Meet the millennials making big money riding China’s bitcoin wave

On a sunny afternoon in west Beijing, on the auspicious eighth floor of a nondescript concrete high-rise, Huai Yang sits with the curtains drawn in his apartment, making his own luck. For the past six months, 27-year-old Yang has worked mainly from home, mainly from his sofa, tracking and trading bitcoin, and watching the money…

Mixed Blood

“Mixed blood” is not a term I thought I’d ever take too kindly to, resonant as it is of eugenics, segregation and Harry Potter’s “mudbloods”. But just as the past is a foreign country, so too are, well, foreign countries. Tourists in China often return home with tales of being asked to take hundreds of photographs…

Author Xue Yiwei on Shenzheners, short stories and the ‘real’ China

Xue Yiwei is a writer between continents. Described as “a maverick in contemporary Chinese literature” by Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award, most of Xue’s work has been written from his adopted home of Montreal, Canada. Originally from China’s Hunan province, Xue’s recently translated collection of short stories, Shenzheners, was inspired by (and dedicated to)…

London smoggier than Beijing…for a day

@MayorOfLondon on Twitter News just in: London’s air pollution is worse than Beijing’s. Well, it was, briefly. At 3pm GMT on Monday, the AQI in parts of London hit a record high of 197, while those of us in Beijing were enjoying a balmy 190, slightly below our daily average in January of over 200.…

Breaking Bread: Beijing Bakery offers hope to disabled orphans

Photography by Aurelian Foucault Spring Festival in China means two things: family and food. With millions of people preparing to leave Beijing for a week of festivities in their hometowns, a family of a different kind is hard at work in the border city of Langfang. This time six years ago, Grace Yang, now aged…

What does the end of the one-child policy mean for China’s disabled population?

In a small shop hidden in the shadows of the gleaming, golden arches of the two-storey McDonald’s next door, Liu Wenzheng has been developing photographs since 1995. Business in his north Beijing neighbourhood is slow but steady. Every now and then, a Western couple will come in to have a photograph taken of their newly adopted…

WTF is a hongbaozza?

Chinese New Year is approaching, and anyone lucky enough to have a Chinese auntie or five knows that this means hongbao are also on their way. To the uninitiated, hongbao are the little red packets of money that are given out to family during Spring Festival to signify good luck for the year ahead. It used to be the…

Beijing now has a KFC that scans your face and tells you what to order

The annus horribilis that was 2016 is finally over. As we enter the brave new world that is 2017, the kind folks at KFC have found a way to let us do less thinking and more handing over of our personal data to multinational companies. Setting a weird tone for the year to come, Chinese internet giant…

KFC China is using facial recognition tech to serve customers – but are they buying it?

Walking into the KFC restaurant in Beijing’s financial district, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a fried chicken outlet like any other. It’s only if you head right to the back corner of the shop that you realise you’re actually in China’s first smart restaurant. KFC has teamed up with Baidu – the search…

Mosques of Beijing

When you think of spirituality in China, you probably think of the big bad Buddha. Maybe Confucius also springs to mind, with his wise words on filial piety and education and everything in between. What you might not think of, however, is Islam. Many people who consider the Western world their starting point associate Islam…