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Historically the U.S. sought rules and institutions like the WTO that apply equally to everyone. Under Mr. Trump, the U.S. now crafts its own rules, as it has with China, according to what it considers its own best interest.

USTR says up to 90% of cases against the U.S. have led to a finding that some U.S. law or measure violated WTO commitments. True, the U.S. brings lots of WTO cases and wins the vast majority, but what Mr. Lighthizer focuses on is that the U.S. is sued more often than anyone else despite having among the world’s lowest trade barriers.

The WTO’s Appellate Body tilted the rules further in China’s favor—for example, by making it difficult to punish anticompetitive subsidies that come via state-owned enterprises, which dominate China’s economy.

the prior policy of trying to change China through engagement didn’t work

Mr. Trump’s actions may make U.S. allies more, not less, willing to work with it on China. Perhaps the strongest defense of Mr. Lighthizer’s approach to managing China is that it beats the status quo. He said: “The fact that it’s complicated is not a reason not to try to do it. And even if you have a little extra inefficiency in the system, it’s still worth it because the way we [had] it is absolutely crazy. It’s destined to fail.”

years of painstakingly worded treaties, high-level visits and cutting-edge disease surveillance—all meant to encourage good-faith cooperation—have only bitten around the edges of the problem.

“It can’t demand entry into a country because they think something bad is happening.”

Nearly 200 countries were counting on an agency whose budget—roughly $2.4 billion in 2020—is less than a sixth of the Maryland Department of Health’s. Its donors, largely Western governments, earmark most of that money for causes other than pandemic preparedness.

In 2018 and 2019, about 8% of the WHO’s budget went to activities related to pandemic preparedness

the agency’s bureaucratic structure, diplomatic protocol and funding were no match for a pandemic as widespread and fast-moving as Covid-19.

To write its recommendations, the WHO solicits outside experts, which can be a slow process.

It took those experts more than four months to agree that widespread mask-wearing helps, and that people who are talking, shouting or singing can expel the virus through tiny particles that linger in the air. In that time, about half a million people died.

As months rolled on, it became clear that governments were reluctant to allow the U.N. to scold, shame or investigate them.

In particular, The Wall Street Journal found:

* China appears to have violated international law requiring governments to swiftly inform the WHO and keep it in the loop about an alarming infectious-disease cluster

—there are no clear consequences for violations

* The WHO lost a critical week waiting for an advisory panel to recommend a global public-health emergency, because some of its members were overly hopeful that the new disease wasn’t easily transmissible from one person to another.

* The institution overestimated how prepared some wealthy countries were, while focusing on developing countries, where much of its ordinary assistance is directed

Public-health leaders say the WHO plays a critical role in global health, leading responses to epidemics and setting health policies and standards for the world. It coordinates a multinational effort every year to pick the exact strains that go into the seasonal flu vaccine, and has provided public guidance and advice on Covid-19 when many governments were silent.

The world’s public-health agency was born weak, created in 1948 over U.S. and U.K. reluctance. For decades, it was legally barred from responding to diseases that it learned about from the news. Countries were required to report outbreaks of only four diseases to the WHO: yellow fever, plague, cholera and smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980.

Nearly three times that amount was budgeted for eradicating polio, a top priority for the WHO’s two largest contributors: the U.S. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

SARS convinced governments to retool the WHO. The next year, delegates arrived in the Geneva palace where the League of Nations once met to resolve a centuries-old paradox: Countries don’t report outbreaks, because they fear—correctly—their neighbors will respond by blocking travel and trade.

“Everybody pushed back. No sovereign country wants to have this.”

China wanted an exemption from immediately reporting SARS outbreaks. The U.S. argued it couldn’t compel its 50 states to cooperate with the treaty. Iran blocked American proposals to make the WHO focus on bioterrorism. Cuba had an hourslong list of objections.

Around 3:15 a.m. on the last day, exhausted delegates ran out of time. The treaty they approved, called the International Health Regulations, imagined that each country would quickly and honestly report, then contain, any alarming outbreaks

In return, the treaty discouraged restrictions on travel and trade. There would be no consequences for reporting an outbreak—yet no way to punish a country for hiding one.

