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The second stage would see a larger number of businesses would reopen, nonessential workers who cannot telework return to work and other public activities return. Indoor religious gatherings could resume with limited capacity and physical distancing measures. It would include raising the limits on the number of people in social gatherings. Stage two could also see more normal public transit schedules and opening of restaurants and potentially bars with significant safety restrictions.

The third and final stage would reinstitute higher-risk activities, such as larger social gatherings, events, religious gatherings and activities at entertainment venues and a further lessening of restrictions at hospitals and eventually nursing homes.

Hospitals in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic began, have discharged the last coronavirus patients, while some of Europe’s worst-affected countries are preparing for the cautious easing of restrictions.

Boris Johnson is back in No 10 after recovering from Covid-19, and once again taking charge of the UK government’s faltering response to the pandemic.

xplained his country’s more successful approach, telling Laura Spinney how Angela Merkel rose to the challenge of the pandemic:

Rather, the campaign says Biden's January 31 accusations -- that Trump has a record of "hysterical xenophobia" and "fear mongering" -- were not about the travel restrictions at all.

Biden's campaign announced in early April that he supports Trump's travel restrictions on China, so part of Trump's Monday claim is correct.

Biden has not apologized for having called Trump xenophobic.

The President does not have "total" authority over coronavirus restrictions. Without seeking or requiring Trump's permission, governors, mayors and school district officials imposed the restrictions that have kept citizens at home and shut down schools and businesses, and it's those same officials who have the power to decide when to lift those restrictions.

Since this is a new virus that was first identified this year, the tests for it are newly created, not inherited from the Obama administration.

"He is lying. He is lying 100%. He is lying because he is trying to shift blame to others, even if the attempt is totally nonsensical,

"When somebody's the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's got to be,"

Trump then said: "The authority of the President of the United States having to do with the subject we're talking about is total." And after speaking about local governments, he said, "They can't do anything without the approval of the President of the United States."

At Monday's briefing, Trump implied that he had inherited flawed coronavirus tests from President Barack Obama's administration.

"He can strongly encourage, advise, or even litigate whether states' authorities to restrict public movements re: shelter in place or stay home orders are warranted, but cannot tell sovereign governors to lift these orders all at once just because the federal government determines it is high time to do so,"

"This tweet is just false. The President has no formal legal authority to categorically override local or state shelter-in-place orders or to reopen schools and small businesses.

Trump did not personally shut down the economy

When CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked him who told him he has "total" authority, he did not answer directly, instead saying, "We're going to write up papers on this."

"Congress has delegated the President a bunch of powers for emergencies, but this isn't among them," Vladeck told CNN.

"I like to allow governors to make decisions without overruling them, because from a constitutional standpoint, that's the way it should be done. If I disagreed, I would overrule a governor, and I have that right to do it. But I'd rather have them -- you can call it 'federalist,' you can call it 'the Constitution,' but I call it 'the Constitution.' I would rather have them make their decisions."

"I did a ban on China, you think that was easy? Then I did a ban on Europe and many said it was an incredible thing to do."

It's misleading to call the travel restrictions Trump announced against China and Europe a ban because they contained multiple exemptions

The broader European travel suspension Trump announced on March 11 applied to the 26 countries in the Schengen Area, a European zone in which people can move freely across internal borders without being subjected to border checks.

Trump asserted on several occasions during Monday's briefing that governors across the country are satisfied with his administration's efforts to get states supplies and hospital capacity they need to handle coronavirus patients. Facts First: Trump's assertions ignore the fact that some governors have said this week that they still need medical equipment and are struggling with hospital bed capacity.

"I mean everybody still has tremendous needs on personal protective equipment and ventilators and all of these things that you keep hearing about. Everybody's fighting to find these things all over the -- all over the nation and all over the world."

It was the second time this month that a tentative agreement announced by Democrats left Republican leaders in Congress scrambling to adjust a legislative agenda that appears increasingly set by the party out of power in the House, Senate and White House.

