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n a statement on Wednesday, a State Department spokesman said that Mr. Blinken and Mr. Sullivan would meet in Anchorage next Thursday with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and its top diplomat, Yang Jiechi.

The meeting in Anchorage will continue a cautious sizing up between the world’s two largest powers, one underway since the Biden administration took office amid pledges to continue in large measure the Trump administration’s firm posture toward Beijing

Mr. Biden spoke to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, last month, warning him that he intended to challenge China’s “coercive and unfair economic practices” as well as its record on human rights and its crackdown on Hong Kong, according to a White House summary of the call. But Mr. Biden also said he hoped to cooperate with Mr. Xi on matters like the coronavirus, nuclear proliferation and climate change.

at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 

just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply

Vaccinations were simply not a priority of zero-Covid policy, whose primary aim was to contain if not eliminate the virus. The health system remains ill equipped and underfunded, with a shortage of critical care facilities. There is also a chronic shortage of fever-reducing drugs such as ibuprofen, even though China is the world’s biggest producer of them.

Why was China so ill prepared? The answer lies in the nature of Xi’s increasingly autocratic rule. Zero-Covid was part of the cult of Xi. It defined everything in China, and to question it was to question him — dangerous in today’s China. It is hard to say what precisely triggered his abrupt reversal at the height of winter when the dangers of rapid spread are greatest. The economy is certainly faltering badly, but the popular conclusion in China is that the protests forced Xi’s hand. That could have profound consequences, since an emboldened population will be potentially troubling for a party whose survival relies in part on fear of challenging its rule.

Some analysts expected the Chinese economy to boom after it lifted the draconian “zero Covid” measures it had adopted to contain the pandemic. Instead, China has underperformed by just about every economic indicator other than official G.D.P., which supposedly grew by 5.2 percent.

the Chinese economy seems to be stumbling. Even the official statistics say that China is experiencing Japan-style deflation and high youth unemployment. It’s not a full-blown crisis, at least not yet, but there’s reason to believe that China is entering an era of stagnation and disappointment.

Why is China’s economy, which only a few years ago seemed headed for world domination, in trouble?

wo years ago, some European and US experts gathered to discuss China in an elegant English country house. The setting was seductive, but the mood was dark. Two years into Xi Jinping’s presidency, China’s politics were turning away from the liberalising trend of the previous three decades, towards a hard-edged nationalism that was discomfiting China’s immediate neighbours and their western allies.

a global conflict between the systems, values and norms of the pluralist, democratic United States and China’s Communist party seemed inevitable. It would be unpleasant, but nobody doubted that US values would prevail.

The group discussed whether China could succeed. What might go wrong?

The silencing of Ms. Ma, better known in China by her pen name, Mimeng, reflects a broader campaign by President Xi Jinping to purge the public sphere of popular voices that the ruling Communist Party finds threatening, no matter how innocuous they may seem.

“There is no longer any freedom of speech in China,” Jia Jia, a blogger who writes about history, said of the campaign. “In the end, no one will be spared.”

Now Mr. Xi is pushing to tame one of the most vibrant corners of the Chinese internet: the more than one million self-help gurus, novelists, sportswriters and other independent writers who make up the so-called “self-media.”

Speaking in South Korea earlier Wednesday, Mr. Trump made an impassioned call for China and other countries to pull together to confront the North, which he described as a sinister regime that starved and terrorized its people — a tragic failed experiment in the “laboratory of history.”

Since Mr. Trump first played host to Mr. Xi at his Florida estate last April, he has said he is counting on Mr. Xi to do the right thing with North Korea, alternately praising and prodding the Chinese leader about enforcing tougher United Nations sanctions.

To his frustration, however, Mr. Xi has stopped short of targeting Mr. Kim with unilateral sanctions that would threaten his regime, send refugees into China and raise the possibility of a Korean Peninsula under control of the South, a close American ally.

When Mr. Xi came to power a decade ago, the entente between the countries accelerated into a deepening relationship that has overcome decades of division and suspicion. Trade has skyrocketed, reaching $146 billion last year. The two militaries train together and conduct joint air and naval patrols along China’s coast.