The treaty’s key chokepoint: Before declaring a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, the WHO’s director-general would consult a multinational emergency committee and give the country in question a chance to argue against such a declaration.

Delegates agreed this could give some future virus a head start but decided it was more important to discourage the WHO from making any unilateral announcements that could hurt their economies.

On Jan. 22, a committee of 15 scientists haggled for hours over Chinese data and a handful of cases in other countries. Clearly, the virus was spreading between people in China, though there was no evidence of that in other countries. The question now: Was it mainly spreading from very sick people in hospitals and homes—or more widely?

On Jan. 3, representatives of China’s National Health Commission arrived at the WHO office in Beijing. The NHC acknowledged a cluster of pneumonia cases, but didn’t confirm that the new pathogen was a coronavirus, a fact Chinese officials already knew.

That same day, the NHC issued an internal notice ordering laboratories to hand over or destroy testing samples and forbade anyone from publishing unauthorized research on the virus.

China’s failure to notify the WHO of the cluster of illnesses is a violation of the International Health Regulations

China also flouted the IHR by not disclosing all key information it had to the WHO

The WHO said it’s up to member states to decide whether a country has complied with international health law, and that the coming review will address those issues.

While Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome and posted it publicly, the government was less forthcoming about how patients might be catching the virus.

WHO scientists pored over data they did get, and consulted with experts from national health agencies, including the CDC, which has 33 staff detailed to the WHO.

Then a 61-year-old woman was hospitalized in Thailand on Jan. 13.

The next day, Dr. van Kerkhove told reporters: “It’s certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission.” MERS and SARS, both coronaviruses, were transmissible among people in close quarters. Epidemiological investigations were under way, she said.

Over the next few years, emergency committees struggled over how to determine whether an outbreak was a PHEIC. It took months to declare emergencies for two deadly Ebola epidemics

The committee met over two days, but was split. They mostly agreed on one point: The information from China “was a little too imprecise to very clearly state that it was time” to recommend an emergency declaration,

On Jan. 28, Dr. Tedros and the WHO team arrived for their meeting with Mr. Xi

Leaning across three wooden coffee tables, Dr. Tedros pressed for cooperation. In the absence of information, countries might react out of fear and restrict travel to China, he repeated several times throughout the trip. Mr. Xi agreed to allow a WHO-led international team of experts to visit. It took until mid-February to make arrangements and get the team there.

China also agreed to provide more data, and Dr. Tedros departed, leaving Dr. Briand behind with a list of mysteries to solve. How contagious was the virus? How much were children or pregnant women at risk? How were cases linked? This was vital information needed to assess the global risk, Dr. Briand said

Back in Geneva, Dr. Tedros reconvened the emergency committee. By now it was clear there was human-to-human transmission in other countries. When it met on Jan. 30, the committee got the information the WHO had been seeking. This time the committee recommended and Dr. Tedros declared a global public-health emergency.

President Trump and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo both assured constituents their health systems would perform well. The U.K.’s chief medical officer described the WHO’s advice as largely directed at poor and middle-income countries. As for keeping borders open, by then many governments had already closed them to visitors from China.

The WHO shifted focus to the developing world, where it believed Covid-19 would exact the heaviest toll. To its surprise, cases shot up just across the border, in northern Italy.

Lessons learned

If there were one thing the WHO might have done differently, it would be to offer wealthier countries the type of assistance with public-health interventions that the WHO provides the developing world

the WHO’s warning system of declaring a global public-health emergency needs to change. Some want to see a warning system more like a traffic light—with color-coded alarms for outbreaks, based on how worried the public should be

Emergency committees need clearer criteria for declaring a global public-health emergency and should publicly explain their thinking

The WHO should have more powers to intervene in countries to head off a health crisis

the WHO’s health emergencies unit should report to the director-general and not member states, and its budget should be protected so it doesn’t have to compete with other programs for money.

Implementing many of those ideas would require herding diplomats back for another monthslong slog of treaty revisions. If and when such talks begin, new governments will likely be in place, and political priorities will float elsewher

“Unfortunately, I’m very cynical about this,” he said. “We are living through cycles of panic and neglect. We’ve been through all of this before.”