“We’re not going to bring a solution to the floor that does not have the support of President Trump,” Speaker Paul D. Ryan

“The president understands he has to work with the congressional majorities to get any kind of legislative solution,” Mr. Ryan said

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, issued a curt statement saying he and his colleagues ‘‘look forward to receiving the Trump administration’s legislative proposal,’’ while Mr. Ryan called Wednesday night’s talks ‘‘a discussion, not an agreement or a negotiation.’’

“I think President Trump has a chance to be on immigration what President Nixon was on China; he has a lot of credibility on the issue,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee. “I think if the president recommended a solution to Congress and the American people, they might very well accept it.”

The royal decree promises to change lifestyles for many of the 10 million women over the age of 20, including foreigners, who live in Saudi Arabia.

Thomas Bach, the president of the I.O.C., has encouraged national organizing committees to secure vaccines for athletes, and he announced this month that China had offered to provide vaccinations for participants who required one ahead of the Games.

Officials said on Saturday that they would meet again in April to discuss how many spectators would be allowed into Olympic venues.

The organizing committees will now have the enormous headache of arranging refunds for ticket buyers. Overseas buyers purchased 600,000 tickets to Olympic events, as well as 30,000 tickets to the Paralympic Games starting in August, organizers said.

Japanese fans could take up some of the slack. Local demand for tickets far outstripped the supply, at least before the pandemic.

Japan declared a widespread state of emergency in early January after a rise in infections. Since then, most areas have lifted the declaration. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced this week that it would be ended in Tokyo.

Barring foreign spectators is unlikely to allay the public’s concerns about the Games, given that thousands of athletes, coaches, officials and journalists will still come for the event.

“Since we are being barred, it is only right for them to make everyone whole and refund all of the money paid,” Mr. Brown said before the announcement was made.

“It would be real painful watching this at home on TV and knowing they have the money, and not knowing when you’re going to get it back.”

The statute does not apply to a state’s procedural rules on issues like scheduling the execution date, the government told the justices. In a two-sentence order, the court lifted the D.C. Circuit’s stay. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan indicated that they would have left the stay in place.

A third case involved whether Montgomery was ineligible for the death penalty due to mental illness. Montgomery’s attorneys argued that she had bipolar disorder, suffered intense hallucinations and continued to experience psychological effects of severe childhood sexual abuse.

Finally, Montgomery argued in a fourth case that the Justice Department violated a federal regulation when it scheduled her execution.

“If the date designated for execution passes by reason of a stay of execution, then a new date shall be designated promptly by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons when the stay is lifted.”

Montgomery was the first woman to be executed by the federal government since 1953. No other women are currently on federal death row.

Montgomery also became the 11th person to be put to death by the federal government since last July, when the Trump administration ended a 17-year moratorium on federal executions.

This free market libertarianism still captivates the leadership of the Republican Party, which has touted the most extreme projection of job losses from the Congressional Budget Office's report on the potential impact of raising the minimum wage and suggested, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, that anything more than poverty-level unemployment benefits for service workers who have been hit hard by the pandemic would "discourage a return to work."

Raising the minimum wage is not a "far left" or "liberal" issue. It is a moral issue that would, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, lift pay for up to 33 million low-wage workers— including nearly 40% of all African-American workers.

Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski, Jr., said, “leaders across Maryland have been forced to scramble to meet with our legal teams, health officials, and neighboring jurisdictions to understand how this impacts our own executive orders and to determine if and how to use our own local authority moving forward.”

Maryland ranks in the middle of states in the percentage of its people who have been given at least one vaccine dose, according to a New York Times database, and somewhat above average in the number of new cases it has been reporting lately relative to its population — 13 per 100,000 residents. All three of the variants of the virus that are being tracked by the C.D.C. have been reported there, but only one in significant numbers: B.1.1.7, which was first identified in Britain and is more transmissible and possibly more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.

Gordon Matthews, a professor of anthropology living in Hong Kong, says some of his colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who have devoted their lives to China are exploring pursuing new lines of academic inquiry to avoid visiting the mainland.

'What are the things I have been doing that may have contributed to my getting detained?' It's also a question of, 'What is my nationality? What have the politicians from my country have been saying?'" says Nee.

"China has always protected the safety and legitimate rights and interests of foreigners in China in accordance with the law,"

In June, a business advisory council to the US State Department issued a report titled "Hostage Diplomacy in China," seen by CNN, which cited the two Canadians' cases as a primary reason why firms should be more careful when sending employees to China.

