A Chinese psychology essay explains why the same person will splurge on a designer toy and pinch pennies on lunch: money is filed in separate mental accounts. The idea, coined by economist Richard Thaler, helps explain China's split-screen spending habits.
Novelist Jiang Fangzhou published a birthday essay from a hospital ward, saying a year of illness and difficulty taught her more than usual. The piece, her first in 107 days, draws on Confucius to argue that hard-won insight matters most.
A widely shared Chinese forum answer argues that China kept its pictographic script for two thousand years because its civilization never faced the survival pressures that pushed Western peoples toward alphabets. The claim is bold, debatable, and a window into how Chinese readers think about their own writing.
Corn is one of the world's three great staple crops, yet Chinese kitchens rarely serve it as a main grain. A Zhihu answer explains how a plant from the grass family became the backbone of modern food, fuel and livestock.
A widely shared Chinese explainer argues that moving to the sea would not have rescued the ancient poor, because a diet of lean fish alone can trigger what explorers called rabbit starvation. The answer turns on fat, not food supply, and it opens a window into how Chinese readers consume everyday science.
A popular Chinese-language explainer reveals that everyday words like gege (older brother) are actually ancient loanwords, and asks why Chinese stayed in characters while most scripts became alphabets.
A Chinese science forum revisits the olm, a blind cave salamander recorded staying within a tiny patch of water for 2,569 days. The animal's extreme stillness raises questions about how much energy a body really needs when food and water never run out.
Yingxian's Sakyamuni Pagoda, built in 1056 and standing 67.31 metres tall, is leaning at its second storey and needs a restoration no one fully knows how to do. A structural engineer's widely read answer explains why the fix is a medical problem, not a carpentry one.
A Chinese psychologist's blunt advice to wives — stop policing who your husband sleeps with, as long as he keeps paying for the household — has gone viral. It taps a wider boom in Chinese essays about marriage, self-worth and emotional exhaustion.
A Zhihu essay argues Guangzhou is the rare Chinese city whose centre has barely moved in 2,200 years, citing layered roads under the Nanyue King Museum. The claim comes with strict caveats about what counts as 'ancient'.
A widely read discussion on Zhihu explores where the losers of China's imperial civil service exams ended up, and which of them left a mark on history. The answer turns out to be a layered system with a safety net at every rung.
In a new interview, director Gu You discusses his film 'First Taste of Loneliness,' arguing that being alone is not always a burden but can be a doorway to clarity. The film opens with a slow pan along the misty Fuchun River.
Yu Donglai, the founder of the Pang Dong Lai supermarket chain, has put 20 million yuan each into two research groups — one on love, one on children's education — aiming to find practical recipes for happier family life within three to five years.
A question on Zhihu asks why translations of ancient bronze inscriptions contain characters that no longer exist. The answer lies in an old scholarly technique called liding, which preserves the structure of scripts older than the modern Chinese writing system.
Frost's Descent, the last solar term of autumn, arrives on October 23, prompting Chinese social media to fill with warm greetings about health, luck and family. The seasonal ritual reveals how traditional calendars still shape everyday culture.
A Korean-made injectable derived from donated human skin is being marketed in China as a premium anti-aging treatment, with experts calling it a waste of scarce medical material. The controversy raises hard questions about how far cosmetic medicine should go.
A viral explainer on hanfu asks why Tang and Song robes show the collarbone while Ming styles seem to cover everything. The answer lies in ceremony versus daily life, and in Ming paintings of street peddlers and ladies cooling off in pavilions.
A 1911 photograph of a leaning, split pagoda in Sichuan has become a favourite among Chinese history buffs asking which relics are worth remembering. The answer says as much about how China preserves old buildings as about the tower itself.
A viral Chinese essay draws on Charlie Munger's remarks about human flaws to explain a familiar double standard: we justify our own choices while judging others harshly. The piece argues that accepting human nature, rather than fighting it, is the smarter path.
Scholars have pieced together fragments of Aristotle's Categories found at a ruined Christian monastery in Turpan, China, dating centuries before the Jesuits brought European editions to Beijing.
Chinese actress Yu Feihong, 55, has again drawn attention for her calm rejection of marriage pressure, telling fans she is neither anti-marriage nor proudly single but simply committed to being happy. Her remarks reignited a familiar online debate about whether marriage is mandatory.
A wave of Chinese self-help essays argues that cutting back — fewer clothes, fewer friends, less food — is the surest route to a good life. The genre trades luck and feng shui for daily discipline.
A wave of viral essays on Chinese media asks why ordinary lives feel like failure, and urges readers to stop comparing themselves with the polished lives on their phones. The genre blends folk wisdom and confession — and it is drawing huge audiences.
Every autumn, on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, Chinese families climb hills, sip chrysanthemum tea and check in on their parents. The Double Ninth Festival is a quiet reminder of how a fast-aging society is rethinking what care for the elderly really means.
A viral history thread on Zhihu asks which minor modern ailments were once death sentences. The answer: everyday skin infections like cellulitis, known in old China as 'yong ju,' killed with terrifying speed before antibiotics and clean surgery.
A popular explainer on Chinese Q&A site Zhihu overturns the common belief that camera flashes damage artifacts with ultraviolet light. The real culprits, it argues, are visible-light exposure, heat and visitor experience.
The Double Ninth Festival, falling on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, is a day for honoring elders, climbing heights, and admiring chrysanthemums. In Chinese culture, the repeated nines symbolize longevity and good fortune.
The 25th China Shanghai International Arts Festival opened with the debut of the Shanghai Grand Opera House, a six-year, 4,200-seat venue on the Huangpu River. City leaders and programmers say Shanghai is shifting from a stop for touring shows to a place that creates them.
