Yantai: Three Romantic Projects and a District That's Supposedly Being Remade
Architects and artists have stepped into an old-city renovation project, but everything about it looks surprisingly piecemeal.
QDaily in English
2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
IKEA Has Been Talking About Selling Beyond Its Stores for Two Years. Why Is It Still So Slow?
IKEA needs to expand its channels and go out to find more customers. It doesn't seem to know where to look, or how to sell to them. Many of its ideas are still stuck at "plan" and "preparation."
Looked Up To and Forgotten: 20 Years of Jifeng, a Private Bookstore
"So many things happen, one hot topic after another, one round of sighing after another. Bigger things than this have already happened, shocked us, angered us, been mourned, and then vanished from our lives and our conversations."
Alibaba and Tencent Reported Earnings: 10 Charts on What Has Changed at the Two Companies That Control the Chinese Internet
The monopoly keeps getting more concentrated
She Built an Online Used-Bookstore. Can It Last? | 100 Entrepreneurs
Do you have books on your shelf that you flipped through once and never opened again? The used-bookstore Duozhuayu wants to buy them from you
Love Isn't Easy When Everyone Has Their Phone: 9 New Words for Dating Now
We want to tell you about the 9 “new normals” of how young people date today.
Werewolf Made Board Games Popular Again. So Why Can't the Business Take Off in China?
Ten years in, the trade hasn't grown the way its operators expected — and not even a hit could change that.
Now that KFC and McDonald's have “gone Chinese,” how much uglier will their fight get?
“Going Chinese” is nothing like what people usually mean by “localization.” In short, both chains are now Chinese companies. The people who decide what happens in the China market no longer sit in the United States. They sit in China.
JD.com Has Posted Another Loss — 7 Charts on Why It's So Hard for Its E-Commerce Business to Make Money
In the end, it comes down to whether users have built a shopping habit on JD.com
Etam, the 100-Year-Old French Womenswear Brand, Has Delisted — It Fell Twice in the Same Place
Etam could have learned from what went wrong in Europe. Instead it made nearly all the same mistakes in China. In the end, China only bought the company a few more years.
Tucked Down a Shanghai Lane, 85 Kinds of Hot Sauce — and an Owner Who Wants to Spread the Addiction
Both people who can't live without chili and people who say "I don't really eat spicy food, but I can try" are welcome inside.
His Second Animated Film Flopped Too. What Is Wrong With Wang Wei and Light Chaser Animation?
He is an investor, a creator, an operator, an entrepreneur — why hasn't that pile of roles added up to one good animated film?
Tencent's Game Platform Is Rising to Threaten Steam. So What Is Its Biggest Weak Spot?
To take a slice of the same pie as Steam, Tencent's WeGame is running risks as big as the opportunity.
Remember the “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” Tote? Here’s the 30-Year Story of the Woman Behind It
Anya Hindmarch calls herself a “Thatcher’s girl.” She has also done very well out of social media.
Does an Ideal City Really Exist? The Space We Live In May Be Shaping Us | Ideal City ③
We talked with the architect Tang Keyang about the ideal city, urbanization, “alone together,” and how he himself perceives and understands different cities.
Marriott Has Handed Alibaba the Job of Finding New Guests. Whatever Happened to Going It Alone?
In the end, it all comes down to finding new customers more efficiently.
What a Giant! How Do Those Huge, Striking Public Artworks Get Made?
This Australian company, UAP, has 24 years in the business, and it has lived through most of the changes in the public art market.
Two Years After Google Became Alphabet, These 10 Numbers Are Its Report Card
Those bets on the future haven't paid off yet.
Alibaba and Meituan Are Both Opening Fresh-Food Supermarkets Offline. In the End It's Still an Online Business
After several failed attempts, e-commerce companies are using physical stores to teach people the habit of buying fresh food online.
WeChat and Alipay Just Ran Their Biggest Cashless Day Campaigns Ever. Why Are They Both So Anxious?
