Bestselling Author Lin Qingxuan Has Died — You Probably Read His Essays in a School Textbook
Don't overlook how much commercial publishing and marketing did to build his fame.
QDaily in English
2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
British Writer David Szalay: The Subject I Care About Most Is Mortality and Aging
The 2016 Man Booker Prize finalist talks to us about the Europe he carries in his head, his nomadic life, and the human weaknesses he can't escape and works hard to put on the page.
Pensions Are a Global Problem: 7 Questions Worth Asking | 2018 Business Events ⑩
Can the wealth a person creates in 30-odd years of work pay for a life of more than 70 years?
Every E-commerce Site Is Selling a Paid Membership Now. What Are They Really Selling?
Shipping, discounts and streaming entertainment: retailers give up a slice of margin first, then use the membership fee — a sunk cost — to lock in swing customers, manage loyalty and raise purchase frequency
Geneva's Watch Fair Holds Its Last Standalone Edition. What Is the Mystique of a Market Built for Watch Lovers and the World's Richest People?
How to define a luxury watch, the allure and the obstacles of the Chinese market, and the problems the global watch industry shares.
Historian Wang Di's Collected Columns on Everyday Life in Chengdu at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
"Chengdu, like every other city in China, is losing its flavor — its culture growing ever more homogeneous."
Is Consumption Upgrading or Downgrading? 18 Charts on How China Spent in 2018 | Annual QDaily Data
Upgrading and downgrading are happening at the same time — in almost every category.
She Has Drawn for The New Yorker for 40 Years. Why Did Her Line Turn From Gentle to Blunt and Fierce?
The politics she wants to get at, she says, is the kind that runs through culture — because "the anger is there, it's just below the surface."
A Financial Writer Who Hoped to "Provide a Methodology for an Age of Economic Enlightenment," in the Years the Internet Rose | 1999 Memoirs ③
"Does going through so much market turmoil mean that our market is still in a wild, untamed age?"
These 21 Books Are the Year's Best, According to 8 Writers, Editors, and Book Critics | QDaily's Best Books of the Year, Part 4
The second installment of our full fiction list, this time from writers, editors, and book critics: Zhu Yue, Zhang Yiwei, Shuang Xuetao, Chen Yijian, Ha Jin, Liu Wenfei, Ken Liu, and Lu Nei.
Members of a Reading Group That No Longer Exists Talk About Public Space and Activists
"In our twenties, we all thought of ourselves as intellectuals. What we wanted to do was respond to public issues."
How Do We Engage With Public Topics Today? QDaily Asked 4,444 People 22 Questions | 2018 Topics of the Year
Some answers were encouraging. Others we did not see coming.
The Most Eye-Catching Packaging Design of 2018: How It Tells a Product's Story and Enters Our Lives
Watch how packaging changes and you may see what this world has turned into.
Starbucks' 20 Years in China: The Eight Growth Curves It Caught | QDaily Business History
Over 20 years, Starbucks turned its own growth into a China story.
China's Big Cities Fought a "War for Talent" in 2018. What Is a Population Worth to a City? | 2018 Business Events ⑨
Population is falling, labor is scarce, and the old model of urban growth can no longer hold — so bringing in talent has become a new path to growth.
These 21 Books Are the Year's Best, According to 5 Scholars and Translators | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations ③
This is the first installment of our full run of fiction recommendations. The recommenders here are mostly scholars and translators: Dan Hansong, Huang Hong, Yang Ling, Shi Xiaowei and Kong Yalei.
From 2G to 5G: Three Times the Power Over Mobile Internet Changed Hands | QDaily Business History
What exactly is 5G? Everyone seems to have a different answer.
Writer Bai Hua Has Died; His Early-1980s Work Bitter Love Set Off No Small Storm
He was one of the few writers "criticized" after the Cultural Revolution ended
Zhang Dachun Launches *Seeing the Word as It Came* (《见字如来》): Half Character Study, Half Life Story
"I always thought I was fearless, that my ways were wild, that nothing could touch me."
A Man From Shantou in 1999 Beijing, Where the Internet Entrepreneurs Who Longed for Freedom Had Gathered | 1999 Memoirs, Part 2
We interviewed several of the earliest chroniclers of the Chinese internet, hoping to reconstruct that era through them.
