Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle/AP

Federal officials attempt to enter the vacated Consulate General of China on July 24, 2020, in Houston. The U.S. ordered the consulate closed within 72 hours, alleging Chinese agents had tried to steal data from facilities in Texas.

Like many visiting researchers in the United States, Chinese citizen Tang Juan seemed to lead an uneventful life at the Davis campus of the University of California, not far from the state capital of Sacramento.

According to the FBI, however, that image was far from the reality.

Last month Ms. Tang – perhaps spooked by a visit from FBI agents – stopped her research at the UC Davis medical school’s department of radiation oncology. U.S. officials allege in court documents filed last week that she fled to San Francisco to seek refuge in the Chinese consulate.

Federal prosecutors allege Ms. Tang is an active member of the People’s Liberation Army, a branch of the Chinese military. She was recruited by her government to enter the U.S. as a researcher, the Department of Justice alleges, with the objective of gaining access to and stealing American intellectual property and sensitive research.

In other words, according to the U.S. government, Ms. Tang is a spy. Last Thursday, Ms. Tang turned herself over to federal officials, and on Friday the graduate of a Chinese military university was jailed. She was expected to appear in federal court Monday charged with visa fraud.

Ms. Tang’s tale is one piece of the unfolding crackdown on Chinese spy activities in the U.S., an operation that also led to last week’s ordered closing of China’s consulate in Houston. Beijing retaliated by ordering the U.S. consulate in Chengdu to shut down.

The extraordinary tit-for-tat closures – unusual even by Cold War standards – illustrate an accelerating deterioration in U.S.-China relations that some worry could lead to dangerous missteps, as well as to a further weakening of the two national economies as well as the teetering global economy.

Justice Department/AP

This undated photo provided by the Justice Department shows Tang Juan, a visiting researcher at UC Davis medical school, in her China People's Liberation Army military uniform. The Justice Department says the scientist lied about her military affiliation in a visa application last October.

“The closing of consulates is a major step,” says Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow specializing in Chinese military and political affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Even in the darkest days of relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the two sides typically expelled diplomats for spying,” he adds, “but here the Trump administration is going significantly further.”

The State Department anticipated China’s possible equivalent response to closure of the Houston consulate. What caught it off guard, some officials say, was the ordered closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu – the westernmost of five U.S. consulates in mainland China and the closest to Xinjiang and Tibet, two regions the U.S. has been closely monitoring, and speaking out about, for human rights violations.

Still, many say it was long past time for the U.S. to move beyond rhetoric and dialogue to action. Past administrations have focused on China’s efforts to gain access to American technology through American companies operating in China, some experts say, while paying less attention to China’s expanding activities on U.S. soil.

Some U.S. officials claim the Houston consulate had developed as a central command for a spy network made up of Chinese-military-linked graduate students and other Chinese nationals in more than two dozen U.S. cities.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted on Thursday that “China’s consulate in Houston is not a diplomatic facility [but] the central node of the Communist Party’s vast network of spies & influence operations” in the U.S.

China’s “cyber and other theft in the U.S. have been a problem for a very long time,” says Shirley Kan, an independent China expert who until recently worked at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. “The difference is in how this administration fights back. Unlike some previous administrations, [this one] is not afraid of friction” with China.

Indeed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out a stark vision in a speech last week at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.

“If we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” he said. “We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”

Still, some wonder why, if U.S. action was “long overdue,” as Senator Rubio and others are saying, the administration has not acted until now.

“There certainly is good reason to confront China. My concern is, escalating this tension, is it really about confronting China, or does it have something to do with an election in four months?” Sen. Angus King, an independent who serves on the Intelligence Committee and caucuses with the Democrats, said on CNN last week.

President Donald Trump and his presumptive Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, have recently hardened on China.

Others have wondered if the spy networks were watched but tolerated to avoid disrupting negotiations for Mr. Trump’s first-phase trade deal, reached in January.

Mr. Cheng says it’s a possibility the election is a factor. “But it’s also true,” he says, “that intelligence investigations take a long time, you have to be able to lay out evidence that can be presented in an open court.”

Ms. Kan notes that David Stilwell, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said in comments on the Houston consulate that research theft attempts had accelerated over the last six months and might be linked to efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

She says the Department of Justice revealed the FBI was investigating links between the Houston consulate and what The New York Times reported were “attempts to illegally transfer medical research and other sensitive information from institutions in the area.”

