We are excited to announce an evolution in our company’s brand identity. We began as a single newsletter in 2016. Over the years, we have grown into a multimedia and business services platform, and now our name is finally growing up, too. Introducing: The China Project.
We are excited to announce that on September 1, 2022, SupChina will become known as The China Project. What started as a passion project with one daily newsletter in 2016 has grown into a full-fledged news, data, and business services platform. It is time that our name evolves to reflect all that we already are today — and all that we will become in the future.
What has not changed is our mission, which was, is, and always will be the same. We exist to help the world understand China better. We do this by delivering contextual analysis, expert insight, and untold stories through the web, email, podcasts, videos, and live events.
Starting in 2019, we began to take things beyond media to more fully achieve our mission. Through our consulting marketplace, business intelligence data products, and bespoke reports, we began to help people connect, make decisions, and do business.
In the past six years, we have:
- Acquired the crown jewel of China podcasts — the Sinica Podcast — and built out the Sinica Podcast Network to 10 shows and counting!
- Expanded from just one newsletter to a portfolio of six, covering everything from business to culture to nonprofit initiatives.
- Created two successful multiyear conferences that bring together giants in the China knowledge space (The SupChina Women’s Conference and NEXTChina).
- Launched our business intelligence data product, ChinaEDGE, to help decision makers navigate China’s complex business ecosystem.
We now reach more than 2 million people per month, publish more than 2,000 articles per year, produce more than 200 podcasts per year, and count more than 35 Fortune 100 companies among our corporate clients and sponsors.
The world changed, too
When we launched in 2016, the world was a different place. It was a time before trade wars, pandemics, supply chain shocks, global-scale military conflicts, and the emergence of unabashed authoritarianism in countless countries around the world.
We had one newsletter that aimed to inform a small audience of experts and enthusiasts about the latest happenings on the ground in China. “SupChina” made sense.
Fast-forward to today, and everything has changed. The trade war that began in 2018 pushed U.S.-China relations onto a steep downhill slope. The pandemic put China at the center of the largest global catastrophe in decades — and China is still at the center of that today. Kinetic warfare made its unbelievable return to continental Europe and exposed fault lines in global ideological allegiances. And speaking of ideological allegiances — China’s president has in recent years reminded the world that China’s government and its policies are much more ideological than people assumed and not driven by the ultra pragmatism that many came to take for granted from China in the past 40 years. And rightly or wrongly, China’s ideology is almost uniformly viewed in the West as being out of line with the global norms that also came to be taken for granted in the past 40 years.
In short, everything is in flux.
Amid these global circumstances, the name “SupChina” no longer makes sense — it falls short of conveying the seriousness of our subject matter and the quality of the work we do.
Why we chose “The China Project”
We cover everything from technology supply chains to youth culture, from geopolitics to architecture. We have free content and newsletters, paid premium content, business databases, and business services. We produce videos and host conferences.
We produce policy white papers for congressional committee members and documentaries about LGBTQ subcultures in third-tier Chinese cities. Indeed, it would be hard to say in one sentence exactly what we are as a company — but through it all, we are undeniably The China Project.
Everything we do, everyone we employ or work with, and everyone who engages with us as an audience member or client is animated by one theme — China.
We are neither pro-China nor anti-China. (We are neither pro or anti any country, for that matter.) Our team is international — Chinese citizens, Chinese diaspora, and foreigners who live or lived in China — but we do not seek to represent China. We care about China because it is important to the world in absolute terms and important to each one of us as individuals in relative terms — but we have no preordained outcome in mind for how China will ultimately be received by the world.
We are dedicated purely and simply to helping the world understand China better, more contextually, and with greater care, so that better decisions can be made. Hardly any important decision can be made these days in government, business, technology, education, or art without considering the China angle.
What we are today may yet change more in the future, but we will always be The China Project.
Into action
What does all of this mean for you? First and foremost, when you start to see The China Project pop up in your newsfeeds, inboxes, and elsewhere on the internet — you’ll know it’s us.
If you are already following us on social media, don’t worry — our name may be changing on those platforms, but you’re still following us and don’t need to do anything.
If you subscribe to our newsletters, make sure to keep an eye out for newsletters sent from our new @thechinaproject.com addresses, which should begin in mid-August.
Even better would be to proactively whitelist our new email domain so we assuredly end up in your inbox and not your spam folder.
Lastly, tell all your friends! As we enter this exciting new phase of our development, we want to reach, inform, and engage more people than ever before. Share us liberally! So much of what we do is free, so why shouldn’t everyone read us?!
And for those of you who want to support independent journalism and ensure we can keep doing what we’re doing indefinitely — become a paid subscriber. With entry-level options starting at just $10 per month and corporate group subscriptions ranging into much larger numbers and carrying with them many more benefits and features, there is something for everyone.