Offline retail is still the most active payment setting in everyday life. WeChat and Alipay both have to win engagement there first, before anything else becomes possible.
Coke Zero Is Being Pulled From Shelves. Why Kill a Brand With So Many Fans?
People mostly choose cola because they love the taste, not because they expect a healthy drink. Sugar-free cola only keeps the guilt to a minimum.
Six Years to Restore One Century-Old Shanghai Building: What Does That Take? | 100 People With Ideas
The architect has a joke of his own: "Every great project comes with a pile of grubby compromises."
From Back-Alley Stalls to Boutique Chains: What's Changing in the Snack Food Market?
Fresher, more fashionable rooms, pricier dishes, addresses closer to office workers, and a push to build chains. But upgrading brings its own problems, and none of them are problems these shops have faced before.
Residents, Newcomers, the Government, Developers: How Do You Think Through Their Tangled Interests? | The Ideal City, Part 2
We talked with urban planning expert Mao Mingrui about city planning, big data, and how he sees the city.
Li Wenxing's Tragedy Points to What's Wrong With How Internet Companies Grow
He probably won't be the last one either.
The World's Richest Man and China's Richest Man Are Both Changing — 12 Charts on the Story Behind the Shuffle
Gates is still the richest man
Architect Balkrishna Doshi Has Designed Buildings for India for More Than 60 Years. He's Also Been Defining What a Good Life Means for the Country
"He never repeated a design — every project was an experiment"
Why Did a Company Like TOTO Emerge in Japan? | QDaily Business History
TOTO turns 100 this year, and we want to trace how the Japanese pursuit of cleanliness and care for one's own body got to where it is today, how the toilet holds a concentrated form of Japanese culture, and what part commercial companies played in it.
Video Platforms Are Inventing New Ad Slots Faster Than Ever, and Leaving Ad Agencies and Viewers Behind
Ads you can't skip even after paying for a VIP membership — shot by the show's own crew rather than an ad agency, acted by "characters" from the show, with the idea usually tied to the plot.
What's Different About China's New High-Speed Trains? We Went and Rode Them
The details inside the cabin have improved a little, but the biggest change is probably the speed increase that starts on October 1.
"Is This the Golden Age for New Directors?" The People Trying to Make Good Films Have No Answer — But Plenty to Say
Why they ended up on this road, and why they are willing to give it their time.
Esports Became the Theme of ChinaJoy 2017. Where Did All These Companies' Enthusiasm Come From?
And where will it take the gaming industry?
Internet Gyms Are Back. Can They Last This Time?
This is no longer Didi-style "disruption"
The Architect Who Studies "Wild Architecture" Wants You to See Another World | 100 People With Ideas
"What you saw is what matters — not what I said"
Samsung Is Briefly the World's Most Profitable Company, Because in the Phone Business the Money No Longer Comes From Selling Phones
Samsung's profit machine overtook Apple's in the second quarter that just ended.
Starbucks wants to run China itself — why now, and what does it mean?
More control for Starbucks also means more risk.
Colette Built a Concept Store No One Could Copy. What Did It Do Every Day for 20 Years?
People saw it as “the end of an era.”
Musk and Zuckerberg Got Into a Fight Over AI. What They Said — and What They Left Unsaid
All of these men are in fact AI's supporters, and none of them care how many jobs it takes away.
Xu Zhiyuan on Liang Qichao in Hong Kong: "This Is What I Can Do Right Now, and I'm Very Sorry"
He said it during a conversation with the novelist Lu Nei — but the best part of the event was the audience Q&A.
How Should We Really Count the Cost of a City? | The Ideal City ①
We will publish three articles on how, under the vision of an “ideal city,” we should face the many problems of cities — and how we should think about them.
What's It Like to Own 780,000 Magazines? Put It This Way: They Cover Japan's Past 150 Years
We talked to a staff member who has worked there for 31 years. He'll tell you the library's history.
An Illustrator in Her Twenties Has Painted More Than 100 of Hong Kong's Old Shops — and Found the City's Warmth
Painting is only a medium. What she really wants to record are the people.
