Midi Z, the Director Who Calls Himself a Permanent Outsider: Film Matters Too Little, Life Is What Matters | Interviews
"Film only skims the surface, conveying or venting a little of what real life makes you feel. That's all it does."
QDaily in English
2310 completed translations from the archive. Articles retain their original publication dates.
Chamberlain's Legacy | A Brief History of Things
Strictly speaking, Churchill and Roosevelt did not appease Stalin at all. In a sense they got the best terms anyone could have got in the circumstances.
In China, What Kind of Business Is a Figure With No IP Behind It?
Licensing an IP to make merchandise is still the default in the figure business; a figure that breaks away from IP faces an even narrower market.
Facing History and Accepting Criticism Are Why Humanity Progresses | Living With the Future ⑤
This interview touches on how we look at particular events in history, but it is mostly about the attitude we should take toward history.
Global Headlines Digest | Israel and Iran Edge Toward War, and The Economist Weighs Masayoshi Son's Influence
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in its trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
Fan Meizhong's Self-Important Life, and How He Sees the World | "Ten Years" Part 4
For most of his life, Fan Meizhong has been fighting what people call mainstream values.
Global Headlines Dispatch | Malaysia Changes Ruling Party for the First Time in 60 Years; The New Yorker on Vape Culture
"Global Headlines" is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it wants you to know more.
Population Is a Problem | A 24-Year-Old in Benxi, in Her Own Words: "Basically, Nobody Even Considers Coming Back"
Losing its young people has become the common problem of small Northeastern cities like Benxi.
ACE Is One of the World's Coolest Hotels. How Did That Become a Business?
"Look at how the most interesting people in different cities live, and whether any of it can be turned into a business idea."
Global Headlines Express | US Quits the Iran Nuclear Deal, Armenia's Opposition Leader Elected Prime Minister
*Global Headlines* is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in its trial run. As always, it aims to help you know more.
At Google's Annual Developer Conference, Everything It Wanted to Talk About Was AI
From Google Assistant to Waymo's self-driving cars, almost every product Google discussed came back to artificial intelligence.
After the Earthquake He Was 42, Had Nothing, and Had to "Start Over" | "Ten Years" ③
With this installment, we begin telling the stories of the individual people caught in the earthquake.
Microsoft Build: All "Productivity" Is Now Part of Cloud Computing
The show was about the internet of things, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. The only piece left for consumers is Windows.
"Why Is Orwell Great?" London Is Staging a Theater Festival of His Work — and Here Are 7 of His Books
The festival is built on *Down and Out in Paris and London*.
Writer Yi Zhongtian: I'm Good at Controlling the Rhythm of Reading, and I Still Think Lu Xun Is Great | The Study
The Study is a new QDaily column for 2018; it is concerned with how people structure what they know.
The China Design Museum Opens, and Its Architect, Álvaro Siza, Hides Strength in Stillness
His buildings look like "a cat dozing in the sun," yet they answer the cold, headlong pace of global consumerism.
Marx at 200: 63 Faces of the Man and His -ism
Him, them, us.
How Does Packaging Design Create Value? Japanese Designer Yuji Tokuda Says It Still Comes Down to Telling a Good Story
What kind of information is hidden underneath a good design — and how do you find it and distill it?
On Girls' Day He Protested the Boys' Crude Love Banners — and Found the World Uglier Than the Banners
Nearly two months have passed since March 7, and Chen Yu still can't work out why one photograph set off so much that nobody could have predicted.
‘Video Games Spread Violence in the Real World’? The Claim Isn’t New, and It’s Still Worth Questioning
We take on the question through history, data, and what’s new in game design.
From Internet Phone to Hardware Company: Xiaomi's Eight Years From Startup to IPO
The first and only company to go public on the strength of smartphones.
Global Headlines Roundup | The Atlantic Says Fake Video Will Destroy Our Sense of Reality; Hawking's Last Paper Is Published
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in its trial run. As always, it's here to help you know more.
Population Is a Problem | Shanghai Is Older Than You Think: One Day in a Typical Aging Neighborhood
In this neighborhood, nearly one person in every three or four is over 60.
The Health Trend Is Irreversible: 7 Trends to Watch in Food and Drink
As it turns out, nearly all of it started with small companies.
Last Week's Fashion News Worth a Look | Vanity Daily
We've picked out the most important fashion news from last week.
Three Days Later: The Moment 10 Lives Turned in the Great Earthquake | "Ten Years" ②
This is the story of the third day after the earthquake, and of the days before it.
LSD's 75-Year Trip: How It Shaped Rock Music, Silicon Valley and the Whole of the 1960s | QDaily Business History
LSD was truly popular for barely a decade. Its influence has lasted ever since.
