出國趣

Another warning sign for China’s economy: falling consumer credit A crackdown on aggressive debt collectors is good news and bad news Oct 14th 2026|Shanghai|4 min read CHINA’s FRUGAL citizens are getting more so. Lending to households has been shrinking for most of the year. Short-term loans to consumers fell by 8.3% in September compared with the year before, the steepest drop on record. In Augus...

Is the semiconductor industry headed for an almighty crash? There are reasons to believe a bust, if it comes, will be less vertiginous than the boom Oct 15th 2026|5 min read For more than four decades the semiconductor industry has been governed by two laws as dependable as any in physics. The first is that the number of transistors, the tiny switches etched onto a chip, keeps rising. The second i...

AI often makes writing worse. (Even if it makes it better) Why is complicated. But it’s not about the damn em-dash Sep 24th 2026|4 min read Writing using artificial intelligence is everywhere. It has crept into elite newspapers (the* Wall Street Journal* ran an op-ed drafted by it) and elite publishing houses (Grasset in France finds itself defending a star author accused—falsely, he claims—of usi...

Chinese students abroad are more liberal than at home They see faults in China’s system as well as in democracies, surveys show Oct 1st 2026|4 min read America should expect that educating China’s young people will give it “moral, intellectual and commercial influence”, wrote Edmund James, a university president, in 1906. In subsequent years, dozens of China’s brightest went to study at the Massac...

The truth and the lies about Islam in Europe Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do   Sep 10th 2026|6 min read   PANIC ABOUT Islam in Europe is spreading. In several European countries half the population now thinks it is incompatible with Western values. On September 6th the populist-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt , its large...

China would face a “hellscape” in a war over Taiwan New tech may give America an edge Sep 15th 2026|TAIPEI AND HONOLULU|7 min read   IN AN OFFICE block on the outskirts of Taipei, Chan Hsiang-chih opens a workshop door and offers a glimpse at the future of warfare in the Taiwan Strait. Inside sit two torpedo-shaped undersea drones, prototypes for Taiwan’s navy. “That’s where the bomb goes,” he say...

Are you committed to your company or your team? Employees have overlapping identities at work. That’s a challenge for bosses   Sep 10th 2026|4 min read Humans are conditioned to form allegiances extremely quickly, a type of behaviour sometimes called the “minimal group effect”. In a famous series of experiments, a social psychologist called Henri Tajfel found that you can divide strangers into gro...

The pressure to have children collides with a fierce work culture Aug 24th 2026|5 min read   For those unaccustomed to truth in advertising, employers in China can be astonishingly forthright in their help-wanted notices. Huangshi, a city in Hubei, recently sought investment-promotion officers under 35 years old, specifying “men preferred”. A high-speed rail operator in Lanzhou wanted women, but o...

THE British government currently slaps a 5% Value Added Tax (VAT) on sanitary products. But some view the “tampon tax” as an affront to women, who have little choice but to bear the burden of the levy. The government has been prevented from reducing the rate to zero by European Union rules, which limit how much countries can lower VAT rates on some goods. But on March 17th, George Osborne rummaged...

China’s mysterious new billionaires are conquering the world And refusing to talk to the press   Jul 19th 2026|Shanghai|7 min read   Early last year, when DeepSeek , a Chinese artificial-intelligence lab, was causing panic among its Western rivals, almost nothing was known about Liang Wenfeng, its founder. Mr Liang remains a mysterious figure, but at least one thing is clear. As DeepSeek closes a...

The six stages of holiday-making Two weeks off, but how many days of relaxation? Aug 13th 2026|4 min read   It’s summer, in the northern hemisphere at least, which means emptier offices and fuller airports. In theory, a holiday is a time to properly relax. In practice, there are several stages to pass through before that moment arrives, and several more to experience before you are fully immersed...

How much would you pay for a smarter baby? Startups claim they can screen embryos for everything from genetic diseases to IQ. Not everyone is convinced   Aug 10th 2026|San Francisco and New York|9 min read   Late last year New Yorkers noticed a series of strange advertisements on the subway. “Have your best baby,” one promised. “IQ is 50% genetic,” noted another. Predictably, they stirred controve...

South Korea’s stock-market boom is collapsing** spectacularly**   It may be a harbinger   Jul 29th 2026|5 min read   America’s giant technology companies have gone from printing money to incinerating it. The market reckons Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will collectively report negative free cashflows next year, owing to their extravagant spending on data centres. Yet real fortunes are being...

