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What specific things, besides stopping industrial espionage, could China do to increase trust? Giving American companies, financial institutions, more opportunities to make money, opening up its various sectors more aggressively — that will allow more dialogue, more cooperation

That’s one thing. Second, it’s understandable for the United States to push back on some of the industrial espionage.

What are the biggest blind spots the Chinese leadership has when it comes to understanding American policies toward the country? I think the Chinese leaders have this notion that the United States is doing everything it can to try to stop China from growing. Or they believe that whatever China does is not going to elicit more trust.

the leadership is convinced that there’s no way out of this. I’m not sure that is the case. And then also, the United States thinks that China wants to displace it.

That “despite” is doing a lot of work. It reminds me of that line, “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” I was trying to say that those are all things that we believe to be essential for sustained economic growth. I was saying that despite all that, China still performed well.

you also write about in the book: “Despite the limits China imposes on free-market forces, the absence of a free press, independent judicial system and the individual right to vote, we see there are other mechanisms in place to respond to the needs of its citizens and to address the threats posed by inequality.”

“The People’s Republic of China needs to understand that in America we make decisions about meeting with visitors for ourselves,” Mr. Cruz said.

The United States does not maintain official diplomatic relations with Taiwan as a result of negotiations with Beijing that led to Washington’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1979.

China has warned Mr. Trump against making changes to the One China policy after he takes office on Jan. 20. The warning came in response to a phone call between Ms. Tsai and Mr. Trump after his November election victory, the highest-level exchange between American and Taiwanese leaders since the end of diplomatic relations

“Cruz is influential above and beyond many senators, given his performance in the last election campaign. It makes sense to add Cruz, whatever his relationship is going to be with the Trump administration.”

Beijing’s influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is growing, and it is expected to achieve recognition from more countries, as China is the wealthier benefactor.

We will continue to meet with anyone, including the Taiwanese, as we see fit.”

While American leaders have vowed to defend Taiwan from attack, the United States is not legally bound to do so, despite what Mr. Cruz said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Beijing opposed any contact between Taiwan’s leader and “anyone from the U.S. government,” saying it threatens to hurt ties between Beijing and Washington.

“The U.S. is Taiwan’s most important ally and friend, and it occupies a special place in the hearts of the Chinese people,”

neither Mr. Trump nor anyone on his transition team would be meeting with Ms. Tsai.

“In general, it raises Tsai’s national and international stature to be going on trips like this,”

For Mr. Xi, the moment reflected how China’s wait-and-see approach to the new U.S. president paid off. Beijing had made clear to the Trump administration that U.S. adherence to the “One China” policy was an inviolable precondition for relations.

After his Oval Office meeting with Mr. Abe, Mr. Trump at a news conference reassured Japan and other Asia-Pacific nations that he wouldn’t unravel decades of American foreign policy by scaling back the U.S. military presence in region. Allies feared he would do so after he questioned the buildup and suggested during his campaign that countries like Japan and South Korea may need to acquire nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump’s agreement to uphold the One China policy marks one in a series of stances toward Asia that he’s tempered since taking office. He had brushed off his call to Ms. Tsai as of little consequence, and vowed to use the One China policy as leverage in negotiations with China on contentious security and economic issues.

Similarly, prior to his confirmation as Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson walked back previous statements that the U.S. might block China’s access to islands it has built in the South China Sea, saying that the U.S. should be “capable” of limiting such access, should a contingency occur.

“The Chinese must have been thinking, ‘We can pick things up for cheap here,’” said Khor Yu Leng, a Malaysian political economist who has been researching China’s investments in Southeast Asia. “They’ve got enough patient capital to play the long game, wait for the local boys to overextend and then come in and take all that equity for China.”

A Pentagon report released last week said “The ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) is intended to develop strong economic ties with other countries, shape their interests to align with China’s and deter confrontation or criticism of China’s approach to sensitive issues.”