Mr. Cheng says he hopes the Department of Justice proceeds to make public more information about the Houston consulate and the spying allegations.

“I think it helps our case to say, ‘We are a rule-of-law country, we don’t just randomly make accusations, and this is exactly why we are doing what we’re doing,’” he says.

As the United States wrestles with racial injustice and policing, a broader conversation has emerged over historic and present-day injustices faced by ethnic minorities. In Texas, that conversation has turned to the violent history of the Texas Rangers. 

Created in 1823 to fight Native Americans and secure the frontier for settlers, the Texas Rangers redeployed to the borderlands in the early 1900s, resulting in widespread racial brutality on which recent historical research has shined a harsh light.

Today the reality of the Texas Rangers is in sharp focus. 

A statue of a Ranger at the Dallas Love Field airport – modeled on a Ranger who stood by as white mobs physically blocked the integration of public schools in the 1950s – was taken down last month. Other statues, monuments, and mascots honoring the Rangers have become a focus of public debate. And even before the killing of George Floyd convulsed the nation, historical markers had already begun to go up in south Texas to memorialize the victims of Ranger violence. 

For generations of Texans raised on heroic cultural depictions of Rangers, this may be a jolt. But historians say that acknowledging and embracing that broader, more complicated history is an important step on the path toward building a more just and equitable society. 

“The history happened, and like it or not it informs contemporary identities,” says Sonia Hernández, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University and member of Refusing to Forget, which seeks to memorialize the racial violence in Texas a century ago. 

According to recent historical research, as many as 5,000 Hispanic Americans were killed here in the 1910s; many died at the hands of Rangers themselves. 

“Anything to do with complicating the history of Texas, talking about some of its dark chapters, that’s not going to destroy our state,” she adds. “I only think it’s going to make us better.” 

Rapid change, racial tensions

The early 20th century in south Texas was a period of rapid change, and of heightened fear and distrust.

Railroads and commercial agriculture brought an influx of white farmers from the north and Mexican laborers from the south, joining communities of landowning “Tejano” families who had lived in the region since Spanish rule. A revolution had broken out in Mexico, and revolutionaries and refugees were crossing the border constantly. In 1917, then-wartime adversary Germany was revealed to have been seeking an alliance with Mexico. 

Historians believe that between 700 and 5,000 Tejanos and Mexican Americans were killed by U.S. law enforcement in this period, many of them innocent. The deaths were justified as the lawful killing of Mexican “bandits.” 

In September 1915, Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria – both prominent leaders of the Tejano community in Hidalgo County – were fatally shot in the back by Texas Rangers after reporting a horse robbery. In January 1918, a company of Rangers surrounded the residents of the town of Porvenir in the early morning, separated 15 men and boys from the town and executed them. 

This is not the only controversial chapter in Texas Ranger history.

The Rangers also have a long history of “using force, violence, and intimidation to undermine desegregation efforts, labor organizing, and anti-lynching campaigns,” Monica Muñoz Martinez, an assistant professor of American and ethnic studies at Brown University, writes in an email.

Carl E. Linde/AP

White students enter Mansfield High School in Mansfield, Texas, as a crowd of anti-integrationists kept watch for any black students that might want to register, Sept. 4, 1956. At left wearing hat is Texas Ranger Capt. Bob Crowder.

Between 1919 and 1921, the Rangers helped pressure 24 of the 33 original NAACP chapters in the state to disband, according to Dr. Martinez, who is also a member of Refusing to Forget. And in the 1950s, the Rangers blocked Black students in Texas from enrolling in white schools in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. 

It’s from this period that the statue at Love Field, a city-owned airport in Dallas, is modeled. 

The sculptor modeled it on Sgt. E.J. Banks, who commanded Rangers sent to police anti-integration protests in Mansfield. In a 1956 photograph, Banks, hands on hips, leans against a tree outside Mansfield High School as white students gather under a Black person hanging in effigy from a noose over the school’s entrance. The inscription reads, “One Riot, One Ranger.” 

The airport took the statue down – it is now in storage – after the backstory was described last month in a local magazine. The photograph of Banks “seemed to display flippancy towards racial issues,” says Christopher Perry, a spokesman for the airport.

Depicted as heroes

The magazine article was an excerpt from Doug Swanson’s new book “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.” 

Banks and the other Rangers in Mansfield at that time were doing what they were told, says Professor Swanson, a former journalist at the Dallas Morning News. Still, the coverage of their actions depicted them as “heroes who waded into the mob and dispersed them and brought order to an unruly situation, and all that just is not true,” he says. 

Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports NPSTrans TopPic

Cardboard cutouts of Texas Rangers fans before the game against the Colorado Rockies at Globe Life Field on Jul 25, 2020 in Arlington, Texas.

He says it’s important to unpack the myths of the Rangers not only in the context of the current national dialogue around racial injustice, but for Texas itself, given its evolving demographics. 

“It’s really important to understand what some of the long-term grievances are from minority communities,” says Professor Swanson, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. “The way Texas is changing, it’s really important to talk about what Texas is and how it got to be this way, and where it’s going.”

That said, he’s wary of seeing statues pulled down. “I’d kind of like to see more statues rather than fewer, just to give people a chance to talk. Why is this statue here? Who put it here and what were they trying to say? What does it say about who had political power at the time?”

The talk is likely to continue for some time. 

Students and faculty at Texas A&M are calling for the removal of a 1919 statue of Lawrence Sullivan Ross – a former president of the college, as well as a former Texas Ranger and Confederate general – from the school’s main campus. So far, no action has been taken.

San Antonio College has removed the Ranger as its school mascot. It had been discussed for years, says Robert Vela, the college president, but in recent months the College Council felt “we needed to act” and passed a unanimous vote this month.

“We needed to be sure that whatever we present as our community, what represents us, that it’s inclusive, and that it supports student success and student development,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball team has come under pressure to change its name. In a statement, the Rangers said that while the team took its name from the law enforcement agency, it had forged its own identity since 1971. “The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms.”

A bicentennial beckons

Today, the Texas Rangers agency is a 234-person division within the Texas Department of Public Safety. It maintains some operations on the border, but its main function is assisting local police departments in Texas with their serious-crime investigations. 

Some say the agency’s bicentennial in 2023 offers an opportunity to confront and discuss its complicated past.

“I think in the end it’s a healing action,” says Professor Swanson. “We have to confront this. We have to go through the pain of talking about it and acknowledging it to do this healing.”

Scholars also hope that a broader historical view will show not just the tragic chapters of history for people of color in the state, but more positive chapters too, such as Bessie Coleman, an early female Black aviator and Lee Roy Young Jr., who in 1988 was sworn in as the first Black Ranger. 

“There were so many positive stories in Texas history as it relates to people of color,” says Michael Hurd, director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture at Prairie View A&M University. “I’m hoping this is an opportunity for people to learn and appreciate that history, and appreciate others’ humanity.” 

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the year of the Porvenir massacre and the spelling of Bessie Coleman's name.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

A woman wears a protective face mask as she walks along a road, as the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Karachi, Pakistan on July 7, 2020.

When my city, Karachi, quiets down at night, I often go for a drive by myself, driving slowly, savoring every moment of the few minutes I have in the world outside home.

On my stereo, the same verses from South Asian poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz play each day. The poem, “Intesab,” begins with a dedication: 

to this day
and
to its sorrows
to the day’s sorrows, cross with life’s overflowing garden
this thicket of yellowing leaves
this thicket of dying leaves, that is my land
this assembly of anguish, that is my land

(as translated by Mustansir Dalvi)

I listened to this poem for days in 2014, after the attack on the Army Public School (APS) in the city of Peshawar, where almost 140 children were killed by the Taliban. It understood the grief I had no power to articulate when nearly 100 people were killed in church one Sunday; or when 70 lawyers were killed in a suicide attack, wiping out a generation of Balochistan province’s sharpest legal minds. It is the poem I now listen to when I drive through the streets of my city, wondering how many people in how many houses are mourning; how many people today will be in need of a hospital bed, of an ambulance, of a ventilator.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters/File

A girl holds candle for the victims of the attack by Taliban gunmen on the Army Public School in Peshawar, the country's worst massacre in years, during a prayer service at Gurdwara Guru Nanak Shah in Karachi on December 19, 2014.

For weeks, Pakistan broke its own record of new coronavirus cases and deaths every other day. Now they are finally falling – but so is testing, creating an impression that the country has emerged victorious. Some restrictions remain, but worshippers congregate in mosques, markets are open, and the government has encouraged tourism. The government says cases stand at 274,000, with more than 5,800 lives lost – though these counts are little trusted.

As Pakistan climbed to join the most affected countries in the world, it felt as if the possibility of prevention had not even occurred to the government. Declining to extend the lockdown, Prime Minister Imran Khan told the people of Pakistan that there are two options: to be exposed to the virus or die hungry.