“Even though the bilateral relationship is not an alliance, in its closeness and effectiveness this relationship even exceeds that of an alliance,” Mr. Xi told his counterpart during virtual talks in December, according to Mr. Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri V. Ushakov.

That relationship seemed to reach a new peak at the Olympics. After their meeting, the leaders issued a lengthy joint statement that raised alarms in Washington.

shift in decades of Chinese support for North Korea, is pressuring China’s new president, Xi Jinping, to crack down on the regime in Pyongyang

China, the North’s only strong ally, has long feared the United States would capitalize on the fall of the North Korean leadership by expanding American military influence on the Korean Peninsula.

Even if China does cooperate, it is unclear how far North Korea might bend; North Korea ignored China’s entreaties not to conduct the nuclear test in February

At the United Nations, the desire to impose ever harsher sanctions on North Korea to try to curb its development of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles has long stalled in the face of Chinese opposition

They include banning specific, high-tech items used in the nuclear program, like epoxy paste for centrifuges; limiting or outlawing some banking transactions; and a far more stringent inspection of ships bound to and from North Korea.

“If we had the kind of product listing and focus on financial flows and interdiction on North Korea that we placed on Iran, we would not be in this spot,”

After weeks of several phone run-ins with world leaders, Mr. Trump committed to a longstanding agreement that the U.S. won’t recognize Taiwan diplomatically in a phone call with President Xi Jinping late Thursday.

Mr. Trump’s blunt style has posed a challenge for protocol-conscious Chinese officials wary of unpredictable turns in the conversation. In previous calls with leaders, Mr. Trump chided Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto over the country’s drug cartels and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee-resettlement agreement Australia reached with the Obama administration.

Chinese analysts said Mr. Trump’s change in rhetoric was inevitable. “Some things you don’t need to be anxious to respond with tits-and-tats for,“ said Zhang Ruizhuang, professor of international relations at Nankai University in Tianjin. ”Instead, give him some time, and let him slowly realize things on his own.”

“Were the United States and China to wage war on one another, the whole world would divide itself,” the People’s Daily newspaper argued in a commentary, paraphrasing Henry Kissinger

Fears of a potentially calamitous trade war, or even a military clash between the two nuclear powers, have been building since Trump’s shock election win last November.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s influential chief strategist, was last week reported to have warned last year that war between the US and China in the resource-rich waterway was inevitable.

A bill to create a Japanese National Security Council is set to pass in the nation's parliament, as China's rising maritime assertiveness and North Korea's nuclear ambitions give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe greater leeway to tighten his grip on foreign and defense policies.

Seen as an important step in Mr. Abe's push for Tokyo to expand its role in regional security, the new council is also viewed as a backdoor for the premier to ramp up Japan's military, which is strictly bound under the nation's postwar constitution to a self-defense role.

The idea of creating a U.S.-style NSC has gained traction in recent years as Japan experienced a string of national-security related incidents that prompted it to boost its defense spending and capabilities. These policies have been viewed with caution by Beijing and Seoul amid tensions over historical and territorial issues.

South China Sea: Beijing 'not frightened to fight a war' after US move

Twenty-four hours after Washington challenged Beijing’s territorial claims in the region by deploying a warship to waters around the disputed Spratly archipelago, the notoriously nationalistic Global Times accused the Pentagon of provoking China.

The People’s Liberation Army Daily, China’s leading military newspaper, used a front-page editorial to accuse the US of sowing chaos in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

As economic growth has fallen while debts and excess industrial output have risen, Chinese leaders have faced growing questions about whether they will carry out the painful policy surgery many experts say is needed to cut away the financial dead weight on the economy.

hinese leaders’ usual two-sided rhetoric about their options — peril is close at hand, but so is a sure cure — was especially striking in Mr. Li’s latest annual report to the legislature, the National People’s Congress.

Mr. Li suggested, would help dull the pain from cuts to wheezing state-supported industries that must shed millions of workers, as part of a program that China’s powerful president, Xi Jinping, has promoted as “supply-side structural reform.”