O'Halloran's exit ban was finally lifted in January. But to complete what Member of the European Parliament for Dublin, Barry Andrews, has called his "Kafkaesque nightmare," when O'Halloran went to the airport, hoping to get home for his son's 14th birthday, he was stopped again. He remains in China.

n 2020, China became the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment, with flows into the country rising 4% to $163 billion.

he wasn't concerned about getting into the country from a political standpoint. In fact, she said her community is itching to go for research and investing purposes, once the pandemic permits travel there again. "Fund flow is still positive and strong into China," she said. "So if you're investing, it's typical to take quarterly trips."

"When I'm in China, I don't go out. I don't fraternize, I don't go out to bars," he says. "You know, there's too much to lose. So my life in China is very small and I want to keep it that way. Because, you know, I've heard horror stories.

criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign powers.

He recalls one Buddhist colleague who had started contributing to a school in Tibet, a restive region of China with an exiled government agitating for its autonomy. He says his company took the colleague aside to ask her to refrain from donating, and to keep a low profile on Tibetan matters, to avoid causing the firm problems when she represented them in the mainland.

"A lot of the new advice we are getting, as graduate students, is to do a project that does not require you to necessarily do fieldwork in China,

With fewer academics willing to travel to China, and those who do make it after the coronavirus pandemic encountering a more closed nation, the result could be fewer Western minds reporting on and studying China firsthand at a time when, arguably, the world has never had a greater need to understand the country.

Despite a 20% pullback in recent weeks, random-length lumber futures are still up more than 400% from their April 2020 low. Lumber prices have skyrocketed so much that it's causing remodeling nightmares and creating even more sticker shock in the booming housing market.

Likewise, prices for US hot-rolled, coil steel, the most widely produced finished steel product, have spiked almost 270% since bottoming out last August and hit a record high of $1,616 per ton on Friday, according to S&P Global Platts. Before this boom, the prior peak was $1,100 in 2008.

Murphy, whose organization opposed the Section 232 steel tariffs from the beginning, argued tariff relief is a way government can help accelerate the recovery while simultaneously easing inflation jitters.

Meanwhile, both the steel and lumber industries are strongly urging Biden to keep the tariffs in place. Removing them could prove to be politically unpopular, especially among steel workers in battleground Rust Belt states.

Scott argued the steel tariffs effectively supported the industry and that removing them, along with quotas limiting imports, would lead to both a "hemorrhaging of jobs" and importing steel that is in many cases worse for the environment than what is made in America.

The Biden administration does not appear to have made a decision yet on lifting the steel or lumber tariffs, though new efforts are being made to address rising inflation concerns.

Biden announced late last week his administration will soon take unspecified steps to fight supply chain pressures, beginning with construction materials and transportation bottlenecks.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi was able to negotiate a last-minute deal in February, however, under which promised the IAEA it would hold onto footage shot by its surveillance cameras and would hand them over if diplomats reached a deal in Vienna to lift the sanctions it faces. Otherwise, Tehran said it would delete the images.

The ultimate goal of the deal is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, something it insists it doesn’t want to do. Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb, but nowhere near the amount it had before the nuclear deal was signed.

Overall, more than 136 million people -- about 41% of the US population -- are fully vaccinated, and about 51% have received at least one dose of vaccine, according to CDC data.

For the first time since March 2020, the US recorded a seven-day average of fewer than 20,000 new daily cases Tuesday. Less than 5% of the US population lives in a county considered to have high Covid-19 transmission, according to CDC data.

"You have parts of the country with very low vaccination rates," she said. "I really worry about the unvaccinated people in those areas spreading coronavirus to one another."

"Our study suggests that, for a population of 10.5 million, approximately 1.8 million infections and 8,000 deaths could be prevented during 11 months with more efficacious COVID-19 vaccines, higher vaccination coverage, and maintaining NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions), such as distancing and use of face masks," they wrote.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice on Tuesday announced a vaccination incentive lottery with prizes that include $1 million, two full four-year scholarships to eligible students and 25 weekend getaways.

