Out on the horizon, a constellation of sensors at a forward base records a faint thermal trail, nothing like a fighter, nothing like a cruise missile.
Radar sweeps return only sporadic, low-RCS blips that vanish in the clutter. Controllers frown at their screens.
On the carrier deck 250 kilometers away, sailors sip coffee, unaware. A routine patrol launches. Fighter jets climb and search. Nothing appears on their radars.
But minutes later, a remotely piloted aircraft drops a precision glide weapon onto a forward refueling node, guided, silent, surgically accurate. Communications die. Fuel fires bloom.
A year studying in the UK or the US cost 630,000 RMB, and a mainland blogger shared her experience online…一年英國或美國留學花了63萬，有內地博主在網上分享了她的經歷…
The money for the UK came from her parents’ 20 years of hard-earned savings. She lived frugally in London, sometimes waiting outside supermarkets by 8 p.m. to grab discounted bread and vegetables with yellow sticker labels. Her school wasn’t close to where she lived, and a 40-minute walk was the norm—just to save on the expensive subway fare. Sometimes, her feet would blister, and she’d lie awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering: Should I just go back? But on the other end of the phone, her mother’s voice was as firm as iron, gritting her teeth and urging her to persevere. So she swallowed her hesitation and pressed on.
After returning to China, she found a job in another city with a monthly salary of 12,000 RMB. It sounds decent, but when she did the math, the 630,000 RMB study abroad expense felt like a mountain weighing on her chest. At this rate, it would take decades to save that amount. She never complained, sending 5,000 RMB home every month like repaying a debt that could never be fully settled. Her parents always said over the phone, “Don’t send us money, keep it for yourself,” but she knew that behind their tough words, this act had long become a form of comfort for them.
Was studying abroad worth it? She never said it explicitly, but her eyes held a struggle. Occasionally, late at night, scrolling through her phone and seeing old photos of London streets, her fingers would pause for a few seconds. Those 40-minute walks, the hot dog stands by the roadside, the half-priced sandwiches snatched from the supermarket—they all seemed to have become imprints. Not sweet, not bitter, just like thorns embedded in her heart, impossible to remove, and not something she wanted to remove. She often asked herself: Do I regret it? The answer never left her lips, but every time she asked, the corner of her mouth would twitch, like a smile, yet not quite.
Some of her friends admired her, while others shook their heads. Some said, “630,000 RMB could have bought a small apartment—why suffer in the UK?” Others felt that studying abroad broadened one’s horizons, making it worth it. She never argued, just lowered her head to sip her coffee, the steam blurring her vision. Perhaps, for her, worth couldn’t be calculated in monetary terms. That year, the cold London wind brushing her face, the yellow supermarket labels clutched in her hand, the silence in her mother’s voice over the phone—these weren’t just numbers but living memories.
After starting work, she began saving money, hoping to take her parents somewhere. Not London, but perhaps a small town in China, staying in a clean hotel and enjoying a meal without having to calculate the cost. She said her parents saved for 20 years to pave her one-year path abroad, and now it was her turn to repay them slowly, even if all she could repay was time. The 5,000 RMB she sent home every month felt like a promise to herself and a kind of reckoning with that 630,000 RMB.
Life goes on. She doesn’t talk much about her future plans, only occasionally posting a photo on social media—the background either her office cubicle or streetlights on her way home from work. No captions, but anyone could tell that the person under those lights wasn’t walking an easy path. Did that 630,000 RMB study abroad experience buy her a 12,000 RMB monthly job or those days of gritting her teeth and persevering? She has no answer, and perhaps she doesn’t need one. Days pass one after another, bills keep coming, and the road stretches ahead.
If you asked her whether she’d do it all over again, she might just smile, lift her coffee cup, and let her gaze drift out the window. The answer lies in the wind, in the silence she never voices. That 630,000 RMB didn’t buy her a diploma or a job—it bought the clenched fists during those late-night discount hunts, the choked silence in her mother’s voice over the phone, and the 5,000 RMB she sends home every month after returning. Was it worth it? Only she knows in her heart.
SCMP: As I see it, The Nobel Peace Prize should now be called the Nobel war prize. Winner Maria Corina Machado can be held up as a poster child of American militarism against her own country, Venezuela, and across Latin America By Alex Lo on Oct 15 2025 香港南華早報: 正如我所見，現在的諾貝爾和平獎應該改名為「諾貝爾戰爭獎」。得主瑪麗亞·科琳娜·可以說是美國軍事主義在委內瑞拉及整個拉丁美洲的代表人物. Alex Lo，2025年10月15日
Donald Trump is reportedly furious that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, it went to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. But if the US president could see beyond his megalomania for a moment, he would realise that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has bent over backwards to placate his administration.
The far-right Machado, after all, was nominated by Trump’s own Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was still a senator, and former national security adviser and now US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, along with other lawmakers.
She once reportedly declared on CBS News in the US that, “The only way to stop the suppression is by force – US force.”
Soon after the committee’s announcement, Machado spoke on the phone with Trump, who apparently didn’t remember her name. “The person who actually got the Nobel Prize … called me and said, ‘I’m accepting this in honour of you, because you really deserved it’,” Trump told reporters. “A very nice thing to do. I didn’t, didn’t say, ‘Then give it to me’, though I think she might have.”