After 450 Rounds of Property Controls in a Year, How Has the Bar for Buying a Home in Chinese Cities Changed? | 2018 Business Events ⑧
Two new policies on an average working day — that was Chinese real estate in 2018.
Lu Qingyi Is Wearing Himself Out Selling Four Springs. He Says He Came Into This World Just to Play
Selling a movie, though, is clearly another matter.
A School Vanishes, a Principal Fades Out, and It's as if Nothing Happened | 2018 Stories No. 10
"One more school for migrant workers' children means one less prison in the future."
When German Philosophers Became Apologists for the Nazis | A Brief History of Things
The truth is the reverse: National Socialism emerged precisely as the social function and cultural role philosophy had carried were being sharply weakened.
How to Become a Better Person in 2019? 100 Sincere Suggestions | 100 Big Questions About Life
In this magnum opus, we share some life lessons that go beyond "use your phone less, read more, sleep early, wake up early, exercise more."
33 Nonfiction Books of the Year: When the Facts Change, How Should We Think? | QDaily's Books of the Year, Part 2
The nonfiction list covers a range of subjects across the humanities, science and economics. Once the list is out, we'll follow it with pieces on each subject in turn.
WeChat's Past and Future: 35 Things Zhang Xiaolong Said in a Four-Hour Speech
How WeChat became WeChat, and what WeChat — now that it has mini programs and Moment Video — wants to become next
18 Novels of the Year, Chosen by 11 Expert Readers | QDaily's Annual Book Picks ①
The 11 recommenders are Ha Jin, Ken Liu, Zhu Yue, Lu Nei, Shuang Xuetao, Zhang Yiwei, Shi Xiaowei, Huang Hong, Dan Hansong, Kong Yalei and Chen Yikan.
Yu'e Bao and Consumer Loans Shrank by 754.5 Billion Yuan in a Year. Regulators Have Ended Alipay's Banking Dream
As policy tightens, Alipay is being capped on every front.
A Tour of Okinawa's Small Bookshops: Opening the "Ideal Secondhand Bookstore" Is Genuinely Hard | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round
"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who works in Chinese. A "second round" (nijikai) is the optional gathering office workers move on to after the first bar closes out — a looser setting where people talk more freely.
The Last Show of the "Bent and Straight" Troupe: "The Stories People Share Are Still All True"
Zhong Shi'er, one of the troupe's founders, says she doesn't know how everyone else understands the name "Bent and Straight" — it can mean a person's sexual orientation, since everyone has the right to love, or it can mean the road of a life, which has its bends and its straight stretches.
Old Playbooks Failing, Creativity Scarce: What's New in a Squeezed Ad Industry This Year? | 2018 Marketing Year in Review
As the old playbooks stop working one by one, where is the advertising industry headed?
The Gossip, Recklessness and Freedom of 20 Years Ago Made the China of Today | Memoirs of 1999, Part One
We interviewed several of the earliest chroniclers of the Chinese internet, hoping to reconstruct that era through them.
Businessman, Artist, Opportunist: Takashi Murakami's First Mainland China Show Has Just Closed
From the ten-million-dollar *My Lonesome Cowboy* to a return to the Japanese painting tradition, Takashi Murakami has always moved through the art world wearing labels and costumes.
100 Billion Yuan Is Pouring Into the Long-Term Rental Market Through ABS. How Will That Change the Renting Business?
A financial product has sped up the growth of the rental business — and, with the economy slowing, spurred more borrowing.
Theater director Tian Gebing looks back on his “20 years of confrontation”: theater, he says, is “deliberately setting out to challenge some kind of impossibility”
“These 20 years of experience have taught me that the boundary between people isn't language — it's the distance in aesthetic sensibility that's really impossible to cross.”
Why the Crimean War Was the First Modern Mass War | A Brief History of Things
In the eyes of historians, no earlier war did as much as the Crimean War to shape Britain's identity as a nation.
What You'll Be Eating in 2019 — Every Forecast Says Roughly the Same Thing
2019 will probably bring more probiotics and fewer straws, more hot nitro coffee in cafes, more CBD cocktails in bars.
A book about drug use in the Third Reich set out to offer a new way of seeing Nazi Germany
"In a sense, drugs changed everything and they changed nothing — that's the paradox of history"
56.575 Billion Yuan: As Chinese Cinema Swings Harder, How Can It Keep Up With What Audiences Want? | 2018 Annual Box Office
"Make good movies" is the vaguest answer there is. What other obstacles do filmmakers actually face?