Don’t blame supermarkets for your expensive** groceries** Saying greedy shops have caused rising food prices is populist slop（垃圾內容）   Jul 20th 2026|Washington, DC|4 min read   FOR MANY characters in fiction, the central drama of their story concerns their grocery bills. Jean Valjean is imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread; Mrs Lovett strikes an unholy alliance with Sweeney Todd for access...

Briefing | Computational bias AI models’ values are very different from most people’s They are more secular and more liberal—unless they’re made in China   Jun 25th 2026|12 min read Imagine that you are having trouble with your in-laws, who are meddling in your marriage. You ask ChatGPT what to do. It tells you not to try to win them over. Keep a respectful distance and don’t justify every decisio...

Science & technology | Well Informed The chemicals that reduce wrinkles Vitamins, applied properly, can partially reverse the effects of ageing Jun 5th 2026|3 min read  ABIOCHEMISTRY textbook sometimes feels like essential reading when shopping for wrinkle-reducing products. Their labels list molecules like retinoids, antioxidants, peptides and exfoliating acids. The names might be familiar, b...

The World Cup doesn’t understand America John Prideaux, our executive editor, on why America is a spectacular place to host the football tournament   Jun 27th 2026|3 min read Fans of soccerball love to complain about America. With its unbridled capitalism, it has the gall to treat football as a business. “Hydration breaks” have been introduced in this year’s World Cup. Fans suspect these are the f...

China’s high-tech rise is leaving much of the country behind That could make a** starkly unequal** country even more so Jun 2nd 2026|TIANSHUI|6 min read Listen to this story LIKE MANY cities in China’s hinterland, Tianshui, in the western province of Gansu, is full of dusty and disused factories. But over the past decade it has also become an unlikely high-tech hub. New industrial parks have sprou...

Sex tourists fuel outrage about vice in Japan The debates do not have women’s interests at heart Jun 4th 2026|Tokyo|4 min read MAI, a 34-year-old woman in Tokyo, used to work at a hospital. But when covid-19 overwhelmed the wards, she found her work too stressful. A single mother, she also needed money for her family. Lured by higher pay, she entered the sex trade, first working as a porn actress...

How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism The me-first doctrine is a threat to prosperity Jun 4th 2026|5 min read Something new is stirring on the left. A fresh crop of socialists want to remake the economy with price controls,** hefty **wealth taxes and a spree of nationalisations. Supercharged by fury over Gaza, they are winning voters at a formidable pace. Many rose to prominence only recently,...

Leaders | Don’t look back in Changhua How East Asia should respond to its China shock As they deindustrialise, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan must reform May 28th 2026|4 min read AMERICA’S artificial-intelligence** boom** has put the rich economies of north-east Asia into overdrive. Taiwan’s output is growing at a blistering 14% annual pace, thanks to soaring sales of chips and servers for data cen...

The secrets to a good employee survey Likert or not Mar 19th 2026|4 min read 1. “This sentence is false” is an example of a logical inconsistency known as the liar paradox. If this sentence is true, then it is indeed false. But if this sentence is false, then it must be true. This is the kind of thing that makes philosophers go weak at the knees and gives normal people a headache. 2. A small echo...

The world wants Chinese tech. China is determined to keep it China’s rivals are learning how to get what China won’t share Apr 20th 2026|5 min read THEY USED to gripe about too much technology transfer in China. But in the past year or so, foreign business and political leaders** have started to fret that too little is happening.** No longer do they worry so much about Western tech landing in Chin...

China | Chaguan Xi Jinping wants China to read more—as long as it’s the right books A new campaign to put down phones and pick up classics Apr 27th 2026|5 min read THE BINHAI library, often called China’s most beautiful, is** breathtaking**. *Swirling shelves* of books rise in gravity-defying stacks to a high ceiling in a light-dappled room: a modern cathedral to learning. No wonder the library, i...

Ageing workers in East Asia are essential. More are needed Yet they often face high barriers to employment and unpalatable options Apr 27th 2026|SEOUL AND TOKYO|6 min read HONDA TAMIKO began working as a child on her family’s farm back when Japan was at war with America. Now 93, Ms Honda still puts in a hard day’s toil as a janitor at a McDonald’s branch in Kumamoto, in southern Japan. Ms Honda sa...