China has passed a law that will curtail the rights of minorities, under the pretext of defending social cohesion and national unity. From now on, minority languages ​​will disappear from education, religious practices will be monitored, and intermarriage will be encouraged. The so-called law to promote ethnic unity and progress, passed by the National People's Congress (NPC), is justified as supporting the development of ethnic minority communities. However, human rights groups consider it a tool of repression.

A year ago, Donald Trump took office as President of the United States. Economically, this year has been marked by the trade war unleashed by the US president and his tariffs on foreign products, especially those manufactured by China. The Asian giant saw its exports to the US fall in 2025, but commercially it did not have a bad year: in 2025, China recorded a trade surplus of $1.189 trillion (€1.02 trillion), representing a 19.8% increase compared to 2024. During the past year, marked by tariff tensions between the world's two largest economies, Chinese exports totaled $3.77 trillion (€3.23 trillion), 3.2% more than in 2024, while imports remained stable (€2.8 trillion).

China has unequivocally condemned the United States' intervention in Venezuela and called for the immediate release of Nicolás Maduro. Unlike the European Union, it has been direct in accusing Donald Trump of violating international law and the principles of the UN Charter. It remains to be seen whether, beyond the statements of its president, Xi Jinping, it will take any further steps in a conflict where it has little room to maneuver.

In 1982, Hans Magnus Enzensberger proposed an ironic hypothesis about "underdevelopment as the highest stage of socialism." He was referring to communism, nothing like the social democracy championed by New York's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. A few years after Enzensberger's insightful observation, the joke was over: in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Finally, East Germans, and after them the citizens of all the Soviet republics, could escape the prison that a communist world marked by scarcity, bureaucracy, terror, waste, disinformation, and an inability to innovate had become. Nothing worked; everyone was working for themselves. It was the end of totalitarian societies that, through terror, had guaranteed themselves fanatical support or passive loyalty. The fall of communism seemed definitive and total. But history is never linear.

Ferran Sáez Mateu He doesn't waste time on social media. He devotes himself to reading and writing, playing and listening to music, and walking. He lives a classic, old-fashioned, in-person life. He sleeps little and daydreams. Now he's written a disturbing novel with the title of an essay: The other hypothesis (Electa). A nightmare. The narrator is an old man, 141 years old, who doesn't have much time left before facing the state of LVF (Physical Vital Limit), set at 150 years old, and then becoming an EPV, that is, a person framed in the Permanent Virtual State, with a digitalized brain, without a biological body. At the end of the 22nd century, death is dead: it is an obsolete category.

Barcelona is gaining greater air connectivity with China. This was one of the main objectives of El Prat Airport following the shock of the pandemic and one of the reasons defended by Aena, the airport operator, for expanding its facilities. With the resumption of routes in recent years, more and more passengers are flying from Barcelona to the Asian giant, and so far this year the numbers recorded before the pandemic have almost doubled. Traffic to China has grown 64% between January and August compared to the same period last year. In just eight months, Barcelona Airport has seen 210,600 travelers coming from or going to China. During all of 2024, the number of passengers reached nearly 221,000. "It's a priority market," emphasizes Eva Valenzuela, director of El Prat Airport.

The official documents published by the Chinese government They tend to be repetitive and bureaucratic. But reading them in detail, taking notes, can lead us to discover gems that help us better understand China's worldview. A few days ago, I was reading the document. Made in China 2025, the most important technology strategy that China has released in recent decades. Published in 2015, the document identified the cutting-edge technological sectors in which China should invest to catch up with the West. But what caught my attention was a sentence at the beginning of the strategy that explained the "foundation" by which modern powers have become "global powers." Curiously, that foundation was not technology or militaries, nor alliances or ideology. For the Party, the basis for becoming a superpower is "manufacturing."

China is consolidating its position as the big winner from Donald Trump's chaotic hyperactivity. While the US president grabs the headlines for a global trade and political reconfiguration accelerated by tariff threats and the erosion of traditional alliances, Xi Jinping's regime offers itself as a guarantee of stability for an alternative recomposition of global balances.

Against the will expressed by French citizens at the polls, the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, decided not to allow the formation of a New Popular Front government and instead forced one formed by a combination of right-wing forces. The justification for this dubiously democratic move was to have a stable government that would serve as a guarantee for addressing France's economic problems. A complete success: a year later, the French conservative government has already had two prime ministers: Michel Barnier, the first, had to leave office four months after taking office, when he lost to a double vote of no confidence from the far right and the left, and the current one, François Bayrou, also finds himself in an uncertain situation. An example of stability and solvency, indeed. It seems that today, even the European right is no longer what it used to be.

1. Surprise. Pedro Sánchez has surprised everyone with a far-reaching—and therefore risky—gesture: his trip to China—via Vietnam—to meet with President Xi Jinping, in the midst of the crisis caused by the explosion of Trump's tariff delusions, in the umpteenth manifestation of his nihilistic impulses.