Everyone Is Arguing About China's New Asset Management Rules. What Do They Actually Say?
Will they end the frenzy in the wealth management market?
Massimo Osti, "the Father of Sportswear and Techwear" — You Probably Didn't Know He Reshaped Modern Menswear Design
"Fashion is about which clothes people are willing to wear. Whether something is fashionable is a state of mind, something very personal. That should be the true meaning of fashion today."
How Should We Understand Secular Society, and Why Is It Missing From Our Lives? | Living With the Future ④
This report is about one thing: how secular society in China grew weaker and weaker.
Why Slavery Took Root in the American South | A Brief History of Things
Slavery was more widespread and more lasting in the Southeast, an old tradition going back to the Mississippian societies, whose leaders saw slaves as symbols of power and revenge.
They Designed Tsutaya Books, the Store Everyone Copies. What Do They Think "Design" Is?
Without the part that lies outside design — the part that actually delivers value — design is just a passing spectacle.
Global Headlines Express | The Two Koreas Sign the Panmunjom Declaration, Pledging to End the War Within the Year; The Guardian Says Business Schools Need a Radical Overhaul
Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
Eight Electric SUVs From New Chinese Brands, and One Car Sold Under Four Badges: the Beijing Auto Show Under a New Policy
Automakers take different views of the "new energy" policy, but the market has already been changed.
Population Is a Problem | The Lives of Two Big-City Families With a Second Child
It's too hard.
This Condom Brand Wants Women to Like It Too. How Does Design Get It There?
The question about condoms has shifted from "How do you get men to like condoms?" to "How do you get women to love them too?"
Saigon: The Play That Tries to Heal "a Wound," and a Director Who Wants It "True to Saigon, True to History"
"What I ask of myself is that I not forget Saigon's tears. What did people feel in this place? Only with that thread running through it could I make a story true to Saigon, true to history."
Beer Prices Are Rising for the First Time in a Decade. What Changed?
The World Cup is a little over a month away, and beer is getting more expensive.
Twenty Years Ago, a Japanese Exchange Student Accidentally Became the Man Who Knows Chinese Rock History Best
The Japanese writer Yoshii Shinobu, who writes in Chinese, came across a "magical rock website" — this is the story behind it.
14 People at the Moment of the Great Earthquake: We Begin Tracking the Lives It Changed Over 10 Years | "Ten Years"
Not all of us lived through it, but we hope all of us remember.
The "Mineral Curse": The Congo Has Its Own "Vibranium." Why Did It Get Endless War Instead of "Wakanda"?
Colonialism, foreign intervention, illegal trade and kleptocratic rule have given the Congo more than 130 years of a "resource curse"
Flying in China Hasn't Changed Much, but Its Big Three Airlines Just Made Record Profits — 13 Charts on What's Happening in This Market
Oil prices and exchange rates sway airline profits. And, more than either of them, government subsidies do.
Time-Honored Brands Are Moving Out and Qianmen Street Is Rebranding Again. Why Does It Always End Up Empty?
The Qianmen Street that planners see may be nothing like the one shoppers walk through.
Douglas Hofstadter, Author of the "Legendary" GEB: Machines Could in Principle Have Human Minds — I Hope That Never Happens | Interviews
I don't like people calling GEB "the Bible of artificial intelligence." That's nonsense — it's simply insane.
Former French Prime Minister: Much of What People Do Drives War, Not Peace
Are we moving closer to war?
A Group of Returnee Scientists Wants to Build a Research University Outside the System — How Will It Actually Be Different?
Westlake University: "Everything about it is rather delicate."
A Photographer Shot a Series of Buildings "Between Real and Fake." He Calls Them "Potemkin Villages"
"Their existence is a silhouette of our era."
In a phone industry built on global division of labor, what does it mean that ZTE can't buy American chips and software?
If the ban takes full effect, most of ZTE's business can't continue. But technology needs a market too, and what happens next is hard to say.
WPP Founder and CEO Martin Sorrell Resigns: What Does the Exit of the 4A Ad World's Last Titan Mean?
Martin Sorrell, 73, is a workaholic who believes in the value of scale and collaboration.
Starbucks Says All 8,000 U.S. Stores Will Close for Three Hours to Retrain Staff — How Did This Escalate So Fast?
Another protest produced by the social-media era.
Public or private? A sudden policy change leaves Shanghai parents with the same old dilemma
"Right at the last kick in front of the goal," the policy changed.
The First Privacy Law of the Big Data Era Is Here, and It Has Both Tencent and Facebook Nervous
What exactly does the EU's GDPR cover?