What Else Do You Need to Know to Read Max Weber? A Weber Scholar's Way of Learning | The Study
Yu Zhejun, a scholar of Max Weber, on the misunderstandings people have about Weber and on how to read the classics.
Pinduoduo and Others Are Discounting the iPhone — Apple's 11-Year Grip on the Phone Business, From Suppliers to Sales Channels, Is Starting to Slip
Letting the channel discount a phone a month or two after launch: Apple never used to do this
"Hooks," Experience, and Thinking About Life: How a Swedish Game Studio Found Its Footing Without Choking on Its Own Ambition
In game-friendly Sweden, Frictional Games made the Amnesia series and SOMA. To avoid the kind of post-expansion collapse that has swallowed other studios, they hold hard to a few principles.
January 1, the First Day of 2019: We Have a Few Questions
On This Day is a new QDaily column, meant to help you understand more.
Suspension, Mobility and Order: How Oxford Professor Xiang Biao Reads the Age We Live In
“Equal participation in an increasingly unequal socioeconomic process”
The Angry Summer of 1968: How It Changed One Woman, and the Rest of Her Life
"1968 ended, but I never left it." The final piece in our series marking 50 years since the passing of the utopian era.
Every Few Decades, One Company Redefines Consumption. Now It's Alibaba and Amazon | 2018 Company of the Year
Sears – Walmart – Amazon/Alibaba
A Decree Is Up for Review for Falling Behind the Times — It Once Guaranteed the Diversity of American Film
Judged on its own terms, the Paramount Decree really has fallen behind. If the review takes in the new forms of monopoly and the new threats, it may turn out to be good for Hollywood.
New Company of the Year 2018: Pinduoduo Got Hundreds of Millions Shopping Online, Just as Taobao Did 15 Years Ago
The question is whether it can solve its own problems in a far less forgiving climate.
Disrupted Company of the Year: Apple. The Whole Company Is Tied to One Phone, and Now the Industry Has Run Out of Road
Remember the Apple Car?
#Cover: *The Atlantic* Asks Where America's Anger Comes From
Anger can be a tool for improving society, a way for businessmen and politicians to profit, a motive for revenge—it depends on how you handle it.
MOSSES, Hong Kong's Hidden Independent Bookshop, Is More Than Two Designers' Private Hobby | Hong Kong Street Life ⑫
"Hong Kong Street Life" is a QDaily column written by commissioned contributors, an attempt to set down quickly whatever sketches it can of a place that is changing fast.
A Sent-Down Family's Way Back: From a Uranium Mine to Shanghai's Old City | Housing and Our Lives #19
When a word as large as "history" is set in front of us, grand narrative usually swallows it. We wanted to do what sorting we could through interviews at the small scale, and we began this record with housing — the thing people watch most closely in their own lives.
Have Gardens Gone Out of Style? *Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China*, 50 Years in the Writing, Is Back — and Its Subject Is More Than Taste
The author Tung Chuin once complained: “Foreigners actually think Chinese gardens came over from Japan.” “I want to write something about this. We have too few books on the subject and Japan has far too many, so Westerners assume Chinese gardens were influenced by Japan — which gets it exactly backwards.”
From Bureau Courier in Jingdezhen to Businessman: One Jiangxi Man's 40 Years | 2018 Stories ⑨
"I'm a wave rider," he likes to say.
From Mass Market to High End and Back Again: What Happened Between a 50-Year-Old Creative Director and a 50-Year-Old Fashion Brand?
In under two years, an experiment in remaking a brand has been declared a failure. But Raf Simons and the Calvin Klein Group did test two questions almost no one else tries to answer.
#Debate: The Opposite of Truth May Not Be Lies — It's Nihilism and Agnosticism
Have people really grown sick of the truth? The answer may be that they are only sick of the noise.
Bitcoin's Speculative Bubble Burst This Year — Technology Was No Match for Greed and Fear | 2018 Software of the Year
Bitcoin, and the kind of cryptocurrency that copied it, essentially retraced the tulip's curve this year.
Over 20 Years, Web Addresses Quietly Stopped Mattering — a Microcosm of the Internet's Drift from Equality to Big-Tech Monopoly | QDaily Business History
The rise and fall of domain names mirrors the changing gateways to the internet.
