China trains staff to be nice to tourists — but that's not the friendliness you meet on an ordinary Wednesday. A broken bike chain in a ...
China pours roughly $7 trillion a year into factories, rails, power grids and housing. An American visitor's back-of-the-receipt arithmetic explains what that money buys, what it ...
Every evening around 7:30, plazas across China fill up. No membership, no fee, no reservation — just a speaker on a trolley and forty neighbors. For ...
A ride-along with a cotton harvester operator in northern Xinjiang, from a 5:40 a.m. spindle check to a 2.2-tonne cotton module rolling onto the stubble — ...
Many visitors arrive in China braced for unfriendly strangers. Then someone lifts their suitcase, types a price into a calculator, or waits with them until the ...
The Great Wall was never the point. After eleven months of sleeper trains, factory towns, county-city livestreams and village football, here are the ten Chinas I ...
China looks linguistically uniform from a distance: one writing system, one national language on the news. Up close, it is one of the most diverse places ...
A delivery drone drops noodles outside a Shenzhen office park in twelve minutes. Eighteen hundred kilometers away in Gansu, a herder uses a small drone to ...
A product manager closes her laptop at 9:58 p.m. on the 24th floor in Beijing. In the same 24 hours, 2,400 kilometers southwest, a 63-year-old farmer ...
At 5:40 a.m. he is on a satellite-guided tractor. By 4 p.m. he is sitting in a plastic chair, opening irrigation valves 12 kilometers away with ...