The country's once-robust trade in serious literature has withered under an increasingly materialistic, results-oriented society.
Not everyone in China is proud of the way their government handled a recent fight with the tech giant.
What effect will the Southern Weekend incident have on the future of Chinese media?
Chinese web users seem to lean toward Obama, but mostly seem love the populism of American politics, a sharp contrast to their own system as well as a reminder of how much the two societies have in common.
The same patriotic feelings that send Chinese to rally for national sovereignty over disputed islands might also explain their surprising and apparently conflicting answers to an online discussion.
A less insular and more worldly China may be turning away from the sport of Mao Zedong's ping pong diplomacy, once a source of tremendous national pride and obsession.
China wants inventors and entrepreneurs, but its schools, built around the notorious gaokao exam, are still designed to produce cookie-cutter engineers and accountants
Ever-controversial Global Times published a surprisingly frank editorial that hit on a long-running Chinese debate over reform, governance, and democracy.
Mayor Wang Zhongbing got a little carried away when his town was awarded a contract to produce steel and iron.
Half a century after the famine that killed perhaps 30 million people, censors have quietly loosened their ban and citizens are moving past the taboo. Why now?
A new U.S. policy that restricts Confucius Institutes starts a debate about China's influence abroad.
When officials spent billions of yuan to blanket Qingdao with pricey foliage, citizens fought back online.
Web users fume over Chinese fishermen held hostage by North Koreans, another turn in a complex relationship going back to the Korean War.
The Chinese national identity has long been tied up with its language, for natives and foreigners alike.
Chen Guangcheng's decision to take shelter in the U.S. embassy extends a modern tradition in China of seeing America as an idealized alternative to their own system.
China's ultra-popular, Twitter-like service moves too fast for censors or propagandists to keep up, but it's changing more than just the spread of information.
As Chinese students flood private American high schools, aided by high-priced "consultants," they are changing concepts of success and security back home, and leading ambitious schools to seek out more of the eager (and often full-paying) mainlanders.
Long before the NBA arrived, missionaries, revolutionaries, and communists helped make the game ubiquitous here.
Alienated and struggling to get by in China's big cities, migrant workers brave chaotic lines and difficult journeys for a chance to reconnect with what they left back home.
Christianity's most important holiday is a big event here, but state regulation of religion and a suspicion of all things Western can sometimes get in the way. And, yes, it's too commercialized.