A Newspaper, and an Experiment in Public Opinion Cut Short | Shenzhen at 40 ③
"Freedom from want, freedom from fear."
QDaily in English
2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
Saccharin, Trans Fats… Why Do Healthy-Eating Trends Keep Turning Out to Be Wrong?
Every time nutrition science lights up a new patch of ground, food companies rush out foods that are "absolutely healthy," and consumers pile in right behind them. Everyone believes the same thing: you can't eat too much of something that's "absolutely healthy."
“Is Northern China Really Short of Water?” An Argument Breaks Out — and What Kind of Question Is This, Really?
Water stress is real. But a “water crisis” has to be looked at from several angles — whatever the definition, it never means that only running out of water counts as a crisis.
Global Headlines Express | Supreme Court Justice Kennedy Will Retire, and The Economist Examines the Decline of Public Transit in Big Cities
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018, still in its trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
Artist Keiichi Tanaami Has Spent His Life Defining Consumer Society — And Being Defined by It | 100 People With Ideas
What was pop art really expressing? What could it express?
"Our Family Should Have Made It": One Family's Wealth and Opportunities Over 30 Years | Shenzhen at 40, Part 2
It has to do with all of Shenzhen and with reform and opening-up — or more precisely, it is a parallel world running alongside Shenzhen's development.
Global Headlines Express | Illegal Immigration Keeps Troubling the EU; How Is Technology Helping Athletes Break Their Own Limits?
Global Headlines is QDaily's new column for 2018, still in its trial run. It is here, as always, to help you understand more.
Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton Debut in Paris: Behind the Alphabet Manual, He's Still Selling Streetwear
"I — Irony: the philosophy of the new era, much like what Virgil Abloh is to Louis Vuitton."
Meituan Is Finally Going Public. What Have Round After Round of Huge Internet Investments Done to Consumption, Work, and Capital Itself?
For Meituan, going public is nowhere near the end of the story.
TSMC Stuck to Plain Contract Manufacturing — What Role Does It Play in the Chip Industry, and Why Was Morris Chang's Retirement a Big Deal? | QDaily Business History
TSMC changed chip manufacturing, and with it the course of the personal computer and the mobile phone
Global Headlines Express | Erdogan Declares Re-election Victory; 100,000 March in London Against Brexit
*Global Headlines* is QDaily's new column for 2018, now in trial run — still here to help you understand more.
Why Shekou, and Why Start Here? | Shenzhen at 40, No. 1
Looking back to understand the present.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich Is Abruptly Out. What Did His Five Years Amount To?
He solved some of the problems Intel ran into while looking for its future, and created some new ones.
What You Should Know About Hardening Class Lines and a Divided Society | Living With the Future ⑩
Class mobility, and its absence, covers enormous ground. This piece is mainly about the risk of a society hardening and splitting apart.
African Fathers, Chinese Mothers: "So Where Am I From?" | "Low-End Globalization" ④
Adams Bodomo, a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Vienna, predicts that within 100 years Afro-Chinese children will form a new ethnic group — chocolate-skinned Chinese with an identity of their own, who will demand their own civic rights in the cities.
World Cup Ad Slots Start at 165 Million Yuan. How Did Three Internet Companies Turn Them Into "Naobaijin" Spots?
"Getting a consumer to watch the ad once is like getting them to watch it 10 times."
Ahem, Ahem, the Meeting's Starting — This Is the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival, 2018!
These days, nothing comes easy.
How Do You Turn 300 Years of Craft into Fashionable "Quality Living," Not Just Souvenirs? | 100 People With Ideas
The chairman of Japan's Nakagawa Masashichi Shoten shares ten years of management experience.
Global Headlines Roundup | The U.S. Quits the UN Human Rights Council, and The Atlantic Shares a Story of Transgender Identity
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018 and still in a trial run. It remains committed to helping you understand more of the world.
Four Years Into Tencent's Young Screenwriters Competition, Working Screenwriters Give Entrants Some Blunt Advice
"Talking a bunch of concepts — market this, IP that — that's empty stuff. For creators, that's not our territory."
Silicon Valley Tech Pioneer Jaron Lanier Says the Internet Took a Wrong Turn, and You Can Help Save It
First, cats or dogs — which do you choose?
Global Headlines Roundup | Trump Administration's "Zero Tolerance" Immigration Policy Stirs New Outcry; The Economist Revisits the Solar Industry's Rise and Fall
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018 and still in trial run. It remains committed to helping you understand more.
An Old Story of Environment and Sanitation: How Scavengers Prop Up China's Recycling Chain
Public education on waste sorting in China is still nowhere near enough. These "scavengers" have become the real experts in sorting waste.
Identity, Labor, Consumerism… What Were China's 37 Most Important Contemporary Artworks of the Past Year Talking About?
