Year: 2025

When Chinese fast-fashion giant SHEIN opened its first permanent store in Paris, it expected applause — not protest. Instead, France erupted. Demonstrators flooded the streets, unions called strikes, and government watchdogs uncovered illegal products on SHEIN’s platform — from banned weapons to child-like dolls. Within days, France froze the company’s operations, turning a retail launch into a diplomatic showdown. Behind the glittering façade of Paris fashion, a deeper battle is unfolding — between speed and tradition, profit and principle, China’s industrial might and Europe’s cultural pride. This is how the Red Dragon of Fashion met French resistance.

From a retail giant based on “channel dominance” to rapid “capital dominance” expansion, and now a “debt dominance” end, Suning has been dragged into a heavy debt spiral. Many are shocked at how quickly this once-thriving empire has collapsed—just ten years from its peak to its fall.

China’s Shenzhou-20 manned space mission is postponing its return to Earth indefinitely after their spacecraft was hit by what Chinese officials called a “small piece of orbital debris.” In a statement, China’s space agency says that safety checks are underway, but that they’ll hold off on their return which was scheduled for Wednesday. NBC’s Janis Mackey Frayer reports for TODAY.

An experimental reactor developed in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for an almost endless supply of nuclear energy.

China’s economy looks calm on the surface, but the numbers tell another story. By the end of September 2025, Beijing’s fiscal deficit had soared to 45 percent — nearly 9 trillion yuan against 19 trillion in revenue — and it’s on track to break 50 percent by year-end. To fill the gap, the government is raising taxes, squeezing citizens, and quietly printing money through “outright reverse repos.” This episode breaks down the data, the debt machine behind it, and why these policies could push China’s economy past its breaking point.

Beijing just did the unthinkable — it quietly hiked taxes on gold. Overnight, every gram of gold in China just got more expensive, and millions of ordinary savers are paying the price. This isn’t a policy tweak — it’s a panic move from a government running out of cash, ideas, and credibility. In this video, I break down how China’s new gold tax works, why it’s really a desperate grab for money, and what it says about the crumbling state of China’s economy.

By drawing parallels to the French Revolution, this narrative illuminates China’s century-long quest for modernization as an unfinished great revolution. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution toppled imperial rule like Louis XVI’s execution, yet failed to forge a stable republic. Mao’s 1949 ascent mirrored the Jacobins’ radical terror, morphing Marxism into a secular faith that bred submissive subjects through coercion and fervor. Deng’s 1978 pragmatism echoed Napoleon’s order, prioritizing economic stability and market reforms over democratic ideals, yielding prosperity but entrenched crony capitalism and inequality.Xi’s 2012 rise signals a Napoleonic restoration: personal dictatorship, ideological revival, and digital surveillance reimpose autocracy, freezing the shift from subjects to citizens. True republican transformation—from autocracy to democracy—remains elusive, a protracted struggle measured in centuries, with cycles of idealism, reversal, and deferred promise.

Over the past 30 years, China’s rapid rise has been driven by an export-oriented foreign investment model. Foreign direct investment, infrastructure investment, state-owned enterprise fixed asset investment, and real estate investment—these four forces once jointly constructed the miracle of China’s economic rise. Today, as these four pillars have almost completely collapsed, China’s economy is facing four ticking time bombs: the economic momentum loss from the sharp reduction in foreign investment, the local government debt risks accumulated from infrastructure investment, excessive subsidies and liabilities in state-owned enterprises’ capacity reduction, and the complete collapse of the real estate investment bubble.