Huaxia Click

Latest dispatches · page 13 of 14

Painted illustration of pairs of stone elephants and camels lining the Sacred Way of the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum in autumn

History

Why Hongwu and Yongle Are Era Names

English language history habitually calls Ming rulers the Hongwu Emperor and the Yongle Emperor. The phrasing sounds like a surname and a given name, or like a regnal style in the European sense. It is neither.

16 min read

Painted illustration of new electric cars driving up the ramp of a huge car-carrier ship at a Chinese port at dawn

Economy

BYD Turned Batteries Into the World’s EV Contender

For most of the electric car era outside China, the story was told as Tesla versus everyone else. Tesla set the aspirational template: software heavy, battery hungry, vertically ambitious, and culturally loud.

12 min read

Painted illustration of a family on a beach watching a small camera drone hover above the sand

Economy

DJI Made Consumer Drones a Chinese Industry

Twenty years ago a ready to fly camera drone was a curiosity for specialist hobbyists. Today it is a mass market appliance, and for most of the world that appliance was designed in Shenzhen.

13 min read

Painted illustration of a drought-stricken Huai river village in the 1340s with a small monastery on a hill and a lone monk on the road

People

The Peasant Who Built the Ming Dynasty

Zhu Yuanzhang, remembered as the Hongwu Emperor and Ming Taizu, ruled China from 1368 to 1398 as the founding sovereign of the Ming dynasty.

11 min read

Painted illustration of the Yuan court's carts and horsemen leaving the earth walls of Dadu at dawn in 1368

History

Why the Ming Replaced a Failing Yuan

The Ming did not appear because a Chinese essence suddenly woke up and expelled Mongol strangers.

10 min read

Painted illustration of temple roofs overlooking a north China town in the 1890s with a Gothic mission church rising among the houses

Culture

Foreign Devil Talk Was China’s Countervailing Fear

Western Yellow Peril stories cast China as an organised threat to white civilisation. Chinese “foreign devil” language ran the insult the other way.

11 min read

Painted illustration of Limehouse Causeway in London's East End on a foggy morning around 1913

Culture

Fu Manchu Taught Westerners to Fear China

Sax Rohmer did not invent Western fear of China. He packaged it.

12 min read

Painted illustration of a torn-up railway line and fallen telegraph poles on the North China plain in 1900

History

The Two Faces of the Boxer Rebellion

The Boxer Rebellion is too often told as a single picture: fists raised against churches, diplomats trapped behind Legation walls, and a multinational rescue column marching on Peking. That picture is not false.

16 min read

Painted illustration of a grey foreign gunboat anchored off a Yangtze treaty-port bund in the 1920s among junks and sampans

History

What the Century of Humiliation Really Means

The phrase “century of humiliation” is often treated in Western commentary as a mood: a permanent grievance, a psychological wound, a slogan that explains every Chinese diplomatic reflex.

16 min read

Painted illustration of the three-arched stone Baliqiao bridge east of Peking in 1860, with British and French troops on the bank after the battle

History

The Second Opium War Reaches Peking

Western memory of the Opium Wars often stops at Canton factories, opium chests, and a few coastal bombardments. Chinese memory does not.

11 min read

Painted illustration of a camel caravan crossing green steppe towards the walled Yuan summer capital of Shangdu

History

The Yuan Dynasty Was China’s First Global Century

Western textbooks still treat the Yuan as a foreign interruption: Mongols rode in, Chinese civilisation paused, Ming restored the script. That story flatters a tidy national timeline and misses what actually happened.

12 min read

Painted illustration of a Hefei quantum lab with a gold-plated superconducting dilution refrigerator beside an optical table for a photonic quantum machine

Science & Tech

China’s Two-Track Race for Quantum Computers

Chinese quantum research has become one of the country’s most disciplined scientific construction projects.

6 min read

Painted illustration of a factory quality lab where a measuring machine checks a machined part beside trays of identical components

Economy

Quality Is Where Chinese Innovation Actually Lives

Chinese industrial power is often narrated as speed, scale, or cost. Those matter. The quieter foundation is quality control stretched across entire supply chains.

6 min read

Painted still life of an opened smartphone and its mainboard with small memory chips, tweezers and a silicon wafer

Science & Tech

CXMT Has Reached the Flagship Tier

Chinese smartphone makers are putting domestically made memory into machines that used to reserve that slot for imports alone.

6 min read

Painted illustration of a long white battery gigafactory at the head of a Fujian bay with oyster rafts and green hills

Economy

China Did Not Stumble Into Battery Dominance

Western commentary on China’s electric vehicle rise still reaches for the same tidy explanation. China assembled other people’s ideas with cheap labour.

8 min read

Painted illustration of a half-ruined walled town and mosque in the loess hills of Gansu in the 1870s above the Yellow River

History

The Dungan Revolt Belongs Beside the Taiping

If the Taiping Rebellion is the nineteenth century Chinese catastrophe that still escapes Western textbooks, the Dungan Revolt is the catastrophe beside the catastrophe.

7 min read

Painted illustration of Qing war junks on the Yangtze off a walled city with smoke rising during the Taiping war

History

The Taiping Rebellion Was Not a Side Story

Western narratives of the nineteenth century still organise themselves around European wars, American expansion, and the slow rise of industrial capitalism.

7 min read

Painted illustration of grain barges passing beneath the three-arched Gongchen Bridge on the Grand Canal at Hangzhou

History

The Grand Canal Was China’s First Network State

Western accounts of Chinese power still reach first for walls, emperors, and armies. Those things mattered. They also miss something quieter and more durable.

8 min read

Quanzhou harbour at dawn with junk ships

Places

When Quanzhou Was the Centre of the World

Long before Shanghai’s skyline and Shenzhen’s factories, a Fujian port city quietly ran the busiest maritime marketplace on Earth, and its story still shapes how China thinks about the sea.

5 min read

Painted illustration of a Shenzhen Bay promenade at dawn with joggers, an electric ferry, a delivery drone and charging cars

Science & Tech

Zhongguo Surprises

For decades, Western commentary has repeatedly predicted that China was approaching the limits of what it could achieve technologically.

12 min read

Painted illustration of a large white lithography machine in the yellow light of a cleanroom with technicians in bunny suits

Science & Tech

China’s Push for Its Own Lithography

For more than a decade, one company has occupied perhaps the most strategically important position in the global semiconductor industry.

12 min read

Painted illustration of a chip designer's desk with monitors showing colourful abstract chip layouts and a layout plot on the wall

Science & Tech

China’s Using AI to Reinvent Chip Design

China’s semiconductor strategy is entering a new phase.

10 min read

Painted illustration of the long underground concourse of Shenzhen Futian railway station with rows of white columns and a polished floor

Places

Shenzhen Futian Station

It does look rather odd when you stand inside Futian Railway Station: an enormous, expensive underground complex in the middle of Shenzhen’s CBD, yet compared with Shenzhen North, relatively few long-distance trains seem to use it.

4 min read

Painted illustration of a gloved hand holding a clear glass chip-packaging panel with a fine copper grid in a cleanroom

Science & Tech

China’s First Glass Chip Packaging

Glass seems an unlikely material for a computer chip. It is best known for windows, bottles and screens, and ordinary glass barely conducts electricity.

4 min read