Opinion Today: Is China’s strength a brittle facade?
Here’s what we’re focusing on.
Opinion Today
November 13, 2025
A police officer watches over a pedestrian street in Beijing.
Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Notable

China looks strong. But life in the country tells a different story. “These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States. That sentiment is likely to grow.”

— Helen Gao, a writer in Beijing

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Maurene Comey and the fate of the civil service. “The greatest risk of putting the tenure of all federal employees at the whim of the president is not that he will fire them all; it’s that people like Ms. Comey will not seek out the work in the first place.”

— Jeffrey Toobin, a contributing Opinion writer

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Can Democrats put aside the internal squabbling? “They might take a lesson from Republicans, recent polling shows. Like it or not, Republicans have a plan and voters know what it is, even if they think some parts of it go too far. ”

— Kristen Soltis Anderson, contributing Opinion writer

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Spotlight

ICYMI

The haves and have-nots are once again at war. “There is another way of looking at the pattern, too: a resurgence of the politics of inequality, obscured for almost a decade by culture wars both left and right, but which seemed absolutely central to American politics before Donald Trump and the backlash to him swamped everything else.”

— David Wallace-Wells, Opinion writer

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In Your Words

Re: “Tim Kaine: Why I Voted to End the Shutdown

Guess what, Senator Kaine. I’m not interested in your explanations. You’re just one more Democrat who’s let us down in this fight against authoritarianism. Simple as that. — A comment posted by Stephen from Middleton, Wis.

Read more comments on the story here and check out our Letters to the Editor.

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