Malaysia’s new finance minister, Lim Guan Eng, raised the example of Sri Lanka, where a deepwater port built by a Chinese state-owned company failed to attract much business. The indebted South Asian island nation was compelled to hand over to China a 99-year lease on the port and more land near it, giving Beijing an outpost near one of its busiest shipping lanes.

“They know that when they lend big sums of money to a poor country, in the end they may have to take the project for themselves,” he said

“China knows very well that it had to deal with unequal treaties in the past imposed upon China by Western powers,” Mr. Mahathir added, referring to the concessions China had to give after its defeat in the opium wars. “So China should be sympathetic toward us. They know we cannot afford this.

In interviews, bloggers described the silencing of Ms. Ma as a clear warning to independent media in China: The party is in charge, and writers must play by its rules.

The party seems concerned that independent commentators, who have become a primary news source for China’s more than 800 million internet users, are drowning out its propaganda messages

“Bloggers are seen as encouraging discontent in society and potentially causing social instability,” said Hu Xingdou, a political economist in Beijing.

Such blogs represent one of the last bastions of relatively free discourse in China and have proliferated in recent years as the state-run news media has become more heavily focused on praising Mr. Xi and his policies.

For many writers, blogs are a lucrative business, with readers paying small fees for content and advertisers paying for mentions of their products. To avoid China’s strict laws on news gathering, many bloggers occupy a gray area, framing their views on current events as commentary.

The freewheeling competition for eyeballs has led to an alarming rise in fake news, a concern that the government often uses to justify its crackdown.

But Mr. Xi is targeting much more than false information. The authorities have blacklisted writers who traded celebrity gossip, analysts who discussed rising property prices and advocates who wrote about problems in the countryside.

Since December, the authorities have closed more than 140,000 blogs and deleted more than 500,000 articles, according to the state-run news media, saying that they contained false information, distortions and obscenities.

But while the range of banned topics in China was once clear — independence movements in Tibet and Taiwan, and the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example — the party’s red line has become much more ambiguous.

China’s trade war with the United States is now considered sensitive. So too, sometimes, are musings about the futility of work, a theme often derided by censors as promoting “slacker culture.”

Li Yongfeng, who runs a popular book review channel, said he avoided publishing articles that mentioned social movements or past or present political leaders, even to offer praise.

“At the end of the day, it is up to authorities to decide what constitutes ‘positive energy’ and what does not,” she said.

In December, the Cyberspace Administration of China listed offenses by bloggers that included distorting government policy and party history, “flaunting wealth” and “challenging public order.”

An account that focused on women was suspended last year after the authorities said its posts on sexual health were “distasteful.”

Similarly, an account run by a nonprofit named NGOCN was shut down in December after it published articles on a chemical spill in eastern China

Increasingly, the party is seeking to limit content that depicts life in China as a constant struggle.

“It is becoming unbearable,” Mr. Wang said. “The party simply can’t tolerate anyone who has a big influence on society.”

Trump’s approach to China, a weird mix of open pleading for help with North Korea, fawning praise for Xi and threatened punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, hardly seems calculated to lay the basis for a more sustainable policy.

friendlier ties with Beijing seemed like a good idea, even a brilliant one, when then-likely presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon first proposed it during the Cold War

the Cold War’s dramatic end spawned a new and loftier rationale for the policy, which had acquired a life of its own. Americans believed that history might be flowing inevitably in favor of free markets and free elections. All we had to do was stay patient, maintain our influence and let China evolve. There would be no long-term conflict between U.S. self-interest and U.S. values.

As for geopolitics, the old Nixon-Kissinger gambit is played out, and increasingly Moscow and Beijing cooperate to counter the United States, whether in the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula.

