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John Sudworth, BBC News, Beijing: "Why red now?"

The World Health Organization recommends 25 micrograms per cubic metre as the maximum safe level.

the US Embassy's air pollution monitor in Beijing reported that the intensity of the tiny particles known as PM 2.5 was at 291 micrograms per cubic metre.

The order will last until 12:00 on Thursday, when a cold front is expected to arrive and clear the smog.

So why red now? Well, the lack of any previous red alerts has been met with increasingly loud howls of derision. What would it take, people wondered last week - as their children felt their way to the still open schools through the poisonous gloom - for the government to act?

China's air quality is a key factor in its push for a new global deal on climate change.

Around 58% of the increase in the country's primary energy consumption in 2013-14 came from non-fossil fuel sources.

A strong agreement here in Paris won't immediately solve China's air woes, but if it ultimately pushes down the price of renewables even further, it could play a part in solving the issue long term.

While the smog's effects have been worsened by weather conditions and the city's geography - bordered to the south and east by industrial areas that generate pollution and to the north and west by mountains that trap it - it has prompted increasing concern that China has prioritised economic growth at too high an environmental cost.

Activists said the level hit 1,400 micrograms per cubic metre in the north-east city of Shenyang last month, saying it was the worst seen in China.

In comparison, London's PM 2.5 average on 6 December was 8 micrograms per cubic metre, the Environmental Research Group at King's College said. It said more than 70 was reached during spring 2014 and 2015, and the highest was on bonfire night, 5 November 2006, at 112.

China still depends on coal for more than 60% of its power, despite major investment in renewable energy sources.

The FA-50 fighter trainers from South Korea were acquired by the Philippines for 18.9 billion pesos. Seoul has committed to deliver 10 more light fighters until 2017.

Weapons for the FA-50s, including bombs and rockets, will be purchased later.

The Philippines has had no fighter capability since it mothballed its Vietnam War vintage F-5A/Bs in the mid-2000s. It has a few S-211 Italian trainer jets, acquired in the late 1980s.

“With these aircraft, our capability to guard maritime borders will be enhanced,” an air force general said, declining to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media. “Our response time will be quicker but we would need radar and communications to fully integrate our air defence systems.”

The Philippines’ ill-equipped armed forces are no match for those of China, despite receiving two cutters and coastal radar stations from the United States in 2011. Washington promised to deliver late next year another cutter and two C-130 planes.

In January 2013, the Philippines brought its disputes with China to international arbitration, but Beijing refused to participate and pressed for one-on-one negotiations.

An international tribunal in The Hague, however, dismissed China's legal arguments last month and ruled that it has authority to hear the Philippines' case.

It said it expects to hand down a decision next year on several issues raised by the Philippines, including the validity of China's sweeping territorial claims under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

China has built seven artificial islands in the Spratly Islands and is constructing military facilities, including airfields, ports and lighthouses.

Still, the Philippines has ruled out a military solution to the territorial conflicts with its limited defence capabilities.

China claims 90 per cent of the South China Sea’s 3.5 million sq km waters. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan also have claims to at least parts of the area.

“If North Korea becomes an enemy state, it would have plenty of ways to harm China,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “Beijing cannot afford to have North Korea become permanently hostile.”

Adding to the complications, Mr. Xi, 62, and Mr. Kim, believed to be 33, have a fraught relationship, say American, Chinese, and South Korean officials.

While the two leaders hail from revolutionary families, they have little else in common. Mr. Xi’s formative years were dominated by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Kim attended a Swiss boarding school and inherited the title of supreme leader before turning 30.

Mr. Xi has long recognized China’s sense of camaraderie with the North, which dates to their Korean War alliance in the 1950s. (Mao called the relationship “as close as lips and teeth.”)

But the two countries have followed starkly divergent paths. While China is now a sophisticated economy and a rising power, North Korea has become increasingly isolated, enfeebled and erratic, depending on China for most of its food and energy.