Every one of them is bound up with a live social question.
Cheer for This Year's E3 Lineup — Oh, and New Ways to Distribute and Monetize Games Are Reshaping the Industry's Future
Players consume games. Maybe the subject and the object on either side of "consume" need to swap places.
Let's Talk About Equality in Education | Class Mobility and How We Understand Cities, Part One
Class rigidity and class mobility reach into a great many things. This piece begins with education.
The Serpentine Commissioned Two Pavilions This Year, in London and Beijing. How Should We Read Each One?
How did architecture, art, commerce, politics and culture all get tangled together?
Global Headlines Express | The Conversation on why humans can't predict suicide, and more than 100 killed in Mexico's election season
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it exists to help you know more.
Robert McKee: Stories Go Shallow When Writers Would Rather Be Liked Than Be True | The Study
The Study is a new QDaily column for 2018. It is about how people build what they know.
Ten Years of Shanghai Pride: What Happened by Accident, What Got Blocked, What Caught On, and What Stopped Short
Also a decade in which LGBT organizing in China grew fast enough to watch.
Beauty Devices Are Young Chinese Consumers' New Toy. How Did They Catch On?
Technical jargon, social networks and influencers, plus a fear of "early aging" — a new electronic toy is born
Global Headlines Digest | The New Yorker on the teen drama that lives inside social media, and a bigger 2026 World Cup
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run, and still meant to help you know more.
A lace show in Hangzhou wants to change what you think lace is
"It's just a trim, but there's no limit to what you can put it on."
Bingchun Meng: The Death of the Public, Second Thoughts on "Girl Power," and "the Resistance of the Elite Middle Class" | Interviews
"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"
Mindfulness Meditation Became a Multibillion-Dollar Business. It Spread by Stripping Out Religion — and Turned Into a Religion of Its Own
Celebrity endorsements, no religious theory to learn, courses cut down to size — mindfulness has ridden the world's anxiety to fame.
John Lasseter Says Goodbye to Disney and Pixar: In 39 Years, What Did This Genius Change?
Who could have guessed he would go out this way?
From the Tramp on Screen to a Father at Home: Getting to Know Charlie Chaplin
"No film actor has ever captured the world more vividly, or left it more enthralled"
Zhang Dachun: "Hell is inside us. What is it? It's that I've lost interest in explaining this world" | Interviews
"We can't read characters accurately not because we lack the ability, but because we lack the will to explain this world accurately. You've lost your curiosity about the world. It's that simple."
Population Is a Problem | Tianjin Underestimated What Its Own Hukou Is Worth, but the Shortage of People Is Real
Infrastructure, recruiting talent, and job opportunities — together these three decide what growth is possible.
Another Democratic Design Day, and IKEA Has Never Been Closer to the Trends — It Seems to Be in a Hurry
IKEA at 75 is going through big changes: hunting for new ways to talk to consumers, and for new sources of growth — sustainable consumption, for one.
Global Headlines Express | The US and North Korean leaders land in Singapore, and The Economist asks what makes a country good at football
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it exists to help you know more.
Shut for a Year, Why Can't Dali's Erhai Guesthouses Escape Being Closed for Good?
Should protecting the environment come at the cost of property rights?
The Anonymous Writers Contest Asks: What Does an Author's Name Really Mean for a Work of Literature?
The conversation among Liang Wendao, Lu Nei, and Zhang Yueran is worth reading in full (though it's a bit long).
The Suzhou W Hotel Opened. What Happened at the Opening Party It Called a "Premiere"?
"W isn't for everyone. What we offer is a place where adults want to be children and children want to be adults."
How Do We Explain Middle-Class Anxiety — and How We Misread the Middle Class? | Living With the Future ⑧
This section takes up middle-class anxiety, social mobility and the hardening of class lines. We begin with the anxiety itself, and with how the middle class gets misread.
We Walked Through macOS's "Mojave Desert" and Came Back With 12 Changes Worth Knowing
A system upgrade made of small fixes
A Somali "Arbiter" and His Office, the Somali Community Center of Guangzhou | "Low-End Globalization" ③
"Low-end globalization" is trade across borders that, unlike the multinationals with deep pockets and long payrolls, takes only a little money — sometimes only one person.
Global Headlines Express | Curiosity Finds Organic Matter on Mars; Rolling Stone Says the "Cake Case" Ruling Settles Little
Global Headlines is QDaily's new column for 2018, still in trial run. As always, it aims to help you understand more of what's going on.
"So What If You've Climbed Everest?" The Making of a "Mature" Wang Shi | "Ten Years" ⑦
In ten years, Wang Shi's nation and his company changed beyond recognition. So did his confidence
Two days with the first iOS 12 beta: 23 changes worth noting
Maybe because nothing big changed, this beta has far fewer bugs than the last two years' did.