Our overall goal is that, by around 2030, China will be among the major space powers of the world

China was late to the space race

But in the decades since, China has pumped billions of dollars and other resources into research and training

China has staged a spacewalk, landed a rover on the moon and launched a space lab that it hopes paves the way for a 20-ton space station

He said other plans include sending probes to Jupiter and its moons

China is still studying the possibility of sending a man to the moon, but focusing on robotic lunar missions for now, including making the first soft landing on the far side of the moon around 2018

He also emphasized China's increasing cooperation with other international space agencies -- with NASA being the exception

the U.S. Congress has prohibited NASA from working with China because of national security concerns

NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies," wrote Robert Walker and Peter Navarro

While the American government's space program has suffered from under-investment, both China and Russia continue to move briskly forward with military-focused initiatives," they added. "Each continues to develop weapons explicitly designed... to 'deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt, or destroy' America's eyes and ears in space

Chinese officials on Tuesday reiterated the country's "peaceful motives" behind its space exploration and utilization, but many have pointed to Walker and Navarro's article as a sign that potential U.S.-China collaboration in space would be unlikely

The changes will amount to a new electoral process with “Hong Kong characteristics,” Wang Chen, a Politburo member who specializes in legal matters, said in a speech.

Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 on the promise that it would be accorded a high degree of autonomy for 50 years. But “Beijing’s full grip on power in Hong Kong may happen well before 2047,” said Diana Fu, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

The government promised economic growth of “over 6 percent,” a relatively modest target by the standards of China’s pre-pandemic expansion but a big turnabout from last year and a signal of its commitment to keeping the world’s second-largest economy humming.

The forecast indicates that China expects a strong rebound after the pandemic brought the country’s economy to a standstill for several months last year.

The spending increases over the past two decades, which have given China the world’s second-largest military budget today, have paid for a modernization and expansion program aimed at challenging American military dominance in the Pacific, especially in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.

Strengthening that message will be a major focus for Mr. Xi as he looks ahead to two important political events. In July, the party will celebrate the centenary of its founding.

As China’s rivalry over science and technology with the United States and other countries remains at a boil, Beijing is digging deep into its pockets in a bid for victory.

Just over a year after the coronavirus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, Beijing also pledged to increase resources to guard against emerging infectious diseases and biosafety risks.

The Communist Party’s latest five-year plan specifically calls for the construction of a “Polar Silk Road,” presumably aimed at helping China better capitalize on new energy sources and faster shipping routes in the Arctic.

China’s military budget is set to rise by around 6.9 percent this year, a slight increase from last year. As overall government spending is projected to decline slightly, the People’s Liberation Army is still being funded robustly.

As countries continue to grapple with the pandemic, the party has doubled down on the message that China’s political model of strong, centralized leadership is superior to the chaos of liberal democracies.

The government addressed concerns about China’s aging population and shrinking labor force by announcing pension reforms and gradual changes to the official retirement age

On Friday, the government announced plans to build a system to support “family development” and strengthen marriage and family counseling services.

“Fully implement the party’s basic policy on religious work,” read a draft of the five-year plan. “Continue to pursue the sinicization of China’s religions and actively guide religions so that they can be compatible with socialist society.”

This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. And in the '80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that's considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.

Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best." This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn't able to control it.

China's response was not without fault. The government's decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.

But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.

Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or the "Wuhan Virus." They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase "China virus" during a March 16 call to Fox News.

A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump's first tweet about a "Chinese virus" to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.

Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D'Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR's Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.

Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.

In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.'s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn't at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.

It's reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a "gay disease," there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren't diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.

That's not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it's appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.

But there's a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like "Chinese virus," that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.

the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.

Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.Without such commitments in place, "it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?" says Shamasunder.

Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.

Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.

Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like "COVID-19" should be used instead of "Chinese virus."

The military budget is being set and major decisions on troop levels and priorities are being made so it's hoped the war game will help prepare the military to face the challenges of the next few years.

War games are always sensitive and outcomes are closely guarded because they can reveal shortfalls in US military plans and operations. One former defense official confirmed that in a recent exercise gaming out a conflict against major adversaries like Russia and China, "we found the Blue Team, the US and allies, kept losing."