“The nuclear test will seriously damage the bilateral relationship,” Mr. Yang said. “Xi Jinping has been forced to be more assertive.”

While his predecessors welcomed North Korean leaders with the fanfare of Politburo meetings, Mr. Xi has kept a distance.

In an unusually public rebuke, Mr. Xi warned that no country should be able to throw the world into chaos for “selfish gain.” Later that year, he imposed sanctions, limiting shipments of materials used in weapons and cutting ties to some North Korean banks, though enforcement was lax.

Mr. Xi has made clear to the North that its future lies in economic reform, not military development, and that China will not accept a nuclear state, current and former Chinese and American officials said.

In a sign of his displeasure, Mr. Xi has cultivated better relations with Ms. Park, the South Korean president, traveling to Seoul for a state visit in 2014.

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who served as the American ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011, said there was a generational divide among Chinese officials about how to deal with North Korea. “The older apparatchiks would defend the North Korean line,” he said. “The younger ones wanted this issue to go away. There’s no emotional connection, there’s no war being waged.”

In recent months, Mr. Xi extended several olive branches to Mr. Kim, concerned that the relationship had deteriorated to the point that Mr. Kim might lash out again, American and Chinese diplomats said.

At the parade in October, Mr. Kim stood next to Mr. Xi’s envoy, smiling and waving. He spoke of a “blood-tied friendship” and said that “bilateral ties are more than neighborliness,” according to coverage in the North Korean news media.

Coca-Cola and other multinational food companies, operating through a group called the International Life Sciences Institute, cultivated key Chinese officials in an effort to stave off the growing movement for food regulation and soda taxes that has been sweeping the west.

in China, ILSI is so well-placed that it runs its operations from inside the government’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. In fact, when asked to comment on the studies, the ministry emailed a statement not from a government official but from ILSI’s China director.

The close relationship with the highest government health policymakers goes significantly beyond what the companies have been able to achieve in the West.

Professor Popkin was not involved in the study, but he has spent decades working in China to help the country develop nutrition guidelines and food policy — efforts he said were often thwarted by well-placed officials aligned with ILSI.Given his experience, he said Professor Greenhalgh’s findings were not surprising. “Over the course of several decades, Coke and ILSI have worked to prevent any kind of food policy that would benefit public health,” he said. “What they’ve been doing in China is insidious.”

the industry efforts have been wildly successful, in part because China lacks a free media or watchdog organizations that might have been critical of the relationship.

In just a few decades, China has gone from a nation plagued by food shortages to one buffeted by soaring obesity and chronic diseases tied to poor diet. More than 42 percent of adults in China are overweight or obese, according to Chinese researchers, more than double the rate in 1991. In Chinese cities, nearly a fifth of all children are obese, according to government surveys.

“The key is that no matter what Cola-Cola or other beverage companies say, these drinks are just a product,” he said. “No one is being forced to buy them.”

These groups, he said, support and publicize scientific studies whose results sometimes muddy the waters on contentious issues like smoking or alcohol and soda consumption.“They often cherry pick data in ways that mislead while portraying these issues as so terribly complex that nothing can be done,” he said.

Many Chinese tech companies are “at this critical size that the China market alone is not enough to support their business and valuation,

The surge also positions Asia’s investors to win stakes in markets that Western companies covet, or that have national security implications.

. “If you think that being the locus of invention gives you a boost to your GDP and so forth, that’s a deterioration of the U.S. competitive advantage.”

Although one of the biggest Asian investors is Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. , which has tapped Middle Eastern money to create the world’s largest tech-investment fund, it is Chinese activity that is having the greatest impact.

China is creating unicorns—startups valued at a billion dollars or more—at much the same pace as the U.S., drawing on funding from internet giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as well as more than a thousand domestic venture-capital firms that have raised billions of dollars a year for the past few year

Chinese-led venture funding is about 15 times its size in 2013, outpacing growth in U.S.-led financing, which roughly doubled in that time period

Most Chinese-led investment so far has gone to the country’s own firms, the Journal analysis found. Many of them, like the Yelp equivalent Meituan-Dianping, are household names with millions of customers in China, yet virtually unknown elsewhere.

