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Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations

When nearly every renminbi borrowed is domestic — lent by a Chinese creditor to a Chinese borrower — it gives regulators a degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only dream of.

Even the makeup of China’s high debt levels has a silver lining for regulators. China’s aggregate ratio of debt to gross domestic product was almost 300 percent (or around $52 trillion) in September 2022, compared to 257 percent for the United States.

Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations

But less than 5 percent of China’s debt is external, amounting to $2.5 trillion, one-tenth of the U.S. level.

instead of introducing reforms to establish a healthy market-based economy in which inefficient businesses are allowed to fail, China’s Evergrande-style fixes — while defusing short-term crises — reward irresponsible behavior and perpetuate the excessive borrowing and wasteful use of funding that leads to recurring financial distress.

Soft landings may become harder to achieve. China faces perhaps its greatest array of economic challenges since it began reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s: high debt, an ailing real estate sector, a long-term economic slowdown, rising unemployment, an aging and shrinking population and worsening trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.

There is a very real risk that China could suffer the same fate as Japan, which is still struggling to emerge from an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the 1990s. Japan’s troubles were caused, in part, by a burst real estate bubble and financial-sector problems similar to what China is now facing.

China’s regulatory troubleshooters have proven the financial doomsayers wrong again and again. But their biggest test may yet lie ahead.

The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.

Following the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal presence in the South was finally robust. So was the spirit of local defiance. In post-bellum Barbour County, Cowie writes, “peace only prevailed for freed people when federal troops were in town” — and then only barely

White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered, whether familiar figures like Andrew Jackson or mostly forgotten magnates like J.W. Comer, a plantation owner who became, in the late 19th century, the architect of a vast, sadistic and extremely lucrative system of convict labor

Thus were white men, in the words of the scholar Orlando Patterson, whom Cowie quotes, “free to brutalize.” Thus were they free “to plunder and lay waste and call it peace, to rape and humiliate, to invade, conquer, uproot and degrade.”

the chaos in Alabama offended Jackson’s sense of discipline and made a mockery of his treaties with the Creeks. Beginning in 1832, and in fits and starts over the following year, federal troops looked to turn back or at least contain the white wave. Instead, their presence touched off a series of violent reprisals, created a cast of martyrs and folk heroes, and gave rise to the mythology of white victimization. Self-rule and local authority — rhetorical wrapping for this will to power — had become articles of faith, fervid as any religious belief.

The federal government is a character here, too — sometimes in a central role, sometimes remote to the point of irrelevance, and all too often feckless in the defense of a more inclusive, affirmative model of freedom.

When Grant stepped up the enforcement of voting rights, whites in Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest town, massacred Black citizens and engaged in furious efforts to manipulate or overturn elections. As in the 1830s, the federal government showed little stamina for the struggle. Republican losses in 1874 augured another retreat, this time for the better part of a century. In the vacuum, Cowie explains, emerged “the neoslavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping and the official disenfranchisement of Blacks” under Jim Crow.

Wallace, as Cowie makes clear, had bigger ambitions. Instinctively, he knew that his brand of politics had an audience anywhere that white Americans were under strain and looking for someone to blame. Wallace became the sneering face of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, against any law or court ruling or social program that aimed to include Black Americans more fully in our national life. Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.”

That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.

In explaining how we got here, “Freedom’s Dominion” emphasizes race above economics, but this seems fitting. The fixation on the free market, so long a defining feature of the Republican Party, has loosened its hold; taxes and regulations do not boil the blood as they once did. In their place is a stew of resentments as raw as any since George Wallace stirred the pot.

Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.

Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.

The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature

The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.

Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse.

By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.

In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.

Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. The Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States.

owever, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.

Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.

When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.

At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengl

In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.

Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.

In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.

In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.

​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.

Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.

An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”

Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”

SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.

One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.

The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed

To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.

A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019

More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.

Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections

investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.

Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill.

No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals

In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.

Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic

Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.

Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing

its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.

Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.

As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.

The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.

But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.

decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.

And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty

One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.

Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.

Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.

An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control

Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.