The island’s first residents had arrived thousands of years ago and were more closely related to the peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific than to the Chinese. Europeans had set up trading posts on the island. The Japanese had ruled over it for 50 years.

The United States and other countries would later follow suit, dealing a blow to mainlanders like Ms. Wang. How could she still claim to be Chinese, she wondered, if the world did not even recognize her as such?

Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has signaled its impatience with Taiwan in increasingly menacing ways, sending military jets to buzz Taiwan on a near-daily basis.

The global criticism of China for its handling of Covid and its repression at home rekindled a longstanding debate in Taiwan about dropping “China” from the island’s official name. No action was taken, though; such a move by Taiwan would have been seen by Beijing as formalizing its de facto independence.

After the Nationalists ended nearly four decades of martial law in 1987, topics previously deemed taboo, including questions of identity and calls for independence, could be discussed.

Now, as China under Mr. Xi has become more authoritarian, the political gulf that separates it from Taiwan has only seemed increasingly insurmountable.

Under the "One China" policy, Beijing has insisted that any country that wants diplomatic relations with China must first break official ties with Taiwan. This has resulted in Taiwan's diplomatic isolation from the international community.

Last month, President Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, notified the World Trade Organization that the American government no longer supported a proposal it once spearheaded that would have exported the American laissez-faire approach to tech. Had that proposal been adopted, it would have spared tech companies the headache of having to deal with many different domestic laws about how data must be handled, including rules mandating that it be stored or analyzed locally. It also would have largely shielded tech companies from regulations aimed at protecting citizens’ privacy and curbing monopolistic behavior.

The move to drop support for that digital trade agenda has been pilloried as disaster for American companies and a boon to China, which has a host of complicated restrictions on transferring data outside of China. “We have warned for years that either the United States would write the rules for digital trade or China would,” Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, lamented in a press statement. “Now, the Biden administration has decided to give China the pen.”

While some of this agenda is reasonable and good for the world — too much regulation stifles innovation — adopting this agenda wholesale would risk cementing the advantages that big American tech companies already enjoy and permanently distorting the market in their favor.

who used to answer the phone and interact with lobbyists at the U.S. trade representative’s office. The paper includes redacted emails between Trump-era trade negotiators and lobbyists for Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, exchanging suggestions for the proposed text for the policy on digital trade in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “While they were previously ‘allergic to Washington,’ as one trade negotiator described, over the course of a decade, technology companies hired lobbyists and joined trade associations with the goal of proactively influencing international trade policy,” Ms. Li wrote in the Socio-Economic Review.

That paper explains how U.S. trade officials came to champion a digital trade policy agenda that was nearly identical to what Google, Apple and Meta wanted: No restrictions on the flow of data across borders. No forced disclosure of source codes or algorithms in the normal course of business. No laws that would curb monopolies or encourage more competition — a position that is often cloaked in clauses prohibiting discrimination against American companies. (Since so many of the monopolistic big tech players are American, rules targeting such behavior disproportionately fall on American companies, and can be portrayed as unfair barriers to trade.)

The truth is that Ms. Tai is taking the pen away from Meta, Google and Amazon, which helped shape the previous policy, according to a research paper published this year by Wendy Li,

This approach essentially takes the power to regulate data out of the hands of governments and gives it to technology companies, according to research by Henry Gao, a Singapore-based expert on international trade.

Many smaller tech companies complain that big players engage in monopolistic behavior that should be regulated. For instance, Google has been accused of privileging its own products in search results, while Apple has been accused of charging some developers exorbitant fees to be listed in its App Store. A group of smaller tech companies called the Coalition for App Fairness thanked Ms. Tai for dropping support for the so-called tech-friendly agenda at the World Trade Organization.

Still, Ms. Tai’s reversal stunned American allies and foreign business leaders and upended negotiations over digital trade rules in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, one of Mr. Biden’s signature initiatives in Asia.

The about-face was certainly abrupt: Japan, Singapore and Australia — which supported the previous U.S. position — were left on their own. It’s unfortunate that U.S. allies and even some American officials were taken by surprise. But changing stances was the right call.

The previous American position at the World Trade Organization was a minority position. Only 34 percent of countries in the world have open data transfer policies like the United States, according to a 2021 World Bank working paper, while 57 percent have adopted policies like the European Union’s, which allow data to flow freely but leave room for laws that protect privacy and personal data.