The rise of China’s venture market “signifies a shift from a single-epicenter view of the world to a duopoly,” he says.

Madhur Deora, chief financial officer for Paytm, one of India’s biggest e-payments firms, says the company approached Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial instead of U.S. backers for funding in 2015 because Chinese mobile-internet innovations are “way far ahead of anything that’s happened in the U.S.

One reason China’s push into new technologies worries many in the U.S. is that, unlike the hunt for good returns that underpins most Western venture finance, a lot of Chinese investment is driven by strategic interests, some carrying the specter of state influence.

China is pushing hard into semiconductors, for which the government has provided billions of dollars in public funding, and artificial intelligence, where Beijing in July set a goal of global leadership by 2030

Mr. Lee, the venture investor, predicts that in the next five to 10 years Chinese tech companies will become pacesetters for tech-related development, vying with the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook for dominance in markets outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe.

“All the rest of the world will basically be a land grab between the U.S. and China,

“The U.S. approach is: We’ll build a better product and just win over all the countries,” says Mr. Lee. The Chinese approach is “we’ll fund the local partner to beat off the American companies.”

Asia’s rise as a startup financier is even starker in the biggest venture investments—those of $100 million or more. These megadeals have become an increasingly important part of venture finance as valuations have ballooned, with their proportion of deal volume growing from around 8% in 2007 to around half of the total last year.

In Southeast Asia, a flood of Chinese money into local startups—such as the $1.1 billion Alibaba-led investment into Indonesian online marketplace PT Tokopedia last year—is drawing the region closer to China

Chinese money is also playing a big role in India, which, with a population of 1.2 billion, has been described as the next big internet market. Chinese and Japanese investors each led nearly $3 billion in venture finance in India last year, ahead of the nearly $2 billion in deals led by U.S. investors

“Think of strategic investments and M&A as playing a game of go,” said Mr. Tsai, the Alibaba executive vice chairman, at the investor conference last year. “In a game of go the strategic objective is to put your pieces on the chessboard and surround your opponent.”

On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.

The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault

That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too

Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him

The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time.

The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.

The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.

sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying.

Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.

Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.

It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.

This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China

Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.

If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.

Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today.

Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.

Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.

At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”

The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight.

Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut

Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego

Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists.

That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”

The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.

During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.

For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years

The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth.

The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.

On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”

on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early

Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.

So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.

Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.

The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.

Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.

Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.

The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.

Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead

s the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.

He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining.

Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump.

Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.

Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.

rump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.

Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.

US criticism of China has intensified over the past week. Over the weekend Politico published details of a 57-page Republican party attack memo,

After a series of controversial shipments, China’s government introduced strict rules last month which required all medical equipment and testing kits to be approved by the national medical products administration and registered before they were exported. However, after some suppliers reportedly complained it was too difficult to get the domestic license required, the rules were scaled back on the weekend, with exports now only needing to meet the importing country’s standard.

“Germany is looking at things, we are looking at things,” he said. “We are talking about a lot more money than Germany’s talking about.” “We haven’t determined the final amount yet,” Trump said. “It’s very substantial.”

China has reacted strongly, denying any coverup over the virus. An editorial in the state-backed Global Times on Monday said “China’s achievement in the fight against Covid-19 is way better than that of the US”.

“This is a life-and-death matter, so it would spare no effort to smear China and mobilise all possible public opinion forces to do so to cover its selfishness.”

“like Australia”

Several countries on Tuesday began to ease lockdown restrictions, including New Zealand and Australia, which have both had significant success in controlling the virus. New Zealand moved down to level 3 restrictions on midnight on Monday, allowing some businesses to reopen.