Eight Years of Making Indie Games: How This Company Found Its Own Way to Survive
Eight years into making indie games, publishing has become Coconut Island's new business for staying alive.
More Than 10 Million People Do Gig Work for Internet Companies. What Is Their Life Actually Like?
They find work on their phones, work with their phones, relax on their phones, and are managed by their phones. This is the story of more than 30 food-delivery riders, same-city couriers, bike-share street crews and cleaners.
"This Festival's Surprises Are Chinese-Language Cinema's Surprises": What Its Founder Has Been Through in 11 Years
Eleven years. It started out of sheer enthusiasm; it became an effort to open up an unknown market.
From 1983 On: the Toward the Future Series as Enlightenment, and the Future of Modern China | China in Bestsellers ⑩
We look back at the stories behind these legendary books — but the bigger question is why we ended up with the society we have today. What have we lived through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?
To Sell Cheese and Butter in China, This Dairy Company Is Training Chefs. Is That Going to Work?
A multinational's push to take the Chinese market — though the results are hard to measure. For Fonterra, the bigger market ahead and the bigger challenge are both in people's shopping carts.
With fewer startups, the exhibits at Xi'an's Maker Faire are no longer practical — but they're more imaginative
Parent-child activities, hand-painted driverless cars, robots you assemble yourself — there were plenty of hands-on projects that were "useless but fun."
Sanlian's New Knowledge Is on Hiatus: How Does a Content Product Born at the Wrong Time Stay Alive?
Does making a print magazine have to mean scraping by?
Why Golden Jaguar Went Under, and What Happened to the Buffet Business
"Golden Jaguar was fast food stretched out. It sold the symbol of comfort food, and what you got in the end was a very full stomach." These days, refinement is the point of eating.
Before Jobs Knew About It: How Apple Secretly Built the iPhone — a New Book Tells the Prequel to 'One More Thing'
No, nobody has found Steve Jobs's secret notes yet
An American Wanted to Bring Chinese Literature to the English-Speaking World. So He Built the Only Website for It | 100 People With Ideas
"How do you really get from Chinese content to readers overseas? Along that whole bridge, where exactly is it blocked? How is it blocked, and how do you clear it? I think I'm slowly working out a more precise idea of my own — how to actually solve this problem."
On Freedom: 20 Books Worth Reading, and Worth Remembering
It's a lot — take your time.
Korean Coffee Chains Failed Across the Board in China. What Can China's Great-Leap-Forward Coffee Shops Learn From Them?
A textbook case of what goes wrong when investors rush headlong into the Chinese market.
Take a Look at This Year's Work From Britain's Most-Watched Creative Graduates
Imagination is always captivating.
Sailor Moon Has Been Fighting for 25 Years. What's Keeping It Alive?
“In the name of the moon, I'll punish you” carries a whole generation's childhood — the perfect fusion of girlish dreams and heroic fantasy.
Two Men Who Have Made Children's Books Together for More Than 30 Years, on What It Means to Create for Children
"What matters is not teaching children how to read, but training them to be good observers who can understand everything beautiful in the world," says Roderick Hunt.
We Asked “Liushen Leilei” 80 Questions. He Talked About Tang Poetry, Jin Yong, and This Parallel World
This official-account writer knows about “the red line that moves.” He says, “You need a switch.”
Happy Camp Redefined What "Variety" and "Entertainment" Meant in Mainland China. Twenty Years On, Those Two Ideas Have Remade the Show
This is a history of the television business handing audiences happiness. It is also a history of happiness being driven out.
How Do You Make a Building Part of Its Surroundings? The Architect of the Shanghai Natural History Museum Has an Answer
A building you remember doesn't have to be aggressive.
Yuval Noah Harari: An Internet-Famous Author's 24 Hours in Shanghai | China Through Its Bestsellers
*Homo Deus* and *Sapiens* are treated as “tools” for resolving the anxiety people now feel about the big questions.