The CSRC fast-tracked Foxconn's A-share listing this Friday — and this company does more than assemble iPhones
Foxconn wants a higher-end manufacturing business, and the A-share market needs it to make a statement.
"Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" — Is the Dirt in Music Really to Blame for What Teenagers Do?
Less a standard of behavior than a product of parental anxiety after the culture changed.
Anyone With Ideas Longs for 706, Because It Tries Every Possibility | This Is Wudaokou, Full of Young People, Part 2
"With them, I can talk about things I can't find anyone to discuss in academia."
A Study Says Higher Temperatures Mean Worse Grades: Why Care About Research With an Obvious Conclusion, and What to Care About
Good research can carry strong “policy implications” — and what it means to say correlation isn't causation
Qian Jianan, Born in 1988, Is Searching for "a World Literature That Can Cross Borders" | Interviews
She hopes "in this era, in this place, to be neither a mediocre good person nor a mediocre evil one."
iOS 12, an anti-addiction system, and a Siri that reminds you to put on sunscreen: 10 software updates worth watching from Apple's keynote
All software — not a single piece of hardware
The Rise and Fall of the Nightclubs, and the People Who Drift Through Them | This Is Wudaokou, Where the Young People Are ①
The place is filled with a kind of fleeting, random happiness. "You get the feeling that just by sitting there motionless, clutching a drink, they've found a doorway into a world of hope."
Apple Is Racing Toward a Trillion-Dollar Valuation. How Did It Get Here, and What Does It Mean?
$380 billion in dividends and buybacks
The BBC Named 100 Classic Books That Changed the World
Critics say these literary figures picked only the books they believe changed the world for the better, and ignored the ones that changed it for the worse.
The year's most important internet report is back, and now it's worried about the problems tech itself creates
Endlessly eating up users' time, and the privacy problem — the tech industry can no longer look away
Global Headlines Express | A Russian Journalist Rises From the Dead, and Wired on How State and Corporate Collection of Personal Data Differ
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018, currently in trial run. It is still committed to helping you understand more.
One Man Building Five Floors, Year 13: The Only Thing an Architect Can Express | 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 the optional second gathering office workers move on to after the first bar — a looser setting where people talk more freely.
So This Is How the "Smart Campus" Begins. Is It a Business, or a Problem?
Ahem, ahem.
From Bangkok to Guangzhou: One Senegalese Man's History of Moving House | "Low-End Globalization" ②
Unlike multinational corporations with deep pockets and large payrolls, this is a kind of "low-end globalization" — it takes only a little capital, sometimes only one person, to pull off.
Global Headlines Express | Italy's political turmoil drags on; The Washington Post asks what awaits deported Afghans at home
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
Who Writes Siri's Lines? We Asked the "Creative Writer" Behind Them
"AI should reach for the best of human literature and art, and create inspired conversation for our lives."
Developers, Hotels and Brokers Are All Piling Into Long-Term Rental Apartments. The Rent Isn't What They're After
Financial innovation in real estate.
Global Headlines Express | Ireland votes to repeal its abortion ban; The New Yorker examines implicit racial bias
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
The 500-Euro Note Is Being Retired, and the Story of Its Design Shows an EU Anxious About Its Own Future
The euro's problem is the EU's problem
One Story Made This Man — and Gave Him the Chance to Leave the Business | "Ten Years" ⑤
"You know, once I had this, the steps I could climb for the rest of my life were different."
Zhang Yimou, doing the interviews for his new show: “I’m not a man who cherishes his feathers”
“I want to twist my own body as hard as I can. And often there’s a cliff — and down I go again.”
Hong Kong Is Scrapping Its Famous Mong Kok Pedestrian Zone. What Should We Be Asking About Street Space?
Shut it down or regulate it — and if regulate, how? It is also a question of how a city uses its public space.
“I Learned How to Be Gay From Drag Queens”
Drag has gone from a purely entertaining form of performance to a space and a vehicle, one that lets society's marginalized groups find something like a home.
Population Is a Problem | China Could Have 36% Fewer Young People in a Decade — 11 Charts on How Cities Are Fighting Over Them
This year alone, 14 second-tier cities have used household-registration rules and cash subsidies to compete for young people. How exactly are they doing it?
Marx's Ghost Wandering Through Asia, Africa and Latin America, and Some Stories Rarely Told
From anti-colonialism to anti-neo-colonialism; from opposing the security treaty to opposing the new one.
What Vanilla Actually Is, and Why It Now Costs More Than Silver
When do you choose vanilla flavor?
Global Headlines Express | The US-North Korea summit may be postponed; The Atlantic on what Chinese e-commerce is doing to America
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it exists to help you know more.