In Kentucky, senior centers will be allowed to reopen at full capacity starting June 11, Gov. Andy Beshear said. "The reason that we can do that are vaccines. These things are miracles," he said in a statement.

Mehul Patel, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues used a mathematical model to simulate a coronavirus spread within the population of North Carolina.

They found that infections, hospitalizations and deaths would continue to rise if pandemic precautions such as quarantine, school closures, social distancing and mask-wearing were lifted while vaccines were being rolled out.

"On Father's Day, we are going to make one of you a millionaire," Justice said.

Fortunately, cases also do appear to be declining in children.

As of May 27, nearly 4 million children had tested positive since the pandemic's start.

The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily.

But governors cited fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations while lifting measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

Chicago officials earlier this month raised indoor capacity for bars, restaurants and other businesses and Baltimore leaders announced Wednesday they were easing restrictions on places including religious facilities, retail stores and malls, fitness centers and food service establishments -- changes that will go into effect next week.

Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases.

The B.1.1.7 variant, she said this week, is projected to become the dominant variant in the US by the end of this month or early April.Despite the warnings, spring break crowds are gathering -- with Florida officials reporting too many people and not enough masks -- and nationwide, air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records.

Now, as the country inches closer to 30 million reported infections, cases are rising by more than 10% in 14 states this week compared to last week,

We're in a race to get the population vaccinated. At the same time, we're fighting people's exhaustion with the restrictions that public health has put in place and we're fighting the move by so many governors to remove the restrictions that are keeping us all safe."

Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last,

All that while cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- climbed. The variants have the potential to wipe out all the progress the US made if Americans get lax with safety measures,

In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday that Covid-19 hospitalizations have "jumped up" slightly

Those include the rolling back of restrictions, a prison outbreak, Covid-19 fatigue, a failure to wear masks, and the B.1.1.7 variant fueling the surge, Morse told CNN. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased restrictions earlier this month, upping capacity limits at restaurants as well as in retail stores, gyms and other facilities.

There's a long list of factors contributing to the spike in cases in Michigan,

Justice had eased restrictions earlier this month, increasing capacity at bars, restaurants and other businesses to 100% and upping the social-gathering limit.

During Wednesday's news briefing, he added that the state has had "seven outbreaks in our church community" across five counties.

what could play a key role in helping control the pandemic will be more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests, top health officials

"I do believe that once we have teachers vaccinated that we can use testing in the schools -- serial testing, cadence testing -- to identify potential infections, asymptomatic infections, shut down clusters and keep our schools open."

Her remarks came the same day the CDC released updated guidance about testing, saying more and better testing should help catch asymptomatic cases and control the spread.

More than 73.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. And more than 39.9 million people are fully vaccinated -- roughly 12% of the US population. But challenges -- including vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and inequities -- remain, and it's not entirely clear when the US will hit herd immunity -

On Wednesday, both Fauci and Walensky pushed back against questions about herd immunity, saying a lot depended on how quickly Americans take vaccines.

For now, the US still has a long way to go to overcome vaccine hesitancy,

Vaccination is the country's best hope to get beyond the pandemic, he said, "and yet there's all this overlay, and some of it is politics and some of it's social media conspiracy theories and some of it is just distrust of anything that the government had anything to do with."

Additionally, in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, counties considered to have high social vulnerability had lower vaccine coverage than counties considered to have low social vulnerability,

The agency's social vulnerability index identifies communities that may need additional support during emergencies based on more than a dozen indicators across four categories: socioeconomic status, household composition, racial/ethnic minority status and housing type.

By March 1, vaccination coverage was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with low social vulnerability than in counties with high social vulnerability -- and the differences were largely driven by socioeconomic disparities, particularly differences in the share of the population with a high school diploma and per capita income.

Only five states -- Arizona, Montana, Alaska, Minnesota and West Virginia -- had higher coverage in counties with high social vulnerability.

Achieving vaccine equity, the CDC said, is an important goal requiring "preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected"

“On the advice of our medical team, the administration does not intend to lift these restrictions on 1/26,” she said. “In fact, we plan to strengthen public health measures around international travel in order to further mitigate the spread of Covid-19.”

