Seeing her seated is striking. When she stands, all you can do is look up. Zhang Ziyu is 19 and stands 2.23 meters tall (seven feet and three inches). She is the tallest professional women’s basketball player in history and the main attraction at the World Cup in Berlin, where she is competing with China’s national team, but as she herself points out, she’s still almost a child. “Everyone thinks I’m tough because I’m very tall, but I’m still a young girl, sometimes quite childish,” Zhang says in a FIBA documentary. It shows in her youthful face, in the jokes with her teammates and in the laughter as she runs through the mixed zone. And in her hobby of crocheting handicrafts that she gives to friends, like a stuffed elephant she spent two weeks sewing with yarn. When she recalls how she became a star, she says she misses her childhood bed full of rag dolls.
Height runs in the family. Her father, Yuquan, was a pro at 2.13 meters. Her mother, Yu Ying, was an international player standing 1.98 meters tall. Ziyu, which means “girl of the universe” in Chinese, was already 1.60m tall at seven years old and dominated her age group leagues. Last season she debuted in China’s top division with Shandong, has already recorded a dunk with the national team — though she rarely jumps — and now she is emerging at the World Cup while the WNBA watches her progression closely. In Berlin she is averaging eight points and five rebounds in 12 minutes per game, and on September 9 she will face Puerto Rico for a spot in the quarterfinals.
Ziyu’s huge frame has its advantages, but also drawbacks, as Spanish coach César Rupérez notes. Rupérez was an assistant with China’s senior national team from 2022 to 2025 (and with Spain from 2014 to 2019) and worked with Ziyu at the last Asia Cup. “People see a 2.23m player but forget that she’s just a girl. You see it when you’re hanging out with her — on trips, joking around. As a player, what stands out is her ability to play at a height that’s unique in women’s basketball. When you talk to her, you realize she’s very level-headed. She’s aware of what she represents, what lies ahead, her potential, and the challenges she faces. She knows she has to face tough challenges because of the kind of defense she faces — being pushed all the time to get her out position, the constant contact, the danger of her elbows being at the level of her opponent’s face… Mentally, that’s very tough; there’s no respite. She doesn’t want to be a punching bag; she wants to play without fear, to be aggressive,” Rupérez explains.
A personal strength and conditioning coach accompanies Ziyu year-round, at her club and with the national team. The national squad has designed a specific plan that includes a nutritionist and individualized training. Unlike the rest of the team, she doesn’t participate in regular practice; instead, she trains on half the court and, before games, separately from her teammates. “Physically, she has to make a tremendous effort to take care of her health and avoid injury. Given her limited mobility, that’s not easy,” adds Rupérez. At the hotel, she needs a bed extension, and she competes while wearing knee braces.
Another major challenge awaits her off the court: living with her fame and the comparisons to Yao Ming, the great Chinese center who succeeded in the NBA. At airports she needs private security to get to the boarding gate because of the attention she attracts, and on the street everyone turns when they see her. “She’s very famous and aims to become a leading force in world basketball,” the Spanish coach says.
The matchup between China and the United States at the World Cup produced an iconic image: Zhang bending down to speak with Paige Bueckers, who is 40 centimeters shorter (1.83m). “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Caitlin Clark said. China coach Luming Gong says she “is a one-in-a-hundred-years player, as special as the feathers of a phoenix or a unicorn.” Zhang Ziyu, meanwhile, considers herself just a girl who loves basketball.
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At the entrances to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the capital of China, the crowd folds repeatedly between the barriers as people slowly move toward the security checkpoints. September 9 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong, whose embalmed body lies in the imposing mausoleum that stands at the center of the vast plaza. There are no reservations left to visit the tomb for the entire week. “We came because our parents and grandparents dream of doing this, but they are old and haven’t had the chance to travel far,” Pan and Wang, two students aged 22 and 24 respectively, said the day before.
The two friends traveled from Dalian in the country’s northeast specifically for that purpose. After two and a half hours in line, they succeeded. “Chairman Mao lies peacefully. I was deeply moved. The atmosphere is very solemn,” Wang said. “Thanks to him we emerged from wars and poverty,” they said as they left the mausoleum.
Half a century after his death, the Great Helmsman sparks interest among many young Chinese born decades after he left this world. Some find in his writings a guide for coping with employment and personal uncertainty; others find a language to express their discontent with inequality. For some he represents China’s strength and rise. This renewed interest is aided by an official memory that praises Mao’s founding role while downplaying his responsibility for the darkest episodes of his rule.
“Chairman Mao has been a beacon guiding me forward,” said Li, 24, an employee in the judicial system. He also traveled to Beijing to visit the mausoleum. “I couldn’t put into words what I felt,” this northern youth and grandson of a military man said. Li says that from graduation until he found work he went through what he describes as his own “odyssey.” During that time, reading the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung helped him cope better with problems. “Mao’s thinking is full of philosophical reflection; it teaches you to look at reality through its contradictions and how those contradictions transform,” he said.
Mao, who died in the early hours of September 9, 1976, at 82 and after nearly three decades of absolute power, is far from a figure confined to history books in today’s China. His portrait presides over Tiananmen Gate, from which he proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949; his image still passes from hand to hand when cash is used; statues of him stand in front of many universities, factories, and public buildings. His ideas are taught from primary school through university and his thought is cited in the preamble to the Constitution and among the doctrines that guide the Communist Party of China (CPC). His iconography goes beyond official spaces: it is not unusual to find photographs of Mao in restaurants, homes, or taxis, sometimes as a political symbol and sometimes as a kind of protective amulet.