12 Episodes in 3 Years: How a Fast-Updating Dutch Studio Built Gaming's Own Twin Peaks
Reaching the ideal state between players and developers
Ruan Yizhong: The Essence of Photography Is Discovery and Documentation — a Selfie Is Just Self-Pity in Front of a Mirror | Interviews
"What I most want to hold onto when I take a photograph is the goodness in human nature: the trust and help people give each other, their gratitude and dependence on the land, their reverence for heaven and their care for things."
In Jinan, What Happened at a Gathering of More Than 300 Gay People and Their Parents?
And what happened in each of their lives?
From Small Everyday Objects to a First Piece of Furniture: How Does This Designer Plan His Own Course? | 100 People With Ideas
"I've never thought about how big this brand ought to get. The question I think about is a different one: how to take it from immature at the start to slowly mature, and grow it into a brand that lasts 50 or even 100 years."
Tracing European Ethnic Cleansing Back to the Ottoman Empire | A Brief History of Things
Wind the clock back and the root becomes visible: when multiethnic states such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I and nation-states rose in their place, the call to build ethnically uniform countries turned minorities at home into targets.
The Age of Great Growth Is Over. What Should We Be Wary Of, and What Should We Fear? | Living With the Future, Part 3
Where the risks lie ahead; the weakness hiding behind our popular culture; what it means when technology and bureaucracy merge; and, above all, the extra price we pay in a society where civil society is missing.
What Does Shanghai's Rong Mansion Reveal About Prada's "Artistic Ambition"?
After the art collections and the expensive art spaces, the art foundations of luxury brands are now competing over who can tell the best story — and they want to tell it to audiences in China.
German architect Juergen Mayer may be the “most fascinating hope for German architecture since the Bauhaus”
People keep calling Juergen Mayer a futurist. To him, architecture is just a long search for the limits of new materials and new structures
TED Doesn't Just Want to Spread Ideas Anymore — Now It Picks Projects and Sends Them Hundreds of Millions | Live From TED2018
Ideas Worth Investing?
After 28 Annual Conferences, TED Is No Longer So Optimistic About the Future | On the Ground at TED 2018
"Sometimes, talking about the future is really a way of talking about the present. It seems less rude, and it's safer." - Benjamin Bratton
Kuaishou's Algorithm, and What This Society Calls Highbrow and Lowbrow
From the moment it started making short videos, so-called vulgarity has clung to Kuaishou like an original sin. Why?
The Man Who Calls Going to the Movies His "Last Act of Resistance" Walks You Through 110 Years of Japanese Cinema
Yomota Inuhiko's new book — and his understanding of the field — are both worth a look.
Zuckerberg's History of Apologies, and the Confidence of Robin Li and His Peers
People keep putting more of their information onto social networks, and tech companies keep pushing out the line where privacy ends. You never notice.
Douglas Hofstadter, Author of the Legendary Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), Has a New Book — and He’s Coming to China Next Week
His second book is called *Surfaces and Essences*.
No One Can Stop the Tide. So Why Can We Still Be Optimistic? | Living With the Future ②
We asked more than 20 specialists in economics, law, sociology, and communications to answer our questions. This is the second installment. It is about how we see the stage we are living through, and why, with so many problems, we can still be optimistic.
Art Basel Hong Kong: Reputations and Deals Both Churning, 11 People With Their Own Agendas
This, after all, is the primary market.
How Xin Yukun's *Wrath of Silence* Got Made
After *The Coffin in the Mountain*, Xin Yukun asked himself: how do I keep being a director? And what kind of director do I want to be?
Chinese Fashion Doesn't Lack Opportunity or Speed — But We Still Have 4 Questions About What's in Style Now
Fashion is unquestionably big business in China. Whether a fashion culture can be grown just as quickly is a question no one can answer for sure.
New Market After New Market, Deal After Deal: What Kind of Company Is Meituan Now?
Capital changed Meituan, Didi and companies like them — and those companies changed capital right back.
The Windows Division Vanishes From Microsoft — the Product That Brought Computers to Everyone and Shaped the Software Industry | QDaily Business History
Windows made good on Gates's vision of a software industry and carried business into the age of information and the internet — but it never caught up with the mobile era itself.
Why Are There More and More “Overgrown Babies” in Our Era? | QDaily Research Lab
Growing up now has little to do with age. A lasting “juvenility” means more than immaturity — it also means being unreasonable and refusing to take responsibility.
15 Years of a New York Architecture Firm: Why It Matters to Imagine What Architecture Could Become
“An idea you put out there may find other ways to get built. There is never only one road.”
WeWork Moves Into Shanghai's Most Expensive Office Tower: What Changes When Co-working Turns to Big Companies?
WeWork IFC has become better suited to big companies — just like WeWork as a whole.
How a Few Villas in Hangzhou's Xixi Became Home and Studio to More Than 20 Illustrators and Comic Artists
What does Qingwu She — a collective "hidden away in a small building, a world unto itself" — mean to the creators who live there?