As I write this essay, I feel it could have been written 10 years ago, in different ways, on different pages of my journal. The same questions always emerge: of how we learn to live in a country that appears always willing to claim our tragedies, but not prevent them.

This pandemic is another reminder of our collective insignificance, in a land where thousands have died in conflict since 9/11. Their names are on no walls or monuments; the number of total casualties remains uncertain. In the post-2001 Pakistan, the extraordinariness attached to moments of tragedy is long gone.

Yet anyone can be branded a shaheed, a martyr, with no choice in the matter: air crash victims, health care workers, children. Victims of terrorism are barely mourned before they are officially exalted in the nationalist narrative. In April, when the government announced that doctors too would be given the title of shaheed, it was obvious there would be no place for acknowledging their deaths as a loss, but only as an honor for the nation. Soon after, the military produced a video urging people to live with the virus; reminding us to be “brave,” that “life comes and goes.”

But this pandemic is a reminder of something else, as well: how, unprotected, we have indeed learned to survive – together. My city of over 16 million runs on ambulance services that are entirely dependent on charity. Countless citizen-led initiatives collect donations for low-income workers to allow them to stay home, while some people cook food for patients, their families, and front-line workers as an act of service.

On Facebook groups, home cooks post photos of what they’ve cooked that day, asking anyone in need to message them. Food is the language of love here; it’s the best way we can express that which we do not say. I have never told anyone I love them in my own language, Urdu, and I have never been told that myself. It is, instead, communicated through biryani, through yakhni soup or daal that a loved one has taken the time and care to cook, that love felt all the more profusely when one is frail and unwell.

Caretaking works in myriad ways. A fisherman often visits my house with his occasional catch of the day. On his last visit, he insisted that I have the honey his wife had sent me from their village. The only way I know how to protect him is to buy fish I don’t want; the only way he knows how to protect me is to give me a present of raw honey. We both watch out for each other in the best way we know how.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

Shopkeepers wear protective masks as they sit outside their closed shops, after Pakistani authorities re-imposed lockdowns in selected areas in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Karachi, Pakistan, July 1, 2020.

Karachi, a city best known for violence and chaos, is perhaps for the very first time knowing how it feels to be loved and wanted. During summer holidays, Europe’s quaint streets usually occupy our Instagram feeds, but today Karachi is finding its due place. Images of our Arabian Sea and the city’s bougainvillea and jasmine flowers are shared with that sense of awe and wonderment that comes when an object of love is seen for the very first time.

Without a lockdown, there is no expectation here of reaching a peak or flattening a curve. I am not sure how many of us will not survive this, and in how many ways our lives will forever change. I do know that the state will tell us it could have been worse, representing tragedies as moments of triumph. But what I also know is that we will continue to find togetherness in the sharing of food and honey, and find comfort in the sights and smells of jasmine flowers, holding on dearly to signs of life that are promised in every flower that blooms. 

Zehra Abid is an independent journalist who has lived in Karachi for most of her three decades. She tweets at @ZehraAbid_.

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

In her hilltop village home outside Nazareth, Iman Khatib Yassin, one of Israel’s newest lawmakers, sinks into a chair in her living room, furnished with plush cream-colored couches and Persian rugs.

Wearing a pale green hijab headscarf and rose-colored cardigan, she clasps her hands on the lap of her floor-skimming dress. It’s been a long week, she explains in her low, gentle voice, a week of shuttling between parliamentary committee meetings on the coronavirus and the economy in Jerusalem, and long drives to tend to her ailing mother at a hospital in the Galilee. She would return home around 11 p.m.

Ms. Khatib Yassin still seems surprised that she’s a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, more than four months after being elected. A social worker and community center director, she had long turned down suggestions that she enter politics. In the end she decided to run for office in March because she was motivated by the idea of representation itself.

“I strongly felt a calling to serve others, I saw running as a chance to open the door to other traditional women. But even though I ran I still didn’t think I had any chance of actually getting into the Knesset,” she says.

She scraped in, 15th on the Joint List, a coalition of parties representing the descendants of the Palestinian Arabs who stayed in Israel in 1948 when the state was created as a Jewish homeland. Others fled or were expelled, settling as refugees in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. The Joint List won 15 seats, which made it the third largest party in Israel and made Ms. Khatib Yassin the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman to be elected to parliament in the history of Israel.

Breaking barriers

She knows the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, is what people will see first, but she hopes to make her mark, she says, as a feminist with a social welfare agenda that will transcend ethnic boundaries to help all of those marginalized and in need.