Nine percent of countries have restrictive data transfer policies, including Russia and China.

The United States now has an opportunity to hammer out a sensible global consensus that gives tech companies what they need — clarity, more universal rules, and relative freedom to move data across borders — without shielding them from the kinds of regulations that might be required to protect society and competition in the future.

If the Biden administration can shepherd a digital agreement that strikes the right balance, there’s a chance that it will also restore faith in free trade by showing that trade agreements don’t have to be written by the powerful at the expense of the weak.

elations between the two countries are conducted largely between the two parties

North Korea’s nuclear test will make the new Xi Jinping administration angry, and give China a headach

a successful professional in Shanghai knows that she will have to bear any future health care or retirement costs for herself and, because of the one-child policy, for her parents and grandparents too.

Every month, the United States buys around $35 billion in goods and services from China and sells around $11 billion back. That, of course, leaves a $24 billion trade deficit.

Every month, the United States is demanding a lot of renminbi and China is demanding few U.S. dollars. The natural result should be for the dollar to get weaker as the renminbi gets stronger.

China’s government prevents that adjustment by artificially increasing the demand for dollars, spending much of that $24 billion surplus on U.S. Treasury bonds. This sounds boring, but it effectively makes all Chinese exports somewhere around 25 percent cheaper and all U.S. imports to China, effectively, about 25 percent more expensive

all that easy money from China helped make the housing bubble much bigger and last longer, which created a far bigger crisis when the bubble finally burst.

The currency intervention also functions as a massive inequality-creation machine. U.S.-based behemoths, which own or use many of those exporting Chinese factories, benefit, as do their shareholders. And because more than 90 percent of U. S. stocks are owned by the wealthiest 20 percent, the spoils are disproportionately concentrated at the top. Meanwhile, lower wages, lost jobs and crippled manufacturing employment fall on the less wealthy.

The economists that I spoke to estimated that China’s currency policy has cost the U.S. between 200,000 and 3 million jobs

it may seem odd that China’s currency policy isn’t the beginning and end of every single political stump speech. After all, it’s probably the one thing that, if changed, could instantly bring both jobs and more equality to this country. I can’t think of any other economic agenda that would receive the support of unions and big business, free traders and protectionists, Wall Street Occupiers and Tea Partiers.

China doesn’t have apartheid. No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa. If you don’t have an ideology like Liu’s to push for peaceful change, then change could result in violence.

Over the past hundred years, China has studied a lot from the West but we haven’t studied the link between faith and liberty. Chinese have mainly learned from France and Germany: from France, the French Revolution, and from Germany, of course Marx and nationalism, which came to us via Japan. And from Russia we learned Leninism. But we haven’t learned much from this British-American tradition. Even in the early twentieth century we didn’t look very closely at the relationship between the political system and faith. Hu Shih, for example, never talked about the link between the separation of powers and religion. I think it’s only with our generation that we’re starting to think about this. One of the basic points is that the liberty to choose is God-given—not given by the state but by God. This means it’s higher than the state. It’s the foundation of Western democracy but many Chinese don’t understand this.

Chinese churches need to develop more democratic institutions. In the West, [Protestant] churches are run by committees; they are like small parliaments that are elected, just like the governments. Chinese congregations don’t know about this, so I wanted to show them. I think there will be a big change in China in the next ten or twenty years and at that point there will be some sort of religious freedom. So the bigger issue is how the congregations will manage themselves. Will they be democratically organized? Will they have a strong theological foundations? Or will they remain a new form of Chinese folk religion, a movement like the Boxers with a new foreign name plate?

The two sides split in 1949 when the Kuomintang lost to the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war and set up a new government in Taiwan.

Mr Ma proposed reducing hostility across the Taiwan Strait, expanding exchanges and establishing a cross-strait hotline, according to Taiwan's central news agency. He said this was part of consolidating the "1992 consensus" - the agreement under which both sides recognise the principle of "one China" but define it in their own ways.Similar remarks were made by Mr Xi, who said upholding the consensus would help "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation".

Satellite pictures show what US analysts say are deployments of surface to air missiles and facilities with military use, such as runways and radar.