In other developments: More than 3,041,700 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, according to the John Hopkins Tracker, and at least 211,167 have died. Argentina’s number of reported cases surpassed 4,000 on Monday, with 111 new cases bringing the total to 4,003 infected persons and 197 deaths so far. Japanese media reported that 300,000 coronavirus masks sent to pregnant women as part of a government handout have been found to be faulty. New Zealand has ended its strictest lockdown phase and entered Level 3, with 400,000 Kiwis returning to work, restaurants and cafes reopening for takeaway, and fishing, surfing and swimming now permitted. China has reported six new coronavirus cases (three domestic and three from overseas) and no deaths, according to the country’s National Health Commission. More than 2,200 Indonesians have died from Covid-19, but were not recorded, according to an investigation from Reuters. The official death toll from the virus in the country is 765. The director general of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said he is concerned about people missing vaccines for diseases such as polio and measles because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico’s president declared the country had “tamed” its coronavirus outbreak, despite widespread suspicions that Covid-19 cases are being undercounted. WhatsApp claims to have cut viral messages by 70% after introducing a limit on the number of people to whom users could forward messages. Afghanistan recorded its biggest one-day rise in cases, triggered by a continued surge of transmission in Kandahar. Sydney’s Bondi Beach has reopened again, after it was shut for being too crowded.

China has nearly completed two of its largest island building projects, at Mischief Reef and Subi Reef.

The W.H.O. emergency use approval allows the Sinopharm vaccine to be included in Covax, a global initiative to provide free vaccines to poor countries. The possible inclusion in Covax raises hopes that more people — especially those in developing nations — will get access to shots at a crucial moment.

“The situation right now is just so desperate for low and lower middle income countries that any doses we can get out are worth mobilizing,” Ms. Taylor said. “Having potentially two options coming from China could really change the landscape of what’s possible over the next few months.”

“The whole world is short of this vaccine,” said a Sinovac spokesman, Pearson Liu. “The demand is just too great.”

Andrea Taylor, who analyzes global data on vaccines at the Duke Global Health Institute, called the potential addition of two Chinese vaccines into the Covax program a “game changer.”

“This should be the golden time for China to practice its vaccine diplomacy. The problem is, at the same time, China itself is facing a shortage,”

China’s vaccines have been rolled out to more than 80 countries, but they have faced significant skepticism, in part because the companies have not released Phase 3 clinical trial data for scientists to independently assess the vaccines’ efficacy rates. An advisory group to the W.H.O. published the data this week.

The Sinopharm vaccine developed with the Beijing Institute of Biological Products has an efficacy rate of 78.1 percent, according to the W.H.O. advisory group.

The Sinovac vaccine has varying efficacy rates of between 50 percent to 84 percent, depending on the country where Phase 3 trials were conducted.

for China’s leaders, the W.H.O. approval can still be seen as a badge of honor. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has pledged to make a Covid-19 vaccine a “global public good.”

After India announced export restrictions on vaccines last month, Indonesia and the Philippines said they would turn to China for help. Last week, China’s foreign minister offered to help South Asian nations get access to vaccines.

Indonesia said it would get additional doses from Sinovac after President Joko Widodo held talks with Mr. Xi. In a speech the same week, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said he owed “a debt of gratitude” to China for its vaccines.

“They don’t like to subsume their generosity in their products under some U.N. brand,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the global health policy center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They are in a historic phase,” he said. “They want the recipients to know that this is China delivering.”

"If there was no policy across the whole country, it would be difficult to enforce a separate one for poor people and Muslims."

China's birth rate has been falling rapidly since the introduction of the one-child policy more than 40 years ago, which limited couples to one baby in order to alleviate poverty and stem a population boom.

During the one-child policy, ethnic minorities, including Xinjiang's Uyghur population, were allowed to have up to three children, which authorities said was in deference of the group's cultural traditions of large families.

Faced with a demographic crisis, the Chinese government relaxed the policy in 2016 to allow for two children

n 2020, the birth rate fell by almost 15% year on year.

