Google has confirmed that it bans the display of adverts for virtual private networks (VPN) in China – the very tools many Chinese people rely on to access Google’s own websites.

VPNs allow internet users in mainland China to access overseas websites blocked by the so-called Great Firewall.

Although the software is essential for Chinese internet users to use Google’s search engine, email and cloud services, VPN providers are blocked from promoting themselves through Google Ads in the country…

He is so focused on keeping his start-up alive that he can't sleep at night.

She was asked in an interview if she would be willing to break up with her boyfriend for the job.

A young couple wants their own family but has no energy for sex after work.

These are some of the struggles faced by the hundreds of thousands of young workers in China’s tech industry.

They are people like Yu Haoran, a 26-year-old computer science major, who in 2014 founded Jisuanke, a start-up in Beijing’s hi-tech…

“I will be your breadwinner.”

“Girls studying biology are my type. Older women I don’t like.”

These are just a few of the examples of messages emblazoned on banners hanging across Chinese campuses on March 7, an informal “Girls’ Day” invented by college students supposedly to celebrate the youth of women. 

But these public banners are sexist, not celebratory. And the bullying of those who rightly protested the messages is an ominous sign for gender equality in the world’s most populous…

There are fast computers, and then there are “exascale” computers, machines so quick on their (rubber) feet that they boggle the mind.

To be exact, they are supercomputers size of a room capable of carrying out a quintillion, or a billion billion, calculations every second.

They don’t exist just yet, but once they do they will be able to take on complex tasks such as climate change modeling, as well as speeding up the development of demanding technologies like artificial intelligence.

Amid…

In the US, the ability to afford avocado toast has become a measure of middle-class millennial success.

Now young Chinese are discovering homegrown bougie symbols of their own.

At first, it was pricy imported cherries. Those who are financially successful enough to afford them were said to have achieved “cherry freedom.”

But now it’s “Xiangchun freedom” – having enough in the bank to be able to afford the coveted leaf of the mahogany tree.

What are Xiangchun?

Xiangchun are the leaves of…

Tibetan Buddhist belief holds that when the Dalai Lama dies, his soul will be reincarnated in the body of a child.

China has no problem with that – as long as it’s the right kind of law-abiding child, its foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Historically, successive Dalai Lamas have been found within the borders of Tibet. But that tradition could be coming to an end, since the current spiritual leader of the Tibetan people left China following a 1959 uprising against Communist Party rule.

The…

In the Inkstone index, we break down China into the simplest possible chunk: a single number. What can one number tell us about China? Quite a lot.

China’s first cloned police puppy has started training.

Kunxun, a two-month-old female Kunming wolfdog, was bred using DNA from an award-winning police sniffer dog. Earlier this month she began training at Kunming Police Dog Base in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, according to media reports.

The puppy was born after scientists took a DNA sample from a seven-year-old female named Huahuangma, who has won a string of awards for helping to crack multiple cases.

The cloning project was…

In the Inkstone index, we break down China into the simplest possible chunk: a single number. What can one number tell us about China? Quite a lot.

Growing up in the Netherlands, Linde Welberg knew she had the most loving parents a child could ask for. Yet she had always felt something was missing from her life.

Long before her father and mother told her she was adopted, she instinctively knew it.

“I felt a part of me was missing,” she says.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the US city of Philadelphia, Lianna Fogg was going through similar turmoil. “I shared the same dream of every adoptee,” says Fogg. “Not just to find my birth…