The slowdown in spending comes as president Xi Jinping seeks to craft a more efficient and effective People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the world’s largest standing military.

Analysts say that for a fraction of the cost of an aircraft carrier – for decades the mainstay of Washington’s ability to project power around the world – the DF-21D missile threatens to alter the military balance in the Pacific.

Beijing defends its actions as being within its sovereign rights and denies Washington’s assertions that they threaten freedom of navigation.

The defence budget was determined by both China’s defence needs and the national economic situation, she added – the country saw its weakest growth in a quarter of a century last year.

What they find is that most states respond sensibly to relative decline, undertaking prompt, proportionate retrenchment, because they seek strategic solvency—they don’t want to go bankrupt (and thus lose their independence). That is, the sensible policy choices that helped make them powerful also help them cope with straitened circumstances and decide to reduce their military and avoid armed conflicts.

Parent and McDonald survey power transitions since 1870 (when data on gross domestic product first started being reliably collected) to explore the behavior of both the top states in the order and the lesser but still powerful states. They examine 16 cases of relative decline, some by hegemonic powers and some by mid-level states.

A hegemon is the rule setter and enforcer in the international order. It is typically (but not necessarily) the strongest power, because states fight for the right to establish terms favorable to their interests—so Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, which “ruled the waves,” could waive the rules; and the United States in the 20th century and especially after World War II became the architect of what is called the liberal international order, or the rules-based international order.

The authors also find that states experiencing decline are not generally seen as inviting targets for aggression by others. So rising states are not generally tempted to attack a weakening rival. Parent and McDonald’s research suggests this is because the states experiencing decline steer clear of conflicts—war being the unsentimental arbiter of state power, declining states would rather not risk demonstrating their diminution.

Their research also suggests that these states tend to prevail in the conflicts they do choose to initiate. Parent and McDonald conclude, “This suggests that declining powers are flexible and formidable.”

For all the talk of China’s leaders as brilliant strategists with a hundred-year time horizon in their planning, their choices in the past decade would seem to conform to Parent and McDonald’s description of a premature bid for hegemony.

This is all good news for the United States in a time of waning relative power in the international order. If the future conforms to the data, we can expect a United States that gets its house in order while avoiding wars, as the Chinese activate antibodies against their continued rise, and thereby allow the U.S. to regain its former standing

two things not apparent in the numbers may prove much more important than the findings from Parent and McDonald’s study.

countries do care whether they hold the top spot, the hegemon, because that gives them the ability to set the rules of the game. If China becomes the hegemon, it will change the rules from what they have been in the time of American hegemony: Preference will replace law, small states will be dictated terms by strong states—patterns we have already begun to see in China’s intimidation of regional neighbors and predatory trade and business practices. The United States and its liberal allies may well fight to prevent those changes.

What we may be seeing in their study is less a generalizable theory of the behavior of declining powers than a demonstration of British and German strategic cultures. They may both be anomalous, which makes them poor examples on which to build a theory.

Regime type may also matter much more because it speaks to a state’s resilience

Authoritarian states tend to be more brittle than their democratic counterparts. Lacking free media to publicize failures and challenge polices, lacking distributed power and civil society to experiment with alternatives and check excess, and lacking elections as competitions among different possible directions for policy, authoritarian governments tend to remain committed to failing policies longer.

Twilight of the Titans is a meaningful contribution to the debate about whether the decline of a great power is to be feared as a cause of war in the international system

they make a very strong case that fighting preventive wars is self-defeating for declining powers. Rather than fight to prevent a rising challenger, states losing their relative power should retrench and compromise to avoid conflict.

Adopting Parent and McDonald’s policy recommendations, though, would be learning to live with “democracy with Chinese characteristics.” Which, interestingly enough, is also the policy recommendation Graham Allison makes in Destined for War.

But China is buying fewer U.S. soybeans, thanks to bumper harvests of cheaper beans in South America.

Limited storage capacity forced many Brazilian farmers to sell at low prices, analysts said. Many Chinese crushers also prefer the higher protein content of Brazilian beans. Brazil’s soybean exports to China more than doubled from September to January while U.S. sales to China dropped more than 20%.