In 1853, a commoner named Wang Ku'er slipped past the palace gates and peddled steamed buns inside the Forbidden City for months before anyone noticed. A rare archive from the Qing court's internal investigation bureau tells the story.
The 25th China Shanghai International Arts Festival opens October 17, with 60 productions and 170 performances. Highlights include three opera Asian premieres and the Beijing People's Art Theatre staging two versions of Hamlet.
A viral essay argues that China's old web of casual social ties has quietly dissolved, leaving people to invest deeply in a few relationships instead. Weddings, group chats and awkward banquet tables are the clearest evidence.
A wave of Chinese-language essays is reviving an old idea: that excess in feeling, force, and cleverness brings ruin. The articles offer an unusually honest window into how ordinary readers think about balance, family, and self-protection.
A viral Chinese science essay explains why horses doze on their feet and why panicked bystanders keep calling the police on perfectly healthy napping animals. It is part of a wave of curious, non-political explainer writing that Chinese readers devour online.
Red king crabs have exploded across the Barents Sea, wrecking seabed ecosystems, yet restaurant prices keep climbing. The answer lies in brutal Arctic fishing conditions, tight quotas and a supply chain built on risk.
Data compression lets us send twenty photos in a blink and stream HD movies instantly, yet almost nobody notices it. A popular Chinese explainer argues this invisible technology is one of computing's most underrated achievements.
A 15-part Chinese essay series on psychological healing is drawing millions of readers. Its eighth installment asks whether three very different people—the pursuer, the self-reliant, and the one who flees—are actually carrying the same wound.
A Chinese essay explores a new kind of intimacy — a relationship that exists only through a phone screen, never in person. It joins a growing genre of writing about modern emotional life in China.
A viral essay by an 81-year-old Chinese grandfather argues that late-life marriage runs on conscience and tolerance, not romance, while a second popular piece examines the quiet guilt of adults still seeking parental approval.
A widely shared Chinese essay revisits Harvard's decades-long research on happiness and distills it into three everyday habits. It lands at a moment when Chinese readers are rethinking what a good life actually costs.
A viral Chinese essay about a son who asks why his family stayed poor has become a meditation on parental sacrifice. It raises a harder question: when does family devotion become control?
A sexual assault case involving seven Cornell students has reignited scrutiny of fraternity life and its rituals. The debate over brotherhood, secrecy and accountability now reaches well beyond American campuses.
A popular Zhihu essay asks why bugs never evolved to look cute enough to spare. The answer lies in millions of years of human risk detection, not in the insects themselves.
A cluster of playful science essays on Chinese question-and-answer site Zhihu is drawing big readership: why humans never became cold-blooded, why rhinos were never farmed, and whether whales knew the Earth was round first.
Chinese Western food is a homegrown cuisine that blends European technique with local staples like rice, soy and wok fire. A Quora-style essay argues this hybrid tradition is one of the world's most underrated ways of eating.
Modern Chinese official stamps are round, but traditional personal seals are square — a shape that survived for centuries for reasons deeper than habit. The answer lies in how a carved block of stone marks a page.
A viral science explainer flips the usual assumption: a chicken jerks its head not to move it, but to hold it perfectly still while its body walks. The trick is a reflex humans share but rarely notice.
A Zhihu essay reveals that the chainsaw began as a surgical saw for difficult births, not logging. The story traces how a tool can drift far from its original purpose — and why Chinese readers love such riddles.
China's traditional calendar marks Cold Dew today, the first solar term with the character for cold in its name. It is a season of chrysanthemum wine, late fishing and gentle advice to put on another layer.
Chinese speakers call overseas Chinese neighborhoods 'Tangren Jie' — Tang People Street — not a transliteration of 'Chinatown.' The name reaches back to the Tang dynasty and a 19th-century diplomatic diary.
A White House reporter's question about JD Vance's weight loss put Chinese pickled cabbage, or suancai, in the global spotlight. We look at what the dish really is and whether fermentation can actually help you shed pounds.
A wave of viral Chinese essays argues that getting rich, staying calm or aging well comes down to mindset, not grind. The genre, popular on Toutiao and Zhihu, blends self-help, folk wisdom and sharp cultural observation.
A wave of Chinese lifestyle essays argues that midlife exhaustion comes from being too accommodating. The pieces urge readers to manage their own lives and stop fixing everyone else's.
A new wave of young Chinese travelers is swapping checklists and photo spots for slow, immersive stays in ordinary neighborhoods. The shift favors depth over speed, and locals over landmarks.
Beltfish, or hairtail, is a beloved staple of Chinese seafood, yet Western diners barely touch it. The reasons lie in farming, fishing and food culture rather than flavor.
A Chinese science writer explains why the immune system, ruthless everywhere else in the body, lets trillions of gut bacteria live in peace — and what happens when that truce breaks.
A quiet genre of Chinese online writing trades celebrity gossip for everyday wisdom about regret, aging and small habits. Its popularity says something about how millions of readers are looking for calm.
A 1958 British case of a man who regained sight after 58 years of blindness ended in depression and death, and it still shapes how doctors think about vision, identity and the mind.
A National Day feature celebrates ordinary laborers — repairers, cooks, warehouse hands — whose satisfaction comes from a job done well, not applause. It is a small window into how Chinese culture honors skilled, unglamorous work.
Chinese social media users are asking food and drink makers to bring back plain white sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. The debate mixes nostalgia, nutrition science and a changing national palate.
On October 1, Chinese social feeds fill with polished National Day greetings, from 'May all go well' to 'a romance of 1.4 billion people.' The copy-paste holiday post has become a quiet ritual of belonging.
A popular answer on Zhihu explains how anyone can judge Chinese calligraphy by looking at line quality, not meaning. It walks through the five major scripts, from round seal strokes to crisp regular script.
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