While the policy successfully reined in birth rates as China developed, in more recent years officials have become concerned the country won't have enough young workers to keep powering its economic growth.

Between 1991 and 2017, Xinjiang had a substantially higher birth-rate ratio when compared to the rest of the country, according to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

But when the Chinese government began its crackdown in Xinjiang in 2017, which allegedly involved sending millions of Uyghurs to a vast complex of detention centers, there was a simultaneous tightening of family planning policies.Between 2017 and 2018, birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by a third, from 15.8 per 1,000 people to 10.7 per 1,000 people.

At a time when the Chinese government was desperately trying to raise birth rates, sterilizations in the region surged to 243 per 100,000 people in 2018, according to official government documents referenced in a report by Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz. That is far higher than the rate of 33 per 100,000 people for the rest of the country.

And while the use of IUD birth control devices dropped in China between 2016 and 2018, Zenz quoted documents showing in Xinjiang it rose to 963 per 100,000 people.

"If you lifted the birth restrictions universally, they'd lose their justification for tightening birth control policies against specific sectors of Chinese society that they dislike," said Carl Minzner, professor of law at Fordham University.

Experts said Beijing would be reluctant to find new roles for the tens of thousands of people employed by the government to oversee the country's massive family planning policy.

At the same time, removing the limits would abolish one of the many ways in the Chinese government can monitor its population, Byler said, forcing Beijing to find another reason to carry out intimate domestic surveillance.

The number of births did increase in 2016, the first year after the policy was eased. But it has been dropping since.

Our calculations — based on the Chinese government’s population and employment statistics yearbooks — show that before the one-child policy was lifted, about 40 percent of mothers who had a first child would have a second one. This is known as parity-two fertility of 0.4. (The figure may seem rather high given the rule, but ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl were exempt.)

These decreases are the result of many Chinese women’s decision to postpone marriage and childbearing. There are many reasons for these changes in behavior, notably urbanization, greater access to higher education for women and rising expectations about standards of living.

And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”Lifting controls over births would be, for the Chinese Communist Party, a tacit admission that its past policies have failed. And yet anything short of removing all such regulations will only ensure more failure.

That has included more visible support for Taiwan, angering China, which deems the island part of its territory and sees Washington as giving succour to Taiwanese seeking independence, a red line for Beijing.

China's Navy said for the first time in early April that carrier drills near Taiwan would become routine. Another U.S. warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait two days after China's announcement.

And now there are significant data about the reliability of the Chinese and Russian vaccines. (It’s still too early to tell for Covaxin.) Trial results in the U.A.E. in early December placed the efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine at 86 percent; others, in China, at 79 percent.

The fact is that no Covid-19 vaccine has been developed or released as transparently as it should have been. And while China and Russia may have botched their rollouts more than some Western companies, that doesn’t necessarily mean their vaccines are shoddy.

Some doctors and activists have put forward proposals to increase the delivery worldwide of vaccines produced in the West. These calls are well-intentioned, but they, too, assume that vaccines from Western countries are the only ones worth having — and waiting for.

There is a simpler solution, already at hand: It’s time to start trusting other countries’ vaccines.

It is a position that China has not been shy to weaponize.

“It is not about individual companies, but rather security standards,” the chancellor said in November. “It is about the certification we will carry out. That should be our guiding benchmark.”

rebellion is brewing in Germany’s foreign policy and intelligence community — scared of American threats to limit intelligence sharing — and even among some of the chancellor’s own lawmakers, who want to submit a proposal to Parliament with tougher security criteria that would, in effect, keep Huawei out.

“Car companies gather loads of personal data from the drivers of their cars, and they face an enormous risk of an angry public outraged to find their data used by the Chinese Communist Party,” said Mr. Grenell, the United States ambassador.

German automakers like Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW have continued to record sales gains in China and to take share from rivals like Ford, even as the overall market has slumped.