The White House proposal for tariffs on steel and aluminum has nevertheless exacerbated concerns about retaliation, according to research firm AgResource Co. Even if China couldn't avoid the U.S. altogether, the firm said, it could buy exclusively from Brazil for the next six or seven months.

Other headwinds for U.S. soybean farmers are strengthening. U.S. officials said they would start labeling soybean shipments to China that contain more than 1% of detritus like weed seeds, to conform with Chinese requirements.

“It’s just one more factor that has contributed to the relative uncompetitive nature of U.S. soybeans,” said Ken Morrison, a trader and commodity newsletter author.

The latest study confirms some of the worst fears of foreign policy analysts in the US and Europe that Trump’s “America first” approach, combined with his volatile and irascible personality, is weakening cohesion among western democracies in the face of a growing challenge from autocracies in Russia and China, and the rise of illiberal democracies and xenophobic nationalism inside Europe.

Approval of US leadership climbed by 10% or more in only four countries: Belarus, Israel, Macedonia and Liberia. It increased moderately in Russia, the former Soviet states in central Asia and parts of west Africa.

One of the sharpest declines in confidence in US leadership was in the UK, where it dropped by 26 percentage points. A third of Britons questioned in the new poll expressed approval, with 63% voicing disapproval.

more people now disapprove of US leadership than approve. This historic low puts the US’s leadership approval rating on par with China’s and sets a new bar for disapproval.”

In just under half of the world’s countries – 65 out of 134 – US standing collapsed, by 10 percentage points or more. Some of the biggest losses were among Washington’s closest allies in western Europe, Australia and Latin America.

Gallup found that the median of worldwide disapproval of US leadership has hit a new record of 43%, higher than disapproval of Russia (36%), China (30%) or Germany (25%).

The US has fallen below China in the Gallup global poll once before, in the last year of the George W Bush administration in 2008, but both the US and China were significantly more popular then than they are now.

The collapse in support is particularly dramatic in Canada and Latin America, where 49% approved of the Obama administration’s leadership, with 27% disapproval in 2016. After Trump’s first year, the ratings graph has scissored sharply, with only 24% now expressing faith in US leadership – a new low - and 58% disapproving.

The Gallup report said that China, which has overtaken the US as the leading trading partner in parts of Latin America, “may be positioned to take further advantage”. It’s approval rating across the Americas is four percentage points higher than the US, but disapproval is much lower at 35%

it is clear that based on the trajectory of what the world thinks of the US, many of the US alliances and partnerships that the Trump administration considers a ‘great strength’ are potentially at risk.”

the most serious finding was the severe drop in approval for US leadership in the world’s democracies. He said: “Elected leaders care what their publics think about the United States. These numbers will make it harder for those leaders to publicly cooperate with the Trump administration – even when it might be in their interest to do so.”

not least because of the actions of Xi Jinping’s own government.

Since then, cases have skyrocketed across the United States, which now has the highest number of confirmed cases anywhere in the world, with more than 100,000 people infected

The U.S., meanwhile, is entering what’s perhaps the darkest phase of its own crisis—its domestic problems hobbling it from providing significant international aid or coordinating a comprehensive response. (The U.S. announced on Thursday that it had made available $274 million in emergency aid to 64 countries.)

As recently as yesterday, Xi offered Chinese support to the U.S. in a phone call with Trump.

This is happening all around the world now,” says David Shullman, a China expert at the International Republican Institute. “[There] is a really long list of places where China is offering this equipment and assistance …

Most immediately, it could mean that the coronavirus ground zero continues to generate and export more cases

Desperate countries were happy to accept Chinese help

The real short-term risk of China’s leadership exercise is that, should the country make the calculation to prize its economic health over public-safety concerns, other countries contending with the pandemic’s economic devastation may find themselves tempted to follow suit

. At that point, the China model may look even more tempting.

As China moves towards getting back to normal after months of paralysis, authorities are focused on avoiding a second wave of infections from overseas.

In the last seven days, China has reported only six locally transmitted cases but dozens arriving from abroad

Observers say the focus on imported cases has led to an increase in anti-foreign sentiment, which according to some has been on the rise for years.