The scenarios covered in the game this summer will reflect real life possibilities. Those could include major cyber attacks, a Russian advance in the Baltics, further militarization of the Arctic by Moscow or China flexing its muscles in the South China Sea or even invading Taiwan.

And preparations aren't just virtual. This week, the US and Canada have been carrying out military exercises, in tough conditions where temperatures can plunge to -20 Fahrenheit, to make clear they are ready to push back against Russian military advances in the resource rich Arctic.

Russia has put advanced missiles in the region to protect its bases there and is directly challenging the US. In 2020 more Russian aircraft flew near US airspace off Alaska than at any time since the end of the Cold War, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command with multiple flights of heavy bombers, anti-submarine aircraft, and intelligence collection planes.

For NORAD, the US and Canadian command overseeing the exercise, a key priority is "being able to track and then defeat" potential Russian military activity in the Arctic, Canadian NORAD Region Commander, Major-General Eric Kenny, told CNN.Concerns about Russian and Chinese activity are increasing and there are no signs of tensions abating since Biden took office.

Both nations are expanding their ability to operate in wider areas in Europe and Asia meaning the Pentagon could be forced to send US forces thousands of miles away. "Russia and China are playing a home game, we are playing an away game," Edelman said.

At the same time the rhetoric from the Biden administration is heating up. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called out Russia for "reckless and adversarial actions" at a NATO meeting in Brussels this week and observed that Moscow has "built up a forces, large scale exercises and acts of intimidation, in the Baltic and Black Sea."

And on China, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks pulled no punches in a speech earlier this month. "Beijing has demonstrated increased military competence and a willingness to take risks, and it has adopted a more coercive and aggressive approach," she said before adding that Beijing's actions "constitute a threat to regional peace and stability, and to the rules-based international order on which our security and prosperity and those of our allies depend."

There is no indication the tough words are tamping down Russian President Vladimir Putin and China President Xi Jinping's plans to strengthen their militaries to ensure they are capable of challenging the US and its allies. Austin, in the coming weeks, "will focus on deterrence" improvements to counter adversaries, a senior defense official told CNN

Top commanders are increasingly blunt about both countries, especially on nuclear modernization.

Russia is upgrading bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine launched ballistic missiles and warning systems, "in short, its entire strategic force structure," wrote Admiral Charles Richard, head of the US Strategic Command in a recent article in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute journal. Moscow is also building hypersonic weapons that travel more than five times the speed of sound, and nuclear-powered torpedoes, capable of reaching US shores quickly.

China is about to become a nation with a full nuclear triad, with an inventory of nuclear capable missiles, submarines and soon a long-range bomber.

The US military is doing substantive planning for the challenge from Russia and China, with billions of dollars of spending planned on modernization in both the nuclear and non-nuclear arena if its wins Congressional approval.

The US is also looking to send a clear message to Beijing amid concerns about Taiwan as China has increased aircraft and shipping activity near the island

In response to Russian advances in eastern Europe, the US and NATO allies are increasing their own presence. But it's not enough, warns David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development. "The US and its allies do not have sufficient combat power," he told CNN. The reality he says is "within 48 to 60 hours Russian forces could be on outskirts of a Baltic capital," once it pre-positions forces.US military experts say this underlines why war games like the upcoming summer exercise are so important to ensure the military can practice and plan ahead before a crisis hits.

A clear and consistent position from the US would allow for a whole-of-government response and ensure the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act are fully enforced. These laws sanction parties involved in human rights abuses, identify where goods produced with forced labor are entering the US supply chain, and bans their import.

Biden raised his concerns over the oppression of the Uyghurs which, while a good step, was insufficient when not backed by uniform US policy. What's needed is a comprehensive strategy that holds China accountable for its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and prioritizes ending violence.

While former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly declared the crimes against the Uyghurs a genocide, the Trump administration's approach to China and to human rights more broadly was spotty and inconsistent at best.

