2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
"If we don't use this year to think hard — above all by examining the May Fourth Movement, the Paris Peace Conference and China-U.S. relations together, in detail — we really won't work our way out of the tangle we're in now, a knot that can't be cut and won't come undone."
Liberal critic, lyrical philosopher, cosmopolitan critic — Lin Yutang was all three at once
He grew a bathtub of rice, but “hopes it won’t be rice in its next life.” He is an internet celebrity, and doesn’t much like being one.
Whether you pay attention to a crowd of people talking nonsense is your business. Whether you can see what they say at all is not.
Globalized taste has long been unavoidable. But the speed at which information travels still decides things — as noted earlier, it shapes desire more forcefully than ever.
Or make some use of that "creative urge with nowhere to go."
The public days run from the 26th to the 29th, but most of the shows stay up through the end of the season.
Next to the new video, gaming and news subscriptions, the real highlight turned out to be the credit card
A century-old mansion, a robot, groundbreaking artworks from decades ago…
How to work, how to be a writer, how to spend a career, how not to cheat, how to be serious, how not to be spiteful, how to hold on to basic professional integrity and a moral sense. That's what needs talking about. It's very basic stuff, and nobody thinks it's worth discussing anymore.
In the zero-sum stock market, someone always eats the losses when a bubble bursts. This time it isn't the people who blew it up.
"This Russian aristocratic girl, the product of a European education, could feel the inner world of every native Russian — every country person."
For 30 years, Yu Hong's canvases have refracted the shifting conditions of her time.
Our survey found that 54% of people steer clear of companies that demand 996 when they job hunt.
Tech's ruling dynasties keep changing; the laws that regulate them are stuck decades in the past.
From caring passionately about society to growing ever more “selfish” — how did Yang Zhao come to change?
Fans have become the thing a star's survival depends on. Where does their power come from, and what produced this kind of competition?
Right now, the retrofit alone can cost as much as 2% of the aircraft's value.
Controlling a whole market on merit can be tolerated, and taking most of an industry's profit isn't much of a problem either. The trouble starts when a company uses its monopoly to decide who may use a piece of infrastructure.
"Vinyl, as a medium, is a way of digging for music. And the fun of it is that I found the music, but you can't take it away from me."
A word like "history" usually reaches us wrapped in grand narrative. We would rather work from interviews at the smallest scale, and sort out what we can.
Turkey was once the Islamic world's beacon of secularization and modernization. Is it now heading for a defeat for modernity?
QDaily's editor-in-chief picks for the week.
One idea from the conversation: Japanese society keeps closing in on itself. Young people won't go abroad, to study or to work, and are content where they are. They think they are the different ones — a dangerous thought.
We're recommending some books, and through them, hoping to see what China and India share and where they differ.
"Victor Hugo used to get furious at trees, because they could live to be 300 years old. I'm a bit like that."
He is now an angel investor
The spread of digital photography left Ni Liang feeling that "words are faint, images weightless." Printing photographs into books is how he fights back — and the "blue ocean" he is betting will turn into a business.
"Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the scope for error." — George Soros
For 40 years she has played other women — or, more precisely, different “images of women.” Many people read that work as a vanguard of feminism, even as the foundation of “male gaze” theory.
"The courtyard has all these rooftops you can climb onto — just like the opening credits of In the Heat of the Sun."
An aging society is coming. What does it mean to face it squarely, and how do we do that?
Globalization is under fire. How are photographers thinking about what it has done to human civilization and contemporary life?
Japan's bubble burst, its economy stalled, its population aged, more people swore off marriage, the nuclear family came apart… A cascade of social problems has left people overwhelmed, and the troubles facing the frontrunner look like the troubles waiting for China. Is that really the case?
Internet friendship isn't just the online edition of offline friendship. It has grown a system of its own.
For a writer, the freest moment is the moment there are no boundaries in your head.
New foods catering to the health trend keep appearing, and behind every naming dispute lies a clear commercial motive.
An exhibition at Modern Art Base tells that history. We also talked about fabric with Zandra Rhodes, the only artist and designer in the show who is still alive.
The jokes are hard to make, and so is the atmosphere.
A utilitarian view of education—and of social progress generally—is certainly one big cause, but the decay of humanities education itself matters just as much.
Designer Chen Min and some of his thinking.
MWC was down to three dedicated phone-company booths. Plenty of new technology on display, but nobody yet knows what will bring consumers back.
"Publishing cannot stand apart from the currents of society. It should watch social problems constantly, and then focus on how to improve and solve them."
"How do we keep that passion alive in people? How do we keep their lives and minds vibrant, instead of extinguishing them?"
