Huaxia Click

Latest dispatches · page 6 of 14

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.

18 min read

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.

18 min read

Painting of young workers at plastic injection moulding machines and a sorting table in a small shed in Tucheng in 1974

Economy

How Hon Hai Became Foxconn

On 20 February 1974, in a rented shed in Tucheng, a rough suburb of Taipei whose name means earth city and which American reporters later translated as Dirt City, a twenty-three-year-old shipping clerk started a plastics firm.

22 min read

Painting of a Neolithic Yangshao village of round thatched houses inside a ditch above the Yellow River, with potters painting pottery

History

Origins of China

The idea of China as a single continuous civilisation is both deeply compelling and fundamentally misleading if taken too literally, because what we now call China is not a natural unit that existed from the beginning…

33 min read

Painting of a Ming envoy carrying an edict ashore from a junk to Vietnamese officials at Thang Long

History

Sino-Annam History

For more than two thousand years, what we now call Vietnam lived in China’s shadow and at times inside its borders, and that long entanglement is what the old phrase Sino-Annam history is trying to capture.

24 min read

Painting of Third Front workers building the Panzhihua steelworks in the Jinsha River gorge in 1966

Places

The Cities China Hid in the Mountains

There is a city in Sichuan where the steelworks came before the city itself.

15 min read

Painting of travellers and carts crossing a stone bridge over the moat into a gate of the Kaifeng city wall in the late Qing

Places

City of Eight Dynasties

There is no single building you can point to and call “Kaifeng Gate” today and have that name cover the whole story.

16 min read

Hand-painted illustration of the Beilun container terminal at Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, China, seen from a wooded hillside on a hazy morning, with rows of red gantry cranes along the quay, a container ship berthing, a patchwork of stacked containers and misty islands beyond, and two small walkers on a hill path in the foreground

Economy

Why China Makes Everything and Britain Doesn’t

Walk through any British high street or hospital store room and the same pattern repeats.

23 min read

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.

16 min read

Hand-painted illustration of Qianmen Street in Beijing in pale morning haze, with ornate red-and-gold shopfronts and blank signboards lining the broad pedestrian street and its tram rails, strings of red lanterns overhead, a vintage tram, the painted five-bay archway and the grey Zhengyangmen arrow tower at the far end, and small figures strolling

Economy

How China Built Its Own Brands

In 2014 Huawei became the first Chinese company to appear in Interbrand’s annual list of the world’s 100 best global brands, at 94th place. Twelve years later the picture looks very different.

30 min read

Hand-painted illustration of Lee Byung-chul's birthplace in Uiryeong, South Korea, a traditional tiled-roof hanok compound with a sandy courtyard, a round brick well and persimmon trees heavy with red fruit, set against a wooded hillside in pale autumn morning haze, with a few small visitors

Economy

How Samsung Built the Chaebol Model

Samsung began in 1938 as a small trading shop in Daegu selling dried fish, fruit and noodles.

23 min read

Hand-painted illustration of Jiangnan Shipyard on Changxing Island in Shanghai in pale morning haze, with tall red gantry cranes straddling dry docks, unfinished ship hulls and container ships at the fitting-out quays on the broad Yangtze, and small workers on the quayside

Economy

China’s Shipyards and the Race to Catch Them

In the first half of 2026, more than four-fifths of the merchant-ship tonnage ordered anywhere in the world went to Chinese yards.

22 min read

Hand-painted illustration of the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in Guizhou in pale morning haze, its turquoise twin-legged towers and steel truss deck slung on cables high above a deep green karst gorge and the Beipan River, with a small village and red-roofed houses on the slopes below

Places

The Bridge Over the Earth’s Crack

On 28 September 2025 a four-lane expressway bridge opened across the Huajiang Grand Canyon in Guizhou, in China’s mountainous south-west, with its road deck 625 metres above the Beipan River.

16 min read

Economy

Spain Bets on China as Europe Hardens

On a September evening in Barcelona, a red-and-gold Chinese dragon wound its way through the crowds of La Mercè, the city’s great autumn festival, while acrobats from Shanghai tossed glowing paper lanterns into the air and caught them without ever letting the candles inside tip over.

23 min read

Hand-painted illustration of a Tang-dynasty palace gate complex in pale morning haze, with red pillars, upturned tiled roofs, gilded brackets and small distant figures on a wide ceremonial avenue

History

The Rebellion That Broke Tang

In December 755 a frontier commander named An Lushan turned his army south from Fanyang, near modern Beijing, and marched on the Tang empire’s eastern capital at Luoyang. Within weeks he held the city.

15 min read

History

Luoyang, the Capital That Kept Returning

In the year 547 a minor official named Yang Xuanzhi rode into Luoyang on government business and barely recognised it.

23 min read

Culture

Big Trouble in Little China at Forty

On Wednesday 2 July 1986, 20th Century Fox opened a strange and expensive film in 1,053 American cinemas and watched it sink.

23 min read

History

Why the ‘Yellow Peril’ Took Hold

On 26 September 1895 Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote from his hunting lodge at Rominten to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II.

28 min read

History

Secret War in Shanghai

In July 1940 a young woman calling herself Princess Sumaire stepped off a boat from India and took a suite at the Cathay Hotel on the Bund.

21 min read

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.

17 min read

Painted illustration of wartime Chongqing around 1940, its dense city on sandstone cliffs above the Yangtze with stilt houses, stone stairways, air-raid tunnels and moored junks

People

Rana Mitter and China’s Forgotten War

For most British and American readers, the Second World War in Asia used to be a story about Pearl Harbor, Burma and the atomic bombs, with China as a backdrop where a corrupt government waited for the Americans to win its war.

16 min read

Painted illustration of the EAST superconducting tokamak in Hefei, a tall steel cylinder ringed with access ports and beam lines, inside its experimental hall

Science & Tech

China’s Race to Bottle the Sun

On the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, a large circular pit has been filling up with machinery. In October 2025 engineers lowered a 400-tonne steel base into it.

15 min read

Painted illustration of the Chinese Academy of Sciences headquarters in Beijing in morning light, its green-tiled entrance porch above broad stone steps, with trees framing the forecourt

History

The Academy That Counted

On 1 November 1949, in Beijing, the new government established the Chinese Academy of Sciences and appointed Guo Moruo its president. He was a poet, a playwright, and a historian of ancient scripts.

22 min read

Painting of boats carrying Zhejiang University staff, students and crates of books upstream on the misty Fuchun River in 1937

History

The University That Walked

On the night of 11 November 1937, about two hundred people from National Zhejiang University went down to the Jianggan docks in Hangzhou and got on boats.

22 min read