In addition, a cross-agency response should focus in particular on allegations of gender-based violence perpetrated against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Biden has already established a White House Gender Policy Council and has made clear that he plans to engage with the UN's Women, Peace, and Security agenda (neglected by the Trump administration) to put gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence at the heart of US diplomacy.

Too often in the past, hosting the Olympics has allowed authoritarian regimes to peddle propaganda and gain legitimacy -- from the Nazis in 1936 to the Soviets in 1980 to the Chinese Communist Party in 2008 and Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2014. In response to China's oppression of Uyghur communities and other human rights abuses, over 180 human rights groups and international legislators are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing or boycotted altogether.

It has effectively drafted Russia as a partner in missions that it has already planned, outpacing a Russian program that has stalled in recent years.

The two countries did not detail their joint projects nor set a timeline. According to a statement by the China National Space Administration, they agreed to “use their accumulated experience in space science research and development and use of space equipment and space technology to jointly formulate a route map for the construction of an international lunar scientific research station.”

The Soviet Union initially led the first space race in the mid-20th century before falling behind the United States, which put the first man on the moon in 1969, a feat the Soviets never managed.

China, by contrast, was never invited to the International Space Station, as American law prohibits NASA from cooperating with Beijing.

China pledged to keep the joint project with Russia “open to all interested countries and international partners,”

With Russia by its side, China could now draw in other countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, establishing parallel programs for lunar development, said Namrata Goswami, an independent analyst and co-author of a new book on space exploration, “Scramble for the Skies.”

Government-launched enterprises in both Russia and Europe also recently revealed plans to develop reusable rockets that are similar both in appearance and function to the Falcon 9 booster.

A year after this test, China's main space contractor revealed plans to develop the ability to reuse its Long March 8 booster, which is powered by kerosene fuel, the same type of power that fuels SpaceX rockets. By 2025, Chinese officials said, this rocket would be capable of landing on a sea platform like SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster.

Earlier this month, the Chinese government signed an agreement with Russia to work together to build a Moon base. China has also begun planning to launch crewed missions to Mars and deploy a massive space-based, commercial-scale solar power plant by 2050.

As China advances in space, NASA has spent more than $20 billion building a large rocket, the Space Launch System, that could soon be obsolete. And flying this single-use rocket is so expensive that, in combination with its Artemis program, NASA could exceed its congressional funds by more than 43%.

Increasingly, the US' main advantage over China lies in its burgeoning commercial space industry, led by SpaceX. If America wants to compete, it should unleash the full potential of SpaceX and other commercial space companies that seek to go further in space, faster and for less money.

While SpaceX became a transformational space company, the US and China have been locked in an increasingly intense battle for influence and economic resources on Earth.

Speaking frankly, it’s a lie,” says Liang Yong, a gruff villager. The official investigation of Ziyun’s economy was, he says, perfunctory.

Provincial leaders popped into his village, rendered their verdict that it had left poverty behind and then sped off. “It’s a show. In our hearts we all know the truth,”

Pork is pricey these days, so he eats meat just a couple of times a week. After paying his two children’s school fees, he has little money left.

He is poorer than many others in China, especially in its cities.

But the ability to scrape enough together for meat, education and heating marks Mr Liang as someone who has in fact left extreme poverty

Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”.

It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011.

Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.)

In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5%

It decollectivised agriculture, giving farmers an incentive to produce more. It allowed people to move around the country to find work. It gave more freedom to entrepreneurs. It helped by building roads, investing in education and courting foreign investors. Its goal was to boost the economy;

The government’s approach changed in 2015 when Xi Jinping, its leader, vowed to eradicate the last vestiges of extreme poverty by the end of 2020.

tried to encourage personal initiative by rewarding poor people who found ways of bettering their lot

They spent public money widely.