People often say travel is a matter of "seeing is believing." Is that really true? Why does travel hide more from us than it shows us — and why is the hidden part the more essential one?
This week's picks from QDaily's editor-in-chief.
"Who really knows what is the most fitting way to think about victims? What can we do for them, and what can we do to them?"
Shared kitchens supply restaurant space — processing space, really — built for delivery. Beyond the real estate, the services they sell aren't worth much yet.
It's not just *The Catcher in the Rye* — the theme of "youth" that Salinger worked over has run on through more than half a century of pop culture, in one variation after another.
"If you see maggots, write the maggots. If you see lividity, write the lividity."
Reporting from MWC
Worthless used cars are undermining the sales channel the auto industry depends on
His name still gives him an edge others don't have, but reality demands he be pragmatic.
The Oscars have never billed themselves as art, and they keep their distance from commercial films. What they try to do is define American values and vouch for them — and that core is now fading.
“Hong Kong Street Life” is a QDaily column by outside contributors, devoted to setting down, as quickly as it can, whatever sketches it can manage of a place that is changing fast.
Twenty years of Joyo Amazon
A handbook of consumerist jargon — it’s all on the test.
“Archiving Eden shows viewers another way of looking at nature, and it draws in people who know nothing about seed banks. If seed banks stopped working, the plants we live on would disappear, the animals would disappear, and in the end we would disappear too.”
Boeing sees a market opening up, but its $15 billion bet lands in an uncertain time.
Only when we place the Meiji Restoration inside East Asia's situation since the West arrived, and inside the history of world civilization, can we see both its great significance and its fundamental shortcomings in full.
What Gao Lu does comes out of passion, and is hard to replicate.
Value for money and hit products — Xiaomi is trying to go back to what it was at the start.
"Power cannot defeat justice, and no sword can sever thought."
Fifty years in the business, and Lee Clow stuck to one test for an idea: is it simple enough to print on a T-shirt?
Conservatism is not necessarily bad. What should worry us are the inhumane acts now carried out in its name
QDaily's editor-in-chief picks this week's highlights for you.
A world without GPS is hard to imagine today.
Trip numbers and spending both grew in single digits for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis.
Revival director Baayork Lee told QDaily what she remembers.
Watching, recording, sorting, making, without stopping — all of it comes naturally.
Chinese New Year.
This interview runs in two parts. This is the second, mainly about nationalism, the transformation of Arab states, and Professor Eugene Rogan's intellectual formation and life.
It begins with a closely observed report
This interview runs in two parts. This is the first, mainly about World War I and the Ottoman Empire.
Forget the buzzword "small and beautiful" — freedom and creativity are the things that actually shine.
Understanding Gorbachev and his era is essential to understanding how Russia changed afterward.
QDaily's editors' picks for the week.
At a time like this, we especially need to value the voices of intellectuals.
Six senior vice presidents have left since Cook took over.
📱 We can ride a spaceship to the moon, but we can't explore the world hidden inside a phone. Unless it's in a game.
Games shine a light on reality.
The only consolation is that our lives are so rich we're confident we could expand the Chinese edition of *The Dictionary of Human Stupidity* until it's as thick as Webster's.
Digital advertising can be counted down to the last cent, but nobody has settled on what works best.
"Hong Kong Streets" is a QDaily contributors' column that sets out to sketch, as quickly and as fully as it can, a place that is changing fast.
It's the Lunar New Year — just in case you need this.
QDaily's editors pick the best of the week.
Constantly changing policy is also changing what people expect of the future.
In the great wave of higher-education expansion, the devaluation of the diploma is nothing new to us.
“Fight absurdity with facts.”
How many of these have you mastered?
This is Chengdu as the historian Wang Di sees it. He has been a harsh critic of the expansion of modern state power, always looking at problems from the side of the weak, and at history from the bottom of society.
"[The new economy's] biggest driver was the WTO, and the second was the internet."
And the decline will continue into the first quarter of this year.
From educating the masses to amusing them to death, from the centerpiece of the living room to a point of attention in the palm of your hand — television drama is cultural change, condensed.
"Conservatism has now arrived in China. The moment matters — not only for China but for the world, because it may help change the fate of this great Eastern power."
Developers and hotel brands are betting that in a world where the outlook keeps getting murkier and young people are broadly broke, a tiny few will keep getting richer.
Facebook and Tencent had the last laugh, but far more than those two companies shaped how you socialize online today.
"Three-quarters of a century after fascism was defeated, thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new war of civilizations has begun."
Every date given here for a country crossing $10,000 has been adjusted for inflation, to the equivalent of $10,000 in 2018 dollars.
“Destressing” remixed with “lifestyle”: a contemporary hybrid philosophy — or mysticism.