More and More Street Restaurants Are Being Pulled Into Opportunistic Malls — What Problems Will They Face? | 2018's Major Business Events ⑦
Restaurant owners who grew up on the street have been eagerly urged into shopping malls, where they run into an entirely different system and an entirely different crowd. In between, the big restaurant groups have become brokers for both sides.
Bi Feiyu, Ge Fei and Su Tong on the Aesthetics of Fiction, a Writer's Style, and the Value of a Work
What makes a good short story? What decides a writer's style? What role does literature play today, and what fate awaits it?
A Young Beijinger's Uprooted Dream of Woodworking | 2018 Stories ⑧
He just wanted to learn a craft. It turned out to take much more than that.
Director Zhang Ming: If You're Serious About Something, You Think Long Term
"Keeping the right posture as you walk — that's what feels important right now."
The Anonymous Writing Contest That Judged “the Work, Not the Writer” Has Ended. What Does It Tell Us About Literature?
Writers, judges, readers and publishers alike may all have something to think about after this anonymous writing contest.
When a Company's Power Keeps Growing, What Can It Do — and What Can't It? | 2018 Business Events ⑥
Once big companies control enough resources, they can out-argue governments at every level. How do you reconcile business, which exists to make money, with politics, which is supposed to serve the public?
A Chinese Restaurant in Venice: One Wenzhou Woman's Troubles, and Other Things
These days, few Chinese business owners still plan to open another Chinese restaurant on the island of Venice.
What Do We Mean When We Say Someone Is "Too Greasy"? | 100 Big Questions About Life
The third installment in our Decency series, in which we use "greasy" as a lens for a closer look at what it takes to be a decent person.
Two Years and 1 Million Apps Later, WeChat Mini Programs Still Aren't a Platform
They are more features for WeChat.
TAO Dance Theater Explores the Freedom of the Body Through Dance. What Happened in Its First 10 Years? | 100 People With Ideas
Surviving and creating — surviving may be the harder of the two.
Tencent's Vanished HK$1.4 Trillion: Grow Big Enough, and the Regulators Come | 2018's Biggest Business Stories ⑤
The pace keeps quickening. The internet has just had its most heavily regulated year.
Uber Plans to Go Public at $120 Billion. How Did the New Tech Bubble Get Here?
This is not Uber's finish line.
Coach Staged Its First Runway Show in China in 15 Years. What Was It Trying to Say?
China accounted for less than 15% of Coach's global revenue in 2018. The brand sees plenty of opportunity here — and even more challenges.
Kevin Tsai: If My Tombstone Gets One Line, Don't Make It "the Man Who Talked About EQ" | Interviews
"It makes me sound too kindly, and I'm not that kindly. I'd rather it said: this is someone who created a fantasy world."
Opportunistic New Faces in the Opportunistic Mall | 2018's Big Business Stories ④
When "whoever's hot gets in" outweighs the logic of business itself, unknown risks follow. For now, though, everyone is still caught up in the chase for opportunity.
From *Oriental Horizon* to Danmei Fan Comics: A 20-Year Cultural Retrospective, and an Argument About Mainstream Values
“When we seem to have nothing to do with mainstream values, are we in fact locked even more firmly inside that system?”
Another Year of the TGA: The Revolution Is Gentle, and Gaming Has Dodged the Worst
Ongoing games brought no disaster. They brought a few new solutions instead.
A Kindergarten Teacher Ran Into an Awkward Question About Being Gay, and Took It to Court | 2018 Stories ⑦
What responsibility does the head of the kindergarten, who fired him under pressure from parents, bear?
Zhu Tianwen Won This Year's "Chinese-Language Literary Figure" Award. She Talked About Literature's Own Rules, and Inheritance
Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianwen was named this year's "Chinese-Language Literary Figure" by 21 students at Renmin University. Here is what she said in her acceptance speech and the interviews that followed.
In the Internet Age of "Instant Gratification," Modern Life Seems to Have More and More Flashpoints for Impatience | 100 Big Questions About Life
"Mildly irritated, prone to the occasional spontaneous combustion" — the emotional baseline of modern life, most of the time.
#Debate: Under the Banner of "Real Is Beautiful," Can We Still Talk About Beauty and Ugliness?
Once moral standards are attached to taste, talking about beauty starts to look like a new form of oppression. In that case, does beauty still exist?