Tesla's New Car Costs 50% More, Which May Mean Its Disruption of Traditional Carmaking Has Failed
Without scale and a rebuilt supply chain, you can't change the world.
South Korea's BTS wins Billboard's fan-voted award two years running
As Billboard's post rallying fans for this year's award put it: "This award is decided by you!"
Global Headlines Roundup | The US Threatens Its Harshest Sanctions Ever on Iran, and Kissinger Says AI Will End the Enlightenment
*Global Headlines* is a new QDaily column for 2018, currently in a trial run. It is still committed to helping you know more.
One Man, Five Floors, 13 Years In: A “Purely Handmade” Building Meant to Last 200 Years | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round
“Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round” is QDaily's column by the Japanese Chinese-language writer Yoshii Shinobu. We begin with the first-class architect[1] Oka Keisuke; this is part one. A nijikai, or “second round,” is the second stage of a night out for Japanese office workers — optional, after the first bar, and the point at which the talk loosens up.
The Africans of Guangzhou: How They Do Business, How They Live | "Low-End Globalization" ①
Four articles to show you another side of Guangzhou.
LG Gets Its Fourth-Generation Heir. Who Are the Successors at South Korea's Five Biggest Chaebols?
Quite a few of them have ended up in criminal court.
Online Fakes Are Costing Luxury Brands “Dearly”: The Past Week in Fashion | Vanity Daily
We’ve picked out last week’s most important fashion news for you.
Haidilao Now Takes In 10 Billion Yuan a Year. What Could Go Wrong for a Hotpot Chain Whose Whole Strategy Is Expansion?
Service is no defense against changing tastes and the turn toward healthier eating
Ten Months After Beijing Normal University Fired Him, Scholar Shi Jiepeng Has a New Book on Classical Poetry | Interviews
Lately I've been thinking about two things: how to make a living, how to live better. And how I can write something more meaningful, something useful to other people.
Fifty years after we met HAL 9000: how did the fear of AI seep from science fiction into real life?
Plus, a list of human-and-machine novels you might want to read.
What Went Wrong With Our Cities, and Why Opinions About Them Are Always Sharp and Irreconcilable (Part One) | Living With the Future ⑥
Part one: what a city ought to be good at; where officials misread cities; and why, judging from the origins of the ancient Chinese city, Max Weber said China had never had cities at all.
The World Cup starts in weeks and half the sponsor slots are still empty — the biggest event in sport is in trouble too
FIFA is mired in scandal, and the way advertising reaches people has been turned upside down. After the Olympics, the World Cup is now under the same pressure.
Global Headlines Express | An Upset in Iraq's Election, and The Economist on Paying for Blood
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018. It is still in its trial run, and it is still meant to help you understand more.
Population Is a Problem | A City of 1.1 Million Where Nearly a Quarter Are Old. This Is Everyday Life There
Benxi, a resource-exhausted city, is no isolated case.
20 outstanding new buildings in 16 countries, which could double as a travel list for architecture buffs
"These 20 outstanding projects were selected for their architectural ambition, ingenuity of design, and excellence in execution. Crucially, they demonstrate architecture's significant and far-reaching contribution to our everyday lives."
Global Change, China's Strange Rise, and Worries About the Young: An Interview With Historian Niall Ferguson
What worries him most is this: a generation that has never read anything of substance is no different from barbarians.
600 Gender-Equality Advocates Met in Sweden and Earnestly Talked Through a Few Questions
Two possible shortcomings: not many men showed up, and — as at many conferences — how to actually push the agenda forward is still an open question.
This British Architecture Collective Is Always "Off-Task." Why Does Its Work Draw So Much Attention?
They helped lead a British version of the "housing for all" movement
He Spent Three Years Reviving the Old Craft of Cement Floral Tiles — Then Turned It Into a Business
He brought back the entirely handmade craft of old floral tiles on his own, gave many people back a fond memory, and put the tiles back into their living rooms and parlors.
After Six Years and $50 Billion of Deals, One Investment Firm Has Turned the Coffee Market Into a Game of Capital
Nestlé and Starbucks have struck a $7.15 billion deal. Meanwhile, another new player is already in the market, and it threatens everyone.
A Century-Old Guitar Brand Files for Bankruptcy Protection: Why Has the Instrument That Carried an Era's Soul Lost Its Shine?
Rock, guitar heroes, and the soil that grew them are all unrecognizable now.
Seawater Rice, Which Yuan Longping Helped Develop, Is About to Be Trial-Planted. What Kind of Problem Is Food Security?
The thinking behind so-called self-sufficiency is not as simple as it sounds.
Hangzhou Has an Exhibition That Challenges the Senses, but Its Curator Won't Call It "Tech Art"
In curator Yao Dajun's view, "You can't define whether something is avant-garde art by the technology it uses."