Qdaily

» see qdaily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yi Xianfeng had helped found CBN Weekly, one of the better business magazines in China, and in February 2014 he left to build the web version of what he thought a magazine was. Qdaily launched in Shanghai on the 17th of that month under a company called Shanghai Peiper Culture Communication, with a slogan that translates roughly as curiosity drives your world.

The editorial position was a deliberate refusal. Everything else in Chinese digital media was racing toward personalized recommendation, the feed that learns you and narrows accordingly, and Qdaily went the other way: a front page assembled by hand, at a slower publishing rhythm, with longer pieces about business and about how cities worked. It ran a side operation called the Curiosity Research Institute that published surveys and reader polls on ordinary questions. The audience skewed young and urban, and it read things all the way through. By 2018 the site was drawing around 1.07 million readers a month on the web, and it was making money, which almost nothing in that category was.

It was also entirely in Chinese and about a mainland that I have only ever read about. There is no version of this I could have been a reader of, and no equivalent of it I can point to from here. It goes in the file for the same reason the smaller Chinese graves do: the thing that killed it is legible in any language.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually published ~

Two pieces show the register it worked in. It covered Beijing's clearing of what officials called the low-end population, the 2017 campaign that turned migrant workers out of their homes in winter, at a time when the story was being actively compressed elsewhere. And on the day Liu Xiaobo died in July 2017 it ran a list of twenty books about freedom, with no obituary attached and no name in the headline, which is how you say something in a system that reads headlines first.

Mostly it was not doing that. Mostly it was writing about retail and architecture and what a brand was doing, competently and at length. The political content was a small fraction of the output, and the regulator's file was built out of that fraction.

~ four rounds ~

The first came on 13 July 2018, when Shanghai's cyberspace administration issued a rectification notice stating that Shanghai Peiper was carrying out internet news services without a license and had assembled a news editorial team it was not entitled to have. The specific complaints were original news columns and the reprinting of foreign political coverage.

The second was heavier. On 3 August 2018 the Shanghai and Beijing offices jointly summoned the company and ordered a month of rectification across every platform under the Cybersecurity Law, running to 2 September. The app came down and the Weibo and WeChat accounts were muted. Articles were deleted and whole columns disappeared. The third round arrived on 22 April 2019, when readers found the app gone from the Chinese app stores with no notice. The fourth was 27 May 2019: a self-announced three-month halt, comments switched off, the app fully delisted. New articles kept surfacing for a while inside a second app called Haoqiguai, which had previously been a wallpaper app and was now quietly doing something else. In June the staff was cut, and editor-in-chief Yang Ying told the New York Times that official interference with critical reporting was destroying the business.

~ the last update ~

It came back at midnight on 28 August 2019 with four surviving columns and one new one, and a note saying that a free soul mattered more than the things it had lost, the things being the commercial success. Within two hours the WeChat version of that note displayed the standard message about content being unviewable due to violations. A few hours after that the same piece was gone from the site and the app too.

What ran from then on was a fraction of a publication. The last update went up on 13 November 2020 and then the client, the mini program, the WeChat account and the Weibo all stopped together, with no farewell post and no explanation from anyone. The domain started returning 502 Bad Gateway and has been returning it since. In October 2019 Alexa had still ranked the site 1,557th in China.

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