160 Chinese Companies Listed Overseas in a Year, and A-Shares Missed the Good Companies of the Future Again | 2018's Biggest Business Stories ③
An opportunistic market from top to bottom, where raising money for companies is held hostage to keeping retail investors calm.
A 22-Year-Old Wants to Turn Garment Workers into Fashion Designers. Is That a Good Idea? | 100 People With Ideas
Less a business plan than an idea expressed as art. How long it can last, and what it costs, are the questions that matter.
Behind 100 “Dad Hats”: A Designer Digging Into Social Questions, and Four Hatmakers in Putian
“Interesting” — but what is the interesting part? The hats made from counterfeit dad shoes, the idea behind them, or the assorted people who made the hat possible?
He'd Been in Game Publishing Less Than Two Months When License Approvals Froze | 2018 Stories ⑥
A man who keeps calling himself “naive” and “blind” left himself a fallback in 2018. Was that … “luck”?
The Best Independent Magazines of 2018, Each With Its Own Way of Caring About This Era
“Magazines that matter”
The Phone Industry Was the Past Decade's Biggest Growth Engine. This Year It Failed for Good | 2018's Biggest Business Stories ②
A full year of decline, and this is only the beginning.
Leaving Tokyo to Open a 5.5-Square-Meter Used Bookstore in Okinawa! | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round
"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese. A "second round" (nijikai) is what Japanese office workers call the second stop of a night out — after the first bar, anyone who feels like it comes along, and the talk runs easier.
Sociologist Li Yinhe: Ours Is Precisely the Generation That Cannot Withdraw From the World | Interviews
"My heart leans toward withdrawing from the world. But there is so much injustice in this world, so much that makes you angry. I think ours is precisely the generation that cannot really withdraw from it."
Everyone on the Internet Is a “Secondary Creator,” to One Degree or Another | 100 Big Questions About Life
If memes tell us that “at heart, humans are just copy machines,” then the existence of secondary creation is saying: even if we are copy machines, we're probably copy machines with some character of our own.
After 30 Years in Mexico, a Belgian Artist Says We Should Stay Wary for the Long Haul — Including of So-Called “Progress”
Francis Alÿs is an urban wanderer who turns absurd performances into acts of resistance
Google "Helped" Microsoft Pass Apple Ahead of Schedule. How Have These Three Traded Places Over 20 Years?
For half of the past 20 years, one of these three companies has been the most valuable in the world.
Companies Line Up to List: A Hong Kong Analyst's Sleepless Year, and Her Opening | 2018 Stories No. 5
HKEX grabbed its last chance. Yang Lin, nowhere near the center of any of it, is learning to find her own place.
Francis Fukuyama: The Great Danger of Engineering Human Genes Is That It Costs Us Our Humanity
In the end, what people fear is that biotechnology will strip human beings of their humanity — the one bedrock quality that does not change however the world turns, that makes us what we are and sets where we are going. Worse, biotechnology will change human nature and we will never notice how valuable the thing we lost was.
Plastic, Then Aluminum, Now Glass: What Besides Looks Changed What Phones Are Made Of?
This time the change could not reverse the market's decline
Director Rao Xiaozhi: "Like My Film's Title, I'm a Nobody Too" | 100 People With Ideas
"For me, this film is mainly about building people up — we even named it 《无名之辈》, nobodies — so I always say the credit belongs to the actors."
A Survival Handbook for the New Fresh-Food Convenience Store: What Business Are They Actually In?
Squeezed between wet markets, hypermarkets, grocery delivery apps and convenience stores, why do fresh-food convenience stores still have room to live?
From the Three Emperors' Treaty to the Triple Entente | A Brief History of Things
The irony of history is this: it was not other powers' hostility that isolated Germany. The way events unfolded gave them the chance to isolate it, and that chance kept growing stronger.
Taiwan's Legendary Chu Family: Three Generations of Writers in One House — How They Get Along, How They See the World
"We're not that dramatic. We know exactly what literature weighs today, what state it's in, how much influence it has. Maybe all the Chu family can do is this: I am changing the world."
Without Noticing It, You May Be Living a Secondhand Life | 100 Big Questions About Life
When you find that every problem in your life already has an answer online, it means someone else has already lived your whole life for you.
Thanksgiving Game Sale: 88 Games and Apps We Picked Out
We've gathered discount information on games released this year on Steam and the App Store.