Current Affairs

The Economist cover, November 15, 2025 Haven’t had time to read it yet — dropping the link here first. Download this issue of The Economist EPUB format TE-2025-11-15.epub

The General Office of the State Council has officially released the schedule for public holidays and swapped workdays in 2026, covering New Year’s Day, Spring Festival, Qingming, Labor Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and National Day. Notice of the General Office of the State Council on Certain Holidays in 2026 (Telegram [2025] No. 7) # To the people’s governments of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, and to the ministries and commissions and agencies directly under the State Council:

Is the gold bull catching its breath, or is it over? Gold is generally considered a safe-haven asset, typically shining when the economy runs too hot or too cold. By Xu Xiaoqing Chief Macro Strategist, Dunhe Asset Management Co., Ltd. Since the start of 2025, gold has climbed steadily from around $2,600 an ounce, at one point approaching $4,400 — a peak gain of nearly 69% for the year. But from October 20, it slid to as low as $3,900 within six trading days, a drop of 11%. Either this gold bull market has ended, or this is merely a pause for breath.

Light and Fatigue in the Short Drama Factory The yellow earth of the Bailu Plain in Xi’an had been beaten into sticky mud by relentless, cold rain. Thirty-odd crew members huddled under a draughty, faux-antique colonnade, squatting on their heels while shoveling down souring thirteen-yuan boxed meals of stewed cabbage and fat pork. Before the downpour had fully slackened, director Wang Jing ground her cheap cigarette stub into the mud and rasped an order across the courtyard: the call sheet demanded twenty-two scenes wrapped before dawn; miss one, and not a single soul on set would close their eyes tonight.

Across more than two thousand Chinese county towns, an irreversible systemic hemorrhaging is underway. This is no cyclical economic dip, but a physical contraction engineered by the dual forces of demographic siphon pumps and the receding tide of land finance. The speed of the unraveling outpaces expectation. Once heralded by grand developmental narratives as the “sponge of urbanization,” the county seat has neither caught the retreating urban youth nor stabilized the foundations of rural society. With the tides of speculative momentum fully ebbed, all that remains is a hollow, decaying shell.

Selected cover of the Berkshire shareholder letter To My Fellow Shareholders: I will no longer be writing Berkshire’s annual report or talking endlessly at the annual meeting. As the British would say, I’m “going quiet.” Sort of. Greg Abel will become the boss at yearend. He is a great manager, a tireless worker and an honest communicator. Wish him an extended tenure.

The Economist cover, November 8, 2025: Rebalancing the World The Economist has always excelled at using polished prose to gloss over savage fractures, dressing up the disintegration of the postwar free-trade architecture and superpower zero-sum warfare as a dignified “Rebalancing the World.” Peel back the magazine’s glossy rhetoric, however, and one confronts an unyielding reality: the high priests of globalization are boarding up their doors, tariff iron curtains are slamming down, and major economies are locking each other in a death grip over industrial subsidies and zero-sum geopolitical spheres.

The President’s Contradictory Posture # In public, President Trump has spent weeks deriding Zohran Mamdani as an extremist, a communist, and a threat to New York City. He has also insisted that he is “much better looking” than the 34-year-old Mamdani. But in private, according to two people who disclosed the president’s remarks on condition of anonymity, Trump has described the New York City mayor-elect as a talented politician — sharp-minded and quick with an argument.

The Rare-Earth War The Rare-Earth War # —— China’s strategic confidence and resource sovereignty amid the reshaping of global geopolitics Preface # I studied geology at China University of Geosciences. As an undergraduate, as part of an academic activity organized by the university, I wrote a short paper titled “The Rare-Earth War.” Back then, the “war” was mostly a metaphor in the academic sense, an exploration of the relationship between resource competition and technological rivalry. Many years on, the world has shifted beyond recognition, and the scenarios once argued on paper are now playing out in reality. Taking up the pen again to rewrite “The Rare-Earth War” fills me with emotion.

Along the marble corridors of Washington there are no innocent victims—only priced lobbying invoices and bargaining chips laid out on the cutting block. TikTok’s miraculous survival between Capitol Hill and the White House was never a triumph of cross-border corporate virtue; it was an absurd theater of raw power choreographed by Silicon Valley ambushes, K-Street black money, internal corporate purges, and extortion by populist strongmen. Silicon Valley’s Hidden Daggers and the K-Street Ledger # Behind the endless congressional hearings, the fingers actually pulling the triggers were rival executives lurking in the shadows.