I

n 2020 the allocation per head was more than 26,000 yuan

One of the biggest challenges has been the terrain where the poor live.

about 30% of the country’s total—that were designated as poverty-stricken when Mr Xi began his anti-poverty campaign were all mainly rural. Most were mountainous or on inhospitable land

to introduce industry

mostly modern agriculture.

government created a 25-hectare zone for growing and processing shiitake mushrooms

the shiitake are a cash crop, letting them earn about 80 yuan a day, a decent wage.

In the 1980s China broke up communal farms, letting people strike out on their own. Now the government wants them to pool their resources again

turning farmers into “shareholders”

Residents get stakes in new rural enterprises, which, all going well, will pay dividends.

The Luomai shiitake farm is run by China Southern Power Grid, a state-owned firm. But there is a risk that as the anti-poverty campaign fades away, some projects will fizzle.

The second approach to helping hard-up villages was more radical: moving inhabitants to better-connected areas.

2016 and 2020 officials relocated about 10m people.

The government concluded that it was too costly to provide necessary services, from roads to health care, to the most remote villages

A frequent problem after moving people into such housing is finding work for them.

the government called on local officials to arrange jobs for at least one member of each household.

with her new surroundings. There is a good school just across the street, which is far better for her child.

A bigger challenge is relative deprivation, a problem abundantly evident to anyone who has travelled between the glitzy coastal cities and the drabber towns of the hinterland.

recent study by Chinese economists concluded that the “subjective poverty line” in rural areas was about 23 yuan per day, nearly twice the amount below which a person would be officially classified as poor.

namely setting the relative poverty line at half the median income level. It suggests that about a third of rural Chinese still see themselves as poor.

If poverty is calculated this way it becomes almost impossible to eliminate,

China does not count any poverty in its cities because welfare safeguards supposedly help those without money.

But workers who have moved from the countryside lack the right documentation for ready access to urban welfare.

And for any city-dweller, support is meagre. In relative terms about a fifth of China’s urban residents can be classified as poor,

To reduce relative poverty, China needs different tactics from the ones used in its campaign against extreme poverty.

policies for which it has shown little eagerness.

On the streets of Guiyang, the booming capital of Guizhou, hardship is still a common sight.

Zhou Weifu, a porter in his 50s, scoffs at the suggestion that poverty is over. “What kind of work is this? I can barely make any money,”

Former reeducation camp detainees have told CNN they experienced political indoctrination and abuse inside the camps, such as food and sleep deprivation and forced injections.

CNN reporting has also found that some Uyghur women were forced to use birth control and undergo sterilization as part of a deliberate attempt to push down birth rates among minorities in Xinjiang.

China denies allegations of such human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It has insisted that its reeducation camps are necessary for preventing religious extremism and terrorism in the area,

Bates said -- apparently referring to a claim by former national security advisor John Bolton that Trump previously encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to continue building detainment camps in Xinjiang.

The treatment of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang has been widely condemned by the international community. In July 2019, twenty-two countries including Japan and the UK signed a letter urging China to end its "mass arbitrary detentions and related violations" and called on Beijing to allow UN experts to access the region.

Earlier this month, the US also banned imports of cotton products and tomatoes produced in Xinjiang over forced labor concerns.

“It seems that a whole-of-government and whole-of-society campaign is being waged to bring China down,” Mr. Xie told Ms. Sherman, according to the summaries of his comments, which were also issued on the Chinese foreign ministry website. “Do bad things and get good results. How is that ever possible?”

Chinese people “feel that the real emphasis is on the adversarial aspect; the collaborative aspect is just an expediency,” Mr. Xie told Ms. Sherman, according to the summary.

The acrimony echoed the opening of high-level talks between senior Chinese and Biden administration officials in March, when Beijing’s top foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, delivered a 16-minute lecture, accusing them of arrogance and hypocrisy.

Last week, Chinese officials said they were “extremely shocked” by a W.H.O. proposal to take a fresh look at the lab leak theory. A report in March from an initial W.H.O. inquiry stated that it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus had jumped into the wider population through a lab leak.

