How we work

This publication exists because a large amount of useful writing about productivity tools and working habits is published in Chinese and never appears in English. Everything below is a rule we hold ourselves to, and most of them are enforced before an article can be published rather than by good intentions.

At least three sources, always

No article is built from a single piece. Every one draws on at least three distinct Chinese publications, and no single source may supply more than 60 percent of the evidence behind it. An article that fails either test does not publish. You can see which outlets an article used at the top of it and in full at the foot.

We work from facts, not from prose

Between the Chinese sources and the writing sits an evidence ledger: a list of atomic facts, each one bound to the source it came from. The writing is done from that ledger. This is not a translation service and there is no stage at which source prose is rewritten into English - facts are not copyrightable, expression is, and the separation is structural rather than a promise.

Three steps, in this order, every time. The original Chinese articles, read in Chinese and named in full at the foot of every piece. The facts we pulled out of them, each one still attached to the article it came from. The explainer, written from those facts and from nothing else.

You do not have to take that on trust. Open The evidence at the foot of any article and the middle step is there: every fact we extracted, grouped under the Chinese article it came from, with a link to it. Nobody publishes their working, which is exactly why we do.

Every number traces to a citation

If a figure appears here, a named source said it. An unsourced statistic blocks publication. Where a source reports an experience, we attribute it - "sspai's reviewer found X" - and we never write a first-person test we did not run.

Explainers, not news

The sources are news feeds; this is not. The question here is always how does this work and why does it matter, never what was announced today. That is more useful six months later, which is the point.

Availability, honestly

Many of these tools are hard or impossible to use outside mainland China, and several need a Chinese phone number. Where the sources say so, articles carry a "for readers outside China" note covering availability, pricing and the closest Western equivalent. Where the sources are silent, we say they are silent rather than guessing.

Corrections

When something is wrong we fix it on the page and say what changed and when, at the foot of the article. We do not quietly edit a published piece.

Tell us: corrections@eastofsilicon.com. Point at the sentence and, if you can, at the source - every claim here is traceable to a named Chinese article, so a correction can usually be settled by reading the one it came from.

What is not here

• No trackers. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party fonts or embeds. On an article the only script is the light and dark toggle. There is exactly one exception in the whole site and it is named here rather than buried: the subscribe form loads Cloudflare Turnstile, an anti-bot check, on that page only. It sets no cookie for us and reports nothing about you to us - and an open form on an open web is a form that fills with robots.
• No paywall and no email wall. The feed is complete and open.
• No sponsored posts. Nothing here has been paid for by anyone whose product it discusses.