Whether Machado is a hero or villain, a national liberator or traitor, is something very much dependent on your political position. But she doesn’t seem the kind of peacemaker Alfred Nobel had in mind.
What the award does, much like US signals to Machado, is justify the deadly and already escalating military operations Trump has ordered off the coasts of Venezuela.
These include blowing up boats in international waters that were supposedly smuggling drugs from Venezuela, though what and who they carried and whether they were from that country could not be verified.
Independent legal specialists have pointed out that those attacks were clear violations of international law, which is another way of saying they amounted to state-sanctioned murders.
The Trump administration has made no bones about being ready to conduct more direct military operations against Venezuela, including potential plans to depose the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The rationale is that it’s a continuation of Washington’s war on drugs, though plenty of much worse drug-smuggling nations across Latin America are actual friends of America.
As for Maduro being a corrupt autocrat, well, there are also plenty of those around the world who are friends and allies of the US. His crime is that he – just like his leftist predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez – is not America’s kind of dictator.
Washington’s decade-long sanctions have destroyed the Venezuelan economy, depopulated the country and caused premature deaths, according to several independent studies including the latest from The Lancet Global Health on Western sanctions-induced deaths in more than 150 countries since 1971.
Machado, of course, has no trouble with deadly sanctions and military operations against her own country, as long as it’s done by the US. Perhaps to save her country, she believes it’s necessary to destroy it first.
According to a Washington Post report, US sanctions effectively destroyed the entirety of the country’s export revenue – of which 96 per cent used to come from oil sales. “Sanctions on Venezuela, for instance, contributed to an economic contraction roughly three times as large as that caused by the Great Depression in the United States,” it said.
More than 7 million people are estimated to have left, of whom, ironically, half a million have ended up at the US southern border, contributing to the migration issue that Trump has been trying to address with the most indiscriminate and brutal methods.
With some exceptions, the Nobel Peace Prize is often hardly about peace, but an instrument to legitimise Western and particularly US foreign policy against countries considered adversarial. The late Liu Xiaobo was a classic example. But Liu at least advocated non-violence; not so with many other winners.
According to the Sweden-based Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, “Machado joins a troubling lineage of laureates whose actions contradict the spirit of peace: Kissinger, Obama, the EU, and the Ukrainian human rights activists who advocated for more weapons imports,” adding that “Each award diluted the meaning of peace, replacing it with strategic symbolism and, as usual and without exception, aligned with US/NATO interests.”
“It’s a perplexing choice [for the Nobel committee],” Greg Grandin, a Yale historian of Latin America told the Democracy Now news channel. “They’ve given it to somebody who’s completely aligned with the most militarist and darkest face of US imperialism.”
瑞典「跨國和平與未來研究基金會」（Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research）指出：「馬查多加入了那個與和平精神背道而馳的令人不安的得主行列：基辛格、奧巴馬、歐盟，以及那些主張引進更多武器的烏克蘭人權活動家。」該機構補充說：「每一次頒獎都在稀釋和平的意義，用戰略象徵取而代之，且一如既往地完全與美國/北約利益保持一致。」
In 1839, China begged Britain to stop poisoning its people with opium. The reply? Gunboats and humiliation.
A century later, that same nation now produces 31% of the world’s goods, has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, and stands as America’s greatest rival.
This is the story of how China went from the “Sick Man of Asia” to a global superpower in just 45 years.
From the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation, to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Made in China 2025, and the Belt and Road Initiative, witness how one nation reshaped the world order.
Watch until the end to understand why China’s rise may define the 21st century and what it means for the future of global power.
American logistic expert report from China with Chinese subtitles: Top Venture Capitalists & investment bankers tour China, declare US & Western energy firms “uninvestable” unless they are partnering with China’s companies! 美國物流專家在中國報道視頻有中文字幕: 頂級風險投資家和投資銀行家訪華，宣稱美國和西方能源公司“不可投資”，除非他們與中國公司合作.
Top VC’s from Western firms and investment banks recently toured Chinese companies in the clean energy industry.
After just days, they concluded that China’s advances across the sector make competition impossible, and are pulling funds from Western startups.
They hope to focus now on partnership opportunities with Chinese firms who already dominate the technology and manufacturing, and enjoy access to China’s deep supply chains and logistics.
But that model will also also prove difficult, as China’s entire economic system is designed to destroy rent-seeking profits.
On Wednesday, Shenzhen-based SiCarrier, a chip equipment maker with close ties to Huawei, announced through its subsidiary Yunqifang that it had launched two fully independent Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software products. This wasn’t just any software; it is a critical tool for designing the most advanced semiconductors at 5nm and beyond—a field previously dominated by just two American companies, Cadence and Synopsys.
BREAKING 🚨🚨🚨 China Hits Back: Korean Shipbuilder Sanctioned for Aiding US Economic War 突發新聞🚨🚨🚨中國反擊：韓國造船商因協助美國經濟戰受制裁
China has sanctioned five U.S.-based subsidiaries of South Korean shipbuilding giant Hanwha Ocean. The announcement, which sent Hanwha Ocean’s shares tumbling by over 8% in Seoul, demonstrates China’s willingness to punish entities it views as complicit in America’s economic pressure campaigns. According to a statement from China’s Commerce Ministry, the sanctions will prohibit any Chinese organizations or individuals from conducting business with the targeted Hanwha subsidiaries. But this is just the opening salvo in what promises to be a much broader campaign.
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