“It is a new variation of a familiar theme: don’t trust foreigners. If there is another flare-up in China, the blame will fall on people coming from outside.”

the focus on foreigners – surprising given that 90% of imported cases were Chinese passport holders, according to the country’s foreign ministry – is the leadership’s attempt to shore up its image

“If there is an opportunity to make themselves look strong, competent and legitimate by capitalising on public anxiety, they’ll take it,” said Mike Gow of the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute. “If that happens to stoke xenophobia, so be it.

Several foreign residents stressed, however, that their experiences were not akin to those of Asians in the US and elsewhere, who have been beaten and subjected to racial slurs.

“The combination of pre-existing attitudes to race and Africans, plus this new wave of fear of foreigners, is making things worse,”

A British-Canadian software engineer living in Shenzhen described being stopped several times by police and asked for her papers, something that did not happen before.

he issue is being replicated across Asia. In Vietnam, hostility toward foreigners has reached such a level that the Vietnamese ministry of foreign affairs issued a statement calling for it to stop.

In Thailand, a since-deleted Twitter account operated by the country’s health minister reportedly said the country had to be “more careful of westerners than Asians” because they “never shower” or wear masks

In Taiwan, some restaurants have reportedly said they will not serve foreign diners.

Chris Lemos, 29, an American living in Shanghai, said he took a seat on the metro last week and a woman abruptly moved to the other side of the carriage.

The Chinese have a different problem. Officials are using their ability to monitor WeChat accounts even outside the country to censor expatriates who share articles critical of President Xi Jinping’s response.

China and Russia are modeling the go-to responses authoritarian regimes have adopted in the digital age for robbing the Web of its democratizing power. A government can try to persuade its citizens to believe only what it wants them to, or it can try to persuade them to believe nothing at all. Either tactic, with stakes as high as they are today, could get people killed.

The result could be an overhaul of 20th century trade rules for a 21st century global economic order, where money, ideas and influence could become as closely watched and tightly regulated as hard goods packed on a ship and sent abroad.

Under an ambitious plan unveiled two years ago called Made in China 2025, Beijing has designs to dominate cutting-edge technologies like advanced microchips, artificial intelligence and electric cars, among many others, in a decade. Sometimes it woos foreign giants like A.M.D. with money and market access in ways that elude American and global trade rules. Sometimes it demands partnerships or intellectual property as the price of admission to the world’s second-largest economy.

“If Made in China 2025 achieves its goals,” he said, “the U.S. and other countries would likely become just commodity exporters to China — selling oil, gas, beef and soybeans.”

bark, silk, wood and leather functioned in a similar way to paper, although they were either much more expensive or heavier. In China, many early works were recorded on long bamboo strips, which were then bound with leather straps or string into books.

People world-wide also carved very important notations into stone or bone, or pressed stamps into wet clay and then dried or fired the tablets to preserve their words. However, writing (and later printing) required a material that was both cheap and lightweight in order to become truly ubiquitous. Paper fit the bill perfectly.

Early paper-makers in China used hemp fibers, which were soaked in water and pounded with a large wooden mallet. The resulting slurry was then poured over a horizontal mold; loosely-woven cloth stretched over a framework of bamboo allowed the water to drip out the bottom or evaporate, leaving behind a flat sheet of dry hemp-fiber paper.

One of the most common formats for early paper was the scroll. A few long pieces of paper were pasted together to form a strip, which was then wrapped around a wooden roller. The other end of the paper was attached to a thin wooden dowel, with a piece of silk cord in the middle to tie the scroll shut.

From its point of origin in China, the idea and technology of paper-making spread throughout Asia.

The Koreans also used rice straw and seaweed, expanding the types of fiber available for paper production. This early adoption of paper fueled the Korean innovations in printing, as well; metal movable type was invented by 1234 CE on the peninsula.

One of the most interesting repercussions of this Arab victory was that the Abbasids captured Chinese artisans - including master paper-makers like Tou Houan - and took them back to the Middle East.

so knowledge of this marvelous new material spread far and wide. Before long, cities from Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan) to Damascus and Cairo had become centers of paper production.

In 1120, the Moors established Europe's first paper mill at Valencia, Spain (then called Xativa). From there, this Chinese invention passed to Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Paper helped spread knowledge, much of which was gleaned from the great Asian culture centers along the Silk Road, that enabled Europe's High Middle Ages.