That physical and doctrinal omnipresence coexists with a public narrative that keeps the most devastating policies of his tenure in the shadows: the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), the campaign of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization that led to a famine estimated to have killed between 30 million and 45 million people; and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a decade of purges, persecution, and political violence that left nearly two million dead, tens of millions persecuted and caused massive destruction of the country’s cultural heritage.
Pan, Wang and Li belong to a generation born and raised in a country Mao could hardly have imagined. The predominantly rural and impoverished China he left behind is today the world’s second-largest economy, its biggest exporter of goods, and an industrial, technological, space, and military power that competes with the United States for global influence. That transformation accelerated when, in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms moved the country away from much of Maoist economic policy. The young people now turning back to Mao are the children of a China built, to a large extent, by correcting many of his policies.
Yang Guobin, a professor of communication and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and director of that university’s Center for Culture and Digital Society, wrote by email that for China’s Generation Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2000s), Mao’s texts are “fresh in style and penetrating in content.” “They read about perseverance and adaptability in guerrilla warfare and interpret it as advice for coping with the difficulties of the labor market or their personal lives,” Yang said. Social networks, he added, let users exchange impressions and pick what best fits their feelings and ideas. “There is a Mao for every occasion,” he summed up.
Wang Yiran, 25, joined a Maoist reading group as a teenager. “I thought it was very cool because it was a space to talk about politics,” she said by phone. But she was soon disappointed when she saw many members “spreading hate online.” She left and continued studying Marxism on her own. Wang is unemployed and lives with her parents. She believes that since the pandemic “there is more competition, inequality and uncertainty.” “Mao supporters keep their confidence, although times are different,” she said. “Mao is our teacher and a red sun that illuminates, but he is not God.”
Despite that diversity of approaches, the role Mao officially occupies in China in 2026 leaves room for few nuances. The CPC set it in stone in 1981, during the reform and opening process, in a historic resolution that concluded his merits had been “far greater than his faults.” “Since what matters is the system, it was obviously not possible to criticize its creator too harshly,” Sinologist Sebastian Veg, a professor of intellectual history of contemporary China at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, wrote by email.
That compromise allowed the CPC to do two things that might have seemed incompatible: abandon much of Mao’s economic model without renouncing the political legitimacy that derived from him. In 2021, China’s current president, Xi Jinping, reinforced the usefulness of that pact with the past and narrowed the scope for interpreting it. The CPC’s third historical resolution ratified the verdict on Mao, reduced mention of his errors to a few lines and incorporated him into an upward trajectory culminating with Xi’s era. In that reading, with Mao, China rose up; with Deng it grew wealthy; and with Xi it grows strong.
“We have corrected the mistakes of the past. We are not going to deny the achievements of a generation because of errors we have learned from,” Wang Yi, a professor at China’s National Academy of Governance, replied bluntly in July when asked directly about Mao’s legacy during a press conference organized by the Chinese Association for Public Diplomacy.
Beijing is thus trying to construct, in the words of Daniel Leese, a professor of Chinese history and politics at the University of Freiburg, “a seamless narrative that connects the past with the present, legitimizes the CPC’s historical mission, and discourages the population from asking critical questions,” he explained in a video call.
Leese, author of the essay Mao Cult, believes Xi — who has accumulated far more power than his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin — has drawn an essential lesson from Mao: “The figure of a central leader and a very strong ideological direction” allowed him “to maintain very tight control over both the Party and society.” Xi began a third term as head of state in 2023 after removing the two-term limit in 2018, and everything suggests that next year he will secure a fourth five-year term as general secretary of the CPC.
“It was 50 years ago… he really was a great leader,” two customers at a café called The Spark of Golden Street in Xicheng district, west of Tiananmen, murmured. They sipped their drinks while looking at the posters and Mao figurines decorating the small space. Revolutionary slogans are on display too. In a notebook, patrons write dedications or practice Mao’s calligraphy. The thirtysomething owner said it is “necessary” to have more businesses that reinforce a “properly Chinese” aesthetic. “Young people, may your light illuminate China,” reads an inscription on the terrace above a painting of a red star.
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Mainland Spain endured its hottest summer since records began in 1961, with an unprecedented 61 heatwave days across June, July and August, national weather agency Aemet said on Wednesday.
The average temperature for those three months was 24.5C, 0.3C above the previous record from 2025 and 2.4C higher than the 1991-2020 reference period, Aemet said in a statement.
A string of exceptional summer heatwaves have smashed temperature records across Europe this year, which scientists say human-driven climate change has intensified and lengthened.
Aemet said the 10 hottest summers on record in Spain have all come in the 21st century.
This year’s number of summer heatwave days obliterated the previous high of 41 from 2022.
Exceptional heat has also spilled over the traditional limits of summer, with high temperatures measured in late May and early September.
On September 2nd, the southwestern municipality of El Granado reached 45.7C, equalling the temperature record for the month and marking the highest temperature in Spain this year.
The extreme heat has been linked to tens of thousands of excess deaths across Europe, upended daily life for millions in ill-adapted regions and disrupted the economy through drought and low river levels.
In Spain, the Carlos III Health Institute has estimated more than 5,000 heat-related deaths from June to August, a record since its statistics began in 2015.
Such heat contributed to ideal conditions for wildfires that devoured swathes of land across the continent.
In late July, a blaze just dozens of kilometres west of Madrid sparked the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, with authorities describing it at the time as the largest wildfire in Spain’s recent history.
According to the European Forest Fire Information System, almost 296,000 hectares (731,000 acres) have gone up in smoke in Spain this year as of September 2nd.
Barcelona doesn’t need to break the budget, with surprisingly affordable food and hotel options.