Today Volkswagen earns almost half its sales revenue in China and has 14 percent of the Chinese car market.

“If we were to pull out” of China, Herbert Diess, the chief executive of Volkswagen, told the Wolfsburger Nachrichten newspaper in December, “a day later 10,000 of our 20,000 development engineers in Germany would be out of work.”

China initially denied the existence of the camps, before claiming they were a necessary measure against separatist violence in Xinjiang.

In July 2020, the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab accused China of "gross and egregious" human rights abuses against the Uighurs. The reports of forced sterilisation and wider persecution of the ethnic group were "reminiscent of something not seen for a long time", he said.

The Chinese government says the measures are necessary to combat separatist violence in the region, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uighurs. Many prominent members of the ethnic minority have been imprisoned or sought asylum abroad after being accused of terrorism

In 2017, President Xi Jinping issued a directive that "religions in China must be Chinese in orientation" and "adapt themselves to socialist society". The directive led to a fresh crackdown on religious practice that particularly affected the Uighurs.

Xinjiang is now covered by a pervasive network of surveillance, including police, checkpoints, and cameras that scan everything from number plates to individual faces.

The Uighurs are a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnicity who regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. The majority live in Xinjiang, where they number about 11 million people.

ong time

In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.

many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.

“As an American, I think there is a lot of good to be said about our libertarian tradition,” Dr. Jared Baeten, an epidemiologist and vice dean at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said. “But this is the consequence — we don’t succeed as well as a collective.”

That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries.

First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions.

The New York Times set out to reconstruct the unique failure of the United States, through numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world. The reporting points to two central themes.

When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.

That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.

Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.

one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.

Nearly every country has struggled to contain the coronavirus and made mistakes along the way.

it quickly became clear that the United States’ policy was full of holes. It did not apply to immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from China, for example. In the two months after the policy went into place, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China.

On Jan. 31, his administration announced that it was restricting entry to the United States from China: Many foreign nationals — be they citizens of China or other countries — would not be allowed into the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks.

A travel policy that fell short

In retrospect, one of Mr. Trump’s first policy responses to the virus appears to have been one of his most promising.

The administration’s policy also did little to create quarantines for people who entered the United States and may have had the virus.

ven more important, the policy failed to take into account that the virus had spread well beyond China by early February. Later data would show that many infected people arriving in the United States came from Europe

South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan largely restricted entry to residents returning home. Those residents then had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival

South Korea and Hong Kong also tested for the virus at the airport and transferred anyone who was positive to a government facility.

“People need a bit more than a suggestion to look after their own health,” said Dr. Mackay, who has been working with Australian officials on their pandemic response. “They need guidelines, they need rules — and they need to be enforced.”

Travel restrictions and quarantines were central to the success in controlling the virus in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia, as well as New Zealand, many epidemiologists believe. In Australia, the number of new cases per day fell more than 90 percent in April. It remained near zero through May and early June, even as the virus surged across much of the United States.

the tolls in Australia and the United States remain vastly different. Fewer than 300 Australians have died of complications from Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. If the United States had the same per capita death rate, about 3,300 Americans would have died, rather than 158,000.

there is a good chance that a different version of Mr. Trump’s restrictions — one with fewer holes and stronger quarantines — would have meaningfully slowed the virus’s spread.

travel restrictions had been successful enough in fighting the coronavirus around the world that those views may need to be revisited.“Travel,” he said, “is the hallmark of the spread of this virus around the world.”

Traditionally, public health experts had not seen travel restrictions as central to fighting a pandemic, given their economic costs and the availability of other options, like testing, quarantining and contact tracing

But he added that

By early March, with the testing delays still unresolved, the New York region became a global center of the virus — without people realizing it until weeks later. More widespread testing could have made a major difference, experts said, leading to earlier lockdowns and social distancing and ultimately less sickness and death.