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has expressed impatience with criticism and demands from Washington, especially over what Beijing deems internal issues like Hong Kong, Xinjiang and human rights.“We’ll never accept insufferably arrogant lecturing from those ‘master teachers!’” Mr. Xi said in a speech on July 1 marking 100 years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. He also warned that foes would “crack their heads and spill blood” against a wall of Chinese resolve.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, who was also scheduled to meet Ms. Sherman in Tianjin, said over the weekend that the United States needed to be taught some humility.“If the United States still hasn’t learned how to get along with other countries in an equal manner, then we have a responsibility to work with the international community to give it a good catch-up lesson,” Mr. Wang said in talks on Saturday with his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.

The current version of the United States doesn’t seem to know quite what it is — global democratic leader or parochial self-protector — and the confusion benefits China.

Instead being fragmented among dozens of apps — one for Starbucks, others for Amazon and airlines and so on — much of Chinese commerce happens within one of two digital networks — WeChat Pay and Alipay. People open one app and can pay for almost anything, in stores or online. The simplicity encourages further retail innovations, and Facebook and Google are trying to mimic this model. It feels like the future of commerce

More quietly, though, Nanjing embodies the growth of a middle-class consumer culture. The city’s subway system opened only 14 years ago and now transports one billion riders a year. It’s clean and bustling, and the trips I took each cost either 2 or 3 yuan (about 28 cents or 42 cents). Nationwide, almost 30 other cities have opened subways since Nanjing did, giving China the world’s largest subway ridership.

“We Chinese people know very well what we have, what we want and what it takes,” Wang Qishan, China’s vice president, told the conference, the New Economy Forum. “We have the confidence, patience and resolve to realize our goal of great national rejuvenation.”China has now exceeded the world’s expectations for three decades in a row — which, of course, does not guarantee that the streak will continue in this new decade.

Chinese scientists have even submitted a paper for publication to the Lancet – although it has not yet been peer-reviewed – that claims “Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human Sars-CoV-2 transmission first happened”, suggesting instead that the first case may have been in the “Indian subcontinent”.

Claims that the virus had origins outside China are given little credence by western scientists. Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not emerge in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.

Reports of Covid circulating in Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, seem “weak”, said Prof Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The serological data [from Italy] can most likely be explained by cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses.” In other words, antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been triggered in individuals who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not those responsible for Covid-19

And while traces of coronavirus have been found on frozen food packaging, scientists think that represents a very low risk for a disease now believed to be overwhelmingly transmitted through respiratory droplets.

A positive test “doesn’t indicate infectious virus, just that some signal from the virus is present on that surface,” Andrew Pekosz of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University told AP. “I’ve seen no convincing data that Sars-CoV-2 on food packaging poses a significant risk for infection.”

But as the human and economic toll of the pandemic mounts, Beijing is keen to protect its reputation at home and abroad. Covid-19 has now infected over 60 million people and killed nearly 1.5 million.

“China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the “original sin” of the outbreak, which undercuts virtually every effort to salvage its image,” said Andrew Small, a China scholar and senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, a US thinktank.

“Recent months have shown what a catastrophic impact the pandemic has had for China in international public opinion.”

He does not think there is any doubt in the minds of senior Chinese leadership about the origin of the virus, and sees the focus on reporting possible alternative origins as a propaganda campaign.

The reports fit an internal narrative of a strong China led by an efficient Communist party. Domestically, Beijing has promoted its enormous success in virtually eradicating the disease and returning life within its borders to something like normal

Internationally, China’s aims probably include introducing some doubt for global audiences who are likely to believe it, turning basic facts into a “contested, politically sensitive matter” in relations with Beijing, Small said.

China’s questioning of the origin of the virus in Wuhan might be more credible if it was supporting an independent investigation into the disease, but instead authorities have repeatedly proved obstructive

WHO investigators who visited Wuhan earlier this year were not able to visit the food market linked to the initial outbreak. A new team is expected to head to China soon to build on initial work by a Chinese team, but they still don’t have a date for travel, with the WHO saying only that they will travel “in due time”.