Tiangong-1 Is Expected to Crash Tomorrow. The Odds of It Hitting Anyone Are One in a Trillion
Defunct spacecraft all burn up in the atmosphere. A few leave debris behind, but none has ever hit a person.
Two Curators, One for Beijing and One for Guangzhou: What Their Conversation Reveals About How They Read Society
"Site-specificity" is the art world's word of the moment. It is a borrowed one, translated from the English "in-site," which originally meant made on the spot.
Environmental Enforcement Is Driving Prices Up. What Do Factories and Nonprofits Make of the Tightening Rules?
The policy has never been clear. Nothing has changed.
Meng Jinghui's Second Theatre Festival in Shenzhen: Wildly Free, Deeply Worried
As things stand, whether a show can be staged at all seems to matter more than what the show is about.
The New iPad for Schools Is Here: Little Has Changed, and Eight Years On the Tablet Is Still Looking for a Reason to Exist
A new iPad that feels familiar, and cheaper — especially for students
After More Than 80 Years, the Beetle Goes Out of Production — It Stood for a Different Culture in Every Era | QDaily Business History
Nazi nationalism, the social market economy, the Mad Men era of advertising, hippie culture — it rode through all of them.
H&M Has Finally Moved Onto Tmall. What's Left for It to Win in Fast Fashion's E-Commerce War?
With its physical stores shrinking and its multi-brand strategy still able to do only so much, e-commerce has become the one remaining way to reach more shoppers.
22 Exhibitions and 3 Forums: If You're in Beijing Right Now, These Are the Art Events to See
The event "gathers up Beijing's best art resources and lets the world know what 798 is doing"
Makoto Tanijiri, the Designer Who Will Build 'Anything From a Doghouse to a High-Rise,' Says Ideas Start With 'Abandoning Bias'
Makoto Tanijiri: "The hundreds of projects I've done are my experience."
Yan Lianke, Jin Yucheng, Tang Nuo, Xu Zidong and Gao Xiaosong on Literature — and on the Writing They Did Young
These remarks came at the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize, which carries a 300,000-yuan purse and goes to a single writer under 45
Bilibili's Nasdaq Listing Is Days Away, and Nothing in Its Prospectus Has Met With Good News
A "vigorous advocate for traditional Chinese culture"?
Writer Li Ge: How I Read With My Daughter (and Wrote Her Into a Book)
We talked with writer Li Ge about her new book, reading with her daughter, and much else
Was the English Revolution Really a Bourgeois Revolution? | A Brief History of Things
In explaining the long-term social causes of state breakdown in the English Revolution, Goldstone argues, population change belongs at the center—not the consequences of capitalist development.
Amazon Is Now Worth More Than Google, and the Fear of It Has Spread to Every Industry
Every time Amazon enters a new field, the share prices of its potential rivals drop on cue.
Five British Writers, Dozens of Chinese Translators: The British Library's Manuscript Show in Shanghai Is Worth the Trip
"Where Great Writers Gather: Treasures from the British Library" runs at the Shanghai Library from March 15 to April 15.
Scholar Tang Shiping: When We Are Confident and Proud, How Do We Stay Clear-Eyed About What the World Thinks of Us?
I often use an analogy: modernization is an island. So far only about 30 countries have swum ashore. More than 100 others are still swimming toward it.
Zuckerberg wrote an apology and $57.3 billion in market value vanished. What exactly is Facebook's big trouble?
Inevitable, really.
Cartoonist Chu Teh-yung: A Creator Needs a Simple Life — and People Should Learn to Take Charge of Themselves
"I just think a creator has to keep his life simple. Everyone's mental energy and attention are limited, the same way a life is limited — all you can do is spend that energy where you mean to spend it."
How the World's Best-Known Architecture and Design Website Grew Up From a £20 Blog
"Creativity is in our DNA" — nonsense! How could it be? Creativity exists only in education and culture.
A Conversation with Art Historian Fred S. Kleiner: How to Read Art, and Why Studying It Still Matters
*Gardner's Art Through the Ages* was the first global art history to break the "Western" boundary. Where did it come from, and why does it matter?
Nobuhiko Horie: What Makes Manga Great Is That the Pictures Speak Without Dialogue
He edited the manga artists Tetsuo Hara and Tsukasa Hojo.
Li Ka-shing's 68 Years: A Business History of Hong Kong
The age of the "Superman" is over.
Li Ao Is Dead. He Kept the Courage to Say No to an Era to the End
Goodbye!
Pulitzer Winner Ian Johnson Worries Most That People Can No Longer Tell Fact From Opinion | Interviews
"A lot of people go online, but they don't know which parts are actually fact and which are opinion."