Mr. Biden has said the American people must be prepared to endure a “dark winter” in which the virus spreads rapidly and creates more sickness and death. His advisers have recommended that he institute a mask mandate in federal workplaces and for interstate travel in the hopes of slowing the increase in the number of infections.

Mr. Trump’s restrictions on travel from Europe did not go into effect until mid-March, by which time the virus was well established in the United States. In May, the administration imposed a travel ban on people who had been in Brazil.

The president’s attempt to alter policy related to the pandemic just two days before he leaves office is in keeping with the unorthodox way he has conducted the transition to a new administration. Normally, departing presidents refrain from issuing new executive orders without consulting with the incoming president.But Mr. Trump has refused to abide by those norms. For weeks after Mr. Biden was projected to be the winner of the presidential race, the president refused to acknowledge defeat and held up the formal process of transitioning power to Mr. Biden’s team.

Mr. Trump ordered the creation of a National Garden of American Heroes that would include statues of notable people. The order followed Mr. Trump’s complaints during the summer that protesters were defacing statues, something he used as a cultural wedge issue in his losing presidential campaign.

"They are the ones that got us into the Middle East mess, but never had the vision or the courage to get us out; they just talked."

As NPR's Brakkton Booker reports, the Turkey-Russia agreement is widely seen as a victory for Russian influence in the region. Russian forces will replace U.S. troops who had patrolled these areas.

"It's unthinkable that Turkey would not suffer consequences for malevolent behavior which was contrary to the interests of the United States and our friends," Romney tweeted.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise

At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy

mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.

party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”

They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.

The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs

the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”

even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.

China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.

It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.

Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries

The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.

Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.

Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain

Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.

In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.

The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.

The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.

The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.

“The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”

“The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”

China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.

both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.

Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.

there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.

Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.

Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.

Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.

n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must

Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.

In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.

Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?

The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.

It’s almost impossible to decipher which path the UK government has chosen.

Without these measures in place, the past seven weeks of lockdown will have been completely pointless. As quarantine measures are lifted, the virus will continue to spread, the number of daily cases will rise and a second peak will become inevitable

this debate misses a more fundamental point: containment (the first path) is the best strategy for public health, the economy and society. The decision in early March to shift from containing to mitigating the virus was disastrous on all three of these fronts

Now, the key challenge facing the government is to replace this lockdown with a package of public health interventions involving mass testing, surveillance and real-time data to identify clusters of the virus and quarantine those who are infected.

The confusion turns on an internal struggle between two opposing camps. The first seems to think the government should attempt to get over the worst of the pandemic by allowing the virus to spread through the population, albeit at a slower pace to ease the strain on the NHS, and by creating more hospital and mortuary capacity to cope with a spike in deaths. The second camp wants to drive down the number of coronavirus cases and reduce the rate of infection – or R – to as close to zero as possible. It recognises the uniquely dangerous nature of this virus, and the emerging evidence that it can cause long-term health complications in survivors and that immunity may only be temporary.

Everyone agrees that we need to get out of the lockdown as soon as possible, but doing so will require massive investment in public health infrastructure. Countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have already built this capacity

why has the government made such little progress in building the public health infrastructure necessary to control the virus and ease the lockdown? You could be forgiven for thinking that the lockdown was simply a way to reassure the public that the government was “doing something”. We need to be asking: what measures has the government put in place to ensure we’re in a better position to release the lockdown and prevent a second wave?

Everyone wants to know when the lockdown will end and life will go back to “normal”. The better question to ask is how we ease lockdown measures in the coming months and years while preventing a second wave of infections and keeping R well below one

There are a number of endings to this story. First, an accessible and affordable vaccine could become available within the next 18 months; second, the government could embark on a resource-intensive and gruelling campaign to eliminate the virus, particularly if emerging data proves coronavirus is as dangerous as diseases such as smallpox and polio; or third, antiviral therapies could become available to treat Covid-19 that make it a mild illness, so the population would gradually and safely build up natural herd immunity.

on our current path we seem destined for a disastrous ending. Lifting lockdown without the public health infrastructure in place to contain the virus will allow Covid-19 to spread through the population unchecked. The result could be a Darwinian culling of the elderly and vulnerable, and an individual gamble for those exposed to the virus. This should be avoided at all costs.