard story of China’s economic rise begins at the coast. Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta grew as workshops for Hong Kong capital. Shanghai rebuilt itself as a trading and financial gateway.
16 min read
Places
How Dongguan Became a Manufacturing City
Dongguan sits on the eastern bank of the Pearl River Delta, between Guangzhou to the north and Shenzhen to the south. Before reform it was a Guangdong agricultural county of paddies, orchards and fishing villages.
16 min read
People
Wu Jing and the Wolf Warrior Legacy
In the mid 2010s Chinese cinemas were already crowded with imported franchises and domestic comedies.
15 min read
Culture
How Ne Zha Remade Chinese Animation
Chinese cinema has produced many expensive spectacles. Few have changed what audiences expect from a Chinese cartoon. The Ne Zha films did.
15 min read
Economy
How China Came to Export Its Excess Capacity
For two decades China has repeatedly built more industrial plant than its own households and builders could absorb in a normal year.
16 min read
Economy
Baowu and the Making of China’s Steel Industry
China Baowu Steel Group made about 125 million tonnes of crude steel in 2025. That was enough to keep it first in the World Steel Association’s company ranking, roughly twice the tonnage of ArcelorMittal in second place.
15 min read
Economy
How China Came to Dominate Rare Earth Magnets
When Western officials talk about rare earths, they often begin with mines and maps. China digs a large share of the world’s rare earth ore.
15 min read
People
Taiwan and the People It Produced
Taiwan is a small island. That sentence is so often used as a preface to a threat, or to a miracle, that it has almost stopped meaning anything. It is still the right place to start.
11 min read
Places
China Built a New Kind of City
Western visitors often meet a Chinese city as a skyline: glass, towers, a river, a lot of light. That is the postcard. It is not the phenomenon.
13 min read
History
The Great Leap and Mao’s Cultural Revolution
Western accounts often fold the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution into one blur: Mao, chaos, and a great many deaths. That shorthand hides what actually happened.
14 min read
Economy
China Built the World’s Train Set
Stand on a Fuxing platform at dawn and the country feels engineered. Stainless noses, blue belts, departure boards that treat three hundred kilometres an hour as ordinary.
14 min read
Science & Tech
China Already Owns the Scale of Science
Beijing did not sneak up the league tables. It industrialised science: patents, STEM degrees, papers and now PPP research spend. The West is still arguing about whether the scoreboard is fair. Scale is settled.
15 min read
Economy
Why China Moved Up the Value Chain
For two decades the dominant Western story about Chinese manufacturing was a story about the middle of the smile curve. Foreign brands kept design, software and marketing.
13 min read
Economy
Foxconn and TSMC Built the Electronics Age
Open an iPhone and you meet a geography lesson disguised as consumer electronics. The branded logic silicon was almost certainly fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
13 min read
History
Plague and the Fall of Yuan China
The mid fourteenth century crisis that Europeans call the Black Death had a Chinese chapter that is harder to name and impossible to ignore.
10 min read
People
Jensen Huang and Ren Zhengfei’s Rival AI Empires
Huawei and Nvidia are now the two names that define the AI silicon contest on either side of the US China technology wall.
10 min read
Science & Tech
Huawei’s UnifiedBus Bet on Giant Clusters
Huawei is not pretending the United States has restored its access to the most advanced chipmaking tools. It is trying to change the unit of competition.
10 min read
People
Sax Rohmer and the Making of Fu Manchu
Sax Rohmer was the trading name of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, an English popular novelist who made Yellow Peril pulp into an international brand and never escaped the shadow of his own invention.
11 min read
History
The Red Turban Uprising Broke Yuan Rule
The Red Turban uprising was not one tidy army with one programme.
11 min read
Culture
Christopher Lee’s Cold War Fu Manchu
Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu was already half a century old when Christopher Lee put on the makeup.
13 min read
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