We live in a marvelous age: everyone is a specialist in everything, provided they have never practiced anything. Knowledge is deemed suspicious, experience arrogant, and competence downright indecent. Today, it is enough to speak in order to exist, and better still: to speak badly, and above all, at great length. Opinion has become a career, and ignorance a posture.

And so China, that country once thought to have little taste for fantasy, has just committed the ultimate breach of etiquette: asking for competence from those who speak about subjects they do not know. Yes, competence. Degrees, knowledge, a craft, the absolute horror in a modern era where opinions are worn like baseball caps and legitimacy is downloaded with a filter.

Thus, as of October 25, 2025, self-proclaimed prophets, experts born between two stories, specialists in everything and masters of nothing, whose only qualification is having spoken louder than others, would be banned from China. In short, China dared to remind us that seriousness is not a weekend hobby.

Meanwhile, here in Europe, the job market has turned into a fairground. Once, people dreamed of being rock musicians without autotune, which, incidentally, required at least a guitar and a few chords. Today, the dream is to become an influencer, a profession whose main tool is the unshakable certainty of being right without knowing why. Generation Z, we are told, no longer wants to learn a trade but to become an opinion. Ninety percent aspire to this, a percentage dizzying enough to cause vertigo and migraines alike. Never has humanity produced so many content creators with so few filled minds.

But let us imagine, just for a brief moment, that this rule were applied elsewhere, to French fashion for example. Gone would be the spontaneous revelations, the geniuses born from a mood board or from a bed after a night watered far beyond reason. Gone the couturiers without sewing, the designers without drawing, the artistic directors who confuse creation with quotation. Gone the well-groomed impostors who speak of cuts without ever having held scissors, without ever having touched fabric. We can already hear the cries: “But audacity!” “But instinct!” “We are self-taught!” As if instinct replaced learning, and audacity replaced work.

Once, at least, people knew what they were talking about, and kept silent with dignity when a subject was unfamiliar. Today, we speak of economics without understanding creation, of creation without understanding drawing, and of design as if it were a slogan. China, in truth, has invented nothing new: it has simply set right an old idea with common sense, because for them, speech should come after the trade. An idea so improper that activists now mistake it for a gag. Courteline would have made it a farce. As for us, we live it daily.