How to Turn Ordinary Objects into Wild Ideas That 800,000 People Love | 100 People With Ideas
Tatsuya Tanaka says, "I've never had a day when I ran out of inspiration."
Microsoft Just Cut 3,000 More Jobs — 8 Charts on What Headcount Changes Really Mean for Big Companies
One person losing a job is a tragedy. Ten thousand people losing their jobs is…?
A company that got famous on stickers can't live on stickers alone. So what business is it in?
Beyond WeChat sticker battles, cute, snarky, over-the-top stickers may yet find other ways into people's lives.
Will TV Series Eventually Overtake Film? This Well-Worn Question Is Still Interesting
Behind every wave of television's advance on film lie changes in the industry, in talent, and in audiences. In the current wave, one side is rising as the other falls, and faster than before.
Why Do Big IP Dramas Get Slammed So Easily? Because Young Viewers' Basic Test for a Good Show Is "Does It Respect My Intelligence?"
The QDaily Research Lab has 37 findings about how young people watch TV.
The World's Biggest Office-Supplies Superstore Sold Itself. How Did a Stationery Retail Giant Reach Its "Midlife Crisis"?
The paperless office and Amazon both turned into killers of Staples, the company once called a "category killer." And Staples is only the latest example of traditional retail in decline.
Six Months After Taking Over Baidu, Lu Qi Lays Out His Plan to Remake It
Voice assistants moving into home appliances, and an "Android for the auto industry" — this is Lu Qi's plan to remake Baidu, six months into the job
Who Controls the Street? Nike and Adidas Escalate Their Fight Over Streetwear Stores
Each of these stores is a world of its own. They used to be mere distributors; now Adidas and Nike are turning them into battlegrounds.
The ATM Just Turned 50, and the “Death of Cash” Now Threatens This Great Financial Innovation
The “death of cash” is like the 1970s theory that computers would replace paper entirely: “Look around your office — has it gone paperless?”
AI Takes Over the Cameras Watching Our Cities to Prevent Crime — and Makes Orwellian Surveillance Possible | AI: The Key Is People ③
To be safe, you have to give up your privacy. Right or wrong, there is no going back.
Every City Displaces Someone, and Hong Kong's Industrial-Building Artists Don't Know Where to Go Either
"I've almost saved up the down payment / A tiny flat I could just about afford / Or else I'll keep paying cheap rent in an industrial building / And keep traveling, storing up more memories"
In 1981, The Path of Beauty Got China Talking About Freedom, Human Nature and the Value of the Individual | China in Bestsellers ⑨
Can you imagine a time when talking about “beauty” was not allowed?
He says his ideas never run dry, so he turned things like the “unmanned coffee cart” into a business
His latest: testing an unmanned vending vehicle in Hefei.
What Counts as a Smart Way to Protect Wildlife Today? | 100 People With Ideas
Groups like the Shan Shui Conservation Center want to tie nature conservation to the livelihoods of the people who live there. Where is the hard part?
Bike-Sharing Collected $1.8 Billion in a Year. How Did Internet Companies Learn to Blow Bubbles This Fast?
The playbook for spawning a big internet company keeps getting more practiced, but nobody has found a way out yet
A Big Player Has Arrived in Craft Beer: How Will AB InBev Shape China's Newest Market?
AB InBev is grabbing China's craft beer market by taking control of its bars. Relations between local craft brewers and the giant are turning tense.
Helvetica Turns 60: How a Typeface Became Part of Everyday Life
From industrialization to commercial globalization, from the age of metal type to the age of digital typesetting — why has Helvetica stayed alive all this time?
JD.com Is About to Pass Baidu in Market Value — 10 Charts on the Rise and Fall of China's Internet Companies
The term "BAT" has finally stopped working
Ad People at Cannes Are Blind Men Feeling an Elephant — 8 of the Questions They Argued Over Are Worth Your Attention
Maybe it all has to come back to the most basic question: what is creativity, really?