While the C.D.C. was struggling to solve its testing flaws, Germany was rapidly building up its ability to test. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a chemist by training, and other political leaders were watching the virus sweep across northern Italy, not far from southern Germany, and pushed for a big expansion of testing.

By the time the virus became a problem in Germany, labs around the country had thousands of test kits ready to use. From the beginning, the government covered the cost of the tests. American laboratories often charge patients about $100 for a test.

Without free tests, Dr. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, said at the time, “a young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people.”

Germany was soon far ahead of other countries in testing. It was able to diagnose asymptomatic cases, trace the contacts of new patients and isolate people before they could spread the virus. The country has still suffered a significant outbreak. But it has had many fewer cases per capita than Italy, Spain, France, Britain or Canada — and about one-fifth the rate of the United States.

One measure of the continuing troubles with testing is the percentage of tests that come back positive. In a country that has the virus under control, fewer than 5 percent of tests come back positive, according to World Health Organization guidelines. Many countries have reached that benchmark. The United States, even with the large recent volume of tests, has not.

In Belgium recently, test results have typically come back in 48 to 72 hours. In Germany and Greece, it is two days. In France, the wait is often 24 hours.

The conflicting advice, echoed by the C.D.C. and others, led to relatively little mask wearing in many countries early in the pandemic. But several Asian countries were exceptions, partly because they had a tradition of mask wearing to avoid sickness or minimize the effects of pollution.

The double mask failure

By January, mask wearing in Japan was widespread, as it often had been during a typical flu season. Masks also quickly became the norm in much of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and China.

In the following months, scientists around the world began to report two strands of evidence that both pointed to the importance of masks: Research showed that the virus could be transmitted through droplets that hang in the air, and several studies found that the virus spread less frequently in places where people were wearing masks.

But because U.S. passenger airlines had stopped all flights by March 12, they have been unable to resume flights to China.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has barred Chinese passenger carriers from flying into America starting June 16 as it pressures Beijing to let U.S. airlines to resume flights to the country.

The CAAC also said all airlines will be allowed to increase the number of international flights involving China to two per week if no incoming passengers on their flights test positive for COVID-19 for 3 consecutive weeks.

forge closer ties with non-NATO countries such as Australia

deterrence in space

China is investing massively in new weapons. It is coming closer to us, from the Arctic to Africa. China does not share our values ... and tries to intimidate other countries

NATO should consider including China in NATO’s official master strategy document, its “Strategic Concept”

Even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ era comes to an end and Europeans welcome the election of an Atlanticist president-elect in Joe Biden, tensions over NATO’s ability to act remain.

From anger over Turkey’s decision to buy a Russian weapons system to U.S. doubts over Europe’s commitment to its own defence, NATO - founded in 1949 to contain a military threat from the Soviet Union - has also faced calls from Trump to do more in the Middle East.

However, Eastern European allies, fearful of Russia since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, are concerned about shifting too many resources away from NATO’s core task of defending Europe.

Since then, China has repeatedly tested Taiwan’s defenses with air and sea patrols. Twice last month, squadrons of fighters and bombers crossed the unofficial median line over the Taiwan Strait, which both countries have largely observed for decades.

An American official briefed on the intelligence said it was wrong to equate the two countries. Russia, the official said, is a tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American democracy now. China is more like climate change, the official said: The threat is real and grave, but more long term.

Iran was seeking “to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country”

Mr. Trump said, “The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because nobody’s been tougher on Russia than I have.” He said that if Mr. Biden won the presidency, “China would own our country.”

“Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly invited, emboldened and even tried to coerce foreign interference in American elections,” said Tony Blinken, a senior adviser to the former vice president.

“The director has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular, also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system,” said Mr. King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Russia, but not China, is trying to “actively influence” the outcome of the 2020 election, said the American official briefed on the underlying intelligence.

Intelligence and other officials in recent days have been stepping up their releases of information about foreign interference efforts, and the State Department has sent texts to cellphones around the world advertising a $10 million reward for information on would-be election hackers.