“Based on our research, I can’t see evidence that we can reach 1.9C,” he said. “But whether we are now on course for 1.9C or 2.7C, the main point is that we should focus on concrete action.”

China has released five documents detailing plans to achieve its dual goals of peaking carbon emissions in 2030 and reaching net zero by 2060. “If you read those reports you can find all of our actions, but nobody reads everything,”

As an example, he said the working guidance document on carbon peaking and neutrality outlined a strict control on the increase of coal consumption during the 14th five-year period and then a gradual reduction during the following five years. “That means China will peak coal consumption around 2025, though that is not a line you will see in the document. You need to interpret it and nobody [outside China] can do that.”

Similarly, he said the government 1+N policy system provided a roadmap of 37 tasks that the country needed to take until 2060 on areas ranging from legislation and policy to technology and finance

There will be another 30 documents published in the coming year that break down actions needed in key sectors, such as building and transport, as well as major industries including steel and chemicals. “No country has issued so many documents to support its targets,” he said. “It’s a holistic solution, but nobody knows.”

China’s two different targets pose very different challenges, he said. “The peaking issue is easy. More difficult is how to achieve neutrality … We are in transition. Our concern in the future is not that China is too slow, but that it is too fast.”

“Our coal-fired plants have a life of 10 to 12 years. If we shut them down, who will pay for the stranded assets? Who will employ the laid-off workers?”

By the end of this decade, the government plans to reach 1200GW of wind and solar power, which would exceed the entire installed electricity capacity of the US, he said.

As at previous Cops, China will also push wealthy nations to make greater financial contributions to developing countries, which have done least to cause the climate crisis but suffer most from its consequences.

“China would like more effort on supporting developing countries,” he said. “If we are going to aim for 1.5C instead of 2C, then there has to be an increase in the funds available to make that happen.”

“1.5C is possible, but it would carry a cost, social and economic. If we cannot solve these problems equally, especially for developing countries, then it is not a real target.”

“We are all in the same boat, but different cabins,” he said. “Some live in a big space and eat too much. We need balance.”

The United States’ allies in the Pacific, including Japan and Australia, “will also adopt a stronger military posture. So it all seems unfriendly to China.”

At the heart of China’s strategy lies a conviction that the United States is weakened from reckless foreign adventures, including, from Beijing’s perspective, goading Mr. Putin into the Ukraine conflict.

China’s path ahead is by no means certain. Drawing too close to Russia would risk entrenching animosity toward China in Europe and beyond, a possibility that worries Mr. Xi’s government, for all its bluster.

“This means that as long as we don’t commit terminal strategic blunders, China’s modernization will not be cut short, and on the contrary, China will have even greater ability and will to play a more important role in building a new international order,” Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who has advised senior officials, wrote after the invasion in a widely circulated article.

It’s not just China’s reputation in the West; I think it also affects China’s reputation in the non-West, because it’s essentially associating itself with an imperial power.”

In any case, China’s economy is large enough to absorb blows that would cripple others. Chinese companies may even end up well positioned to take advantage of Russia’s desperate need for trade, as happened when Moscow faced sanctions over the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“Biden has repeatedly avowed that the United States is not in a ‘new Cold War’ with China, but China often feels the chill creeping in everywhere.”

Just as Mr. Putin depicts the United States as menacing Russia on its western frontier, Mr. Xi sees American support for Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its own, as a similar threat off China’s coast.

“The West should not have become a hegemon in defining universal standards because the West or Europe, or the West in general is only part of humanity,” Mr. Dugin told a Chinese state television interviewer in 2019. “And the other part, a majority of human beings, live outside the West, in Asia.”

As it turns to Beijing for support against Western sanctions, Russia will become increasingly beholden to China as its diplomatic and economic lifeline, while serving as its strategic geopolitical ballast, analysts say.