What's it like to make music however you please? We asked the musician behind “Whale Circus”
Li Xingyu's music is gentle, but the word he uses most in conversation is “confrontation.”
How Did Balenciaga Get So Cheeky and So Biting?
A childhood of scarcity shaped how Demna Gvasalia sees the world — and became the "dark side" running through his designs.
The Whole World Worries There Won't Be Good Movies Anymore. People at the Shanghai Film Festival Said So Too, but No One Had an Answer
How did this happen?
Podcast App CastBox Took Few Wrong Turns — Making Money Will Be the Hard Part | 100 Entrepreneurs
Years at big companies like Google gave the founding team its first leg up.
For 20-Odd Years, One Magazine Recorded What Britain's Non-Mainstream Kids Were Into. Now It's Back From the Dead
Oh, The Face, the bible of subculture.
Ikea Could Barely Dent Japan's Furniture Market. How Did a Company Called NITORI Take It? | Market Inventors
It's not just about low prices.
How Do Businesses Cut Corners When It Comes to Getting Your Attention? | QDaily Research Lab
Brands take the position that “this was made just for young people” or “I’m already getting close to young people” — and sometimes you’re just not buying it.
E3 2017 Was Dull and Awkward, But It Still Had to Save Face for the Games Industry
Behind the spectacle, an ongoing existential crisis
The People Teaching China About Alzheimer's Want You to Ask This Too: "If I Get This Disease, Who Will Take Care of Me?"
How hard is it to turn around a society's indifference to a disease that is everywhere? And what should actually be done?
In 1986, a Tolerant Society Let The Ugly Chinaman Be Published, and It Made People Confront Their “Ingrained Flaws” | Bestseller Series 8
On one hand this series revisits the stories behind these legendary books; more important, of course, is the other question: why do we have the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we built up, and how did we get here.
AI Is Being Used to "Custom-Tailor" Prices and Insurance, and Even the Appearance of Fairness Is Gone | AI: It Still Comes Down to People, Part 2
Every industry wants in on artificial intelligence. Along with the gains in efficiency come problems no one has faced before.
Ding Wei, a Singer Who Always Went Her Own Way, Is Back. After More Than a Decade, Does She Still Have That Sound?
Her new album, *Unbound* (《松绑》), comes out on June 23 — nine years later than planned.
Amazon Buys the World's Largest Organic Supermarket. Will Big Companies Make Organic Consumption More Democratic? | How's the Organic Business Doing, Part 3
Organic began as hippies' revolt against the industrial system and capitalism. Then public panic about food pushed it out of the counterculture and into business, but high prices kept it a niche. Has the story reached a turning point?
The Film Industry's Real Trouble Is Just Beginning — IMAX's Bad Numbers Are Only the Tip of the Iceberg
The "technology + giant screen + IP" formula may have gone about as far as it can. Time to think of something else.
He built an audio Bilibili. But Bilibili itself still has no business model — so what becomes of his? | 100 Entrepreneurs
Whether to build a business for ordinary users or a service for the industry — that is still unsettled.
Alibaba Has Changed What It Counts Again — How Do the Biggest Internet Companies Tell Stories With Numbers?
In the end, what story a company can tell well still depends on how the product itself performs.
He's Only Visited Two Countries, But He's Drawn 220 Subway Maps — Including 40 Chinese Cities | 100 People With Ideas
Passion can make even unremarkable design bloom.
50 Years in Fashion, 27 Years Running Her Own Store: It All Comes Down to "Freely Exchanging Ideas"
"Information gets 'burned up' too fast," she says. "By the time things reach the stores, they're already old."
VOGUE and GQ Have "Outsourced" Their Retail Business — Content and E-Commerce Have Never Been This Close
Condé Nast makes the content, Farfetch makes the sales. What could be a more ideal pairing than that?
One Visa Decides the Fate of More Than 300,000 Chinese Students in America. Here Are Two Stories
Luck doesn't favor someone just because she started trying earlier.