“I believe we need to push and invest and if we do, ultimately that work will pay off,” says Ms. Khatib Yassin, the daughter of farmers with little education who pushed her and her siblings to go to university.

Heidi Levine/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Iman Khatib Yassin with her daughter Rose (r.) at their home near Nazareth. Rose acted as her mother's driver during the recent Israeli election campaign.

Another breakthrough – she is the first woman elected to the Knesset from Ra’am, a party representing the Southern Islamic Movement, known for its conservative brand of Islam and network of social services.

Ms. Khatib Yassin, a middle-aged mother of four, is credited with helping get the Arab women’s vote out in the March elections. She campaigned especially hard in the Negev desert among Bedouin women, giving speeches in village courtyards to pitch the importance of making their voices as devout Muslim women heard in the corridors of power. She would leave her home at 6 a.m., returning after midnight. Rose, her daughter, 24, acted as her driver.

She recalls a speech to a group of men and women when someone proposed a photo. Some men balked, mindful of the taboo against mixed-gender gatherings in traditional Bedouin society. But they relented. A woman pulled her aside to whisper, “Iman, we are breaking barriers.”

No Arab party has ever joined an Israeli governing coalition, but the Joint List is demanding to take part in decision-making, especially on budget allocations and investment in Arab towns, and on issues that disproportionately impact Palestinian citizens of Israel such as home demolitions, rising crime levels, and civil rights. During the election campaign the party said it was ready to join a government under the right conditions.

The current politically polarized climate, in which the right-wing establishment paints the Arab electorate as disloyal and dangerous, makes the likelihood of a such an outcome low. But just floating the idea seems to be eroding the taboo against it, some observers say.

Heidi Levine/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

A view of the village where Iman Khatib Yassin lives. Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are playing an increasingly active role in Israeli politics.

“We are aware of the realities here, but we in the Joint List decided we want to be part of the political game,” says Ms. Khatib Yassin. And she has a message for those Jewish Israelis who tell her that that this will never happen. “We are getting stronger all the time.” Palestinian Arab turnout was 67% in the last elections, the highest in more than 20 years.

Political since childhood, religious since childbirth

Ms. Khatib Yassin’s rise, and that of the Joint List, is part of a larger story of the social and economic integration of Arab citizens – or Palestinians as many call themselves – into Israeli society. “My national identity is Palestinian, but my civic identity is as an Israeli. I am Israeli in every way. I was born here, grew up here, and became part of this society,” says Ms. Khatib Yassin.

Her political awareness dates back to childhood. From the age of five she worked the family fields with her mother and her siblings, growing tomatoes, melons, and tobacco. It was there she first felt the sting of injustice. The government confiscated a piece of her family’s land with a well on it. She would sneak under the fence to fill up the family water bottles.

“This was my first memory of the government – that it prevented us from having a normal life,” she says.

She wishes her children had had a chance to grow up in the village. “There was a pride in working the fields, the fruit you held in your hands was a product of your work,” she recalls. “We children took pride in the land and our role. I feel it built my personality. From early on I had an understanding that not everything comes easily, but that there is worth in what you do and what you contribute.”

She was not always religious, she explains. But when her doctor told her she would not be able to have children she vowed to become observant if she became pregnant. Grateful for her first pregnancy, she became a devout Muslim.

Ms. Khatib Yassin sees political significance in the way Palestinian Arabs in Israel are increasingly returning to their Islamic faith. It is a salve to soothe the pain of the suspicion they face, she believes.

Over the years she has befriended religious Jewish women, including fellow social activists. She sees a common goal to their joint struggle – an equal place for women in conservative religious and political settings.

“I hope we can be a good example of what religious women can do,” she says.

Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Trees are absent in front of row houses in a low-income neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, last year.

In a few U.S. cities, street protests against racial inequities have escalated in the two months since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In that city, however, people are trying something else. From pastors to politicians, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, they are “working to quell community tensions and exploring new strategies to combat racial injustice.”

One particular effort focuses on bringing people together to reshape the urban landscape – literally. In the city’s racially diverse northern neighborhoods, for example, volunteers and local residents have been working the land since June – planting trees, creating gardens – as an act of social healing.

This urban regreening “is about putting Black, brown, Indigenous, white hands in the soil together,” Jordan Weber, artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center, told Minnesota Public Radio.

According to various studies, people who live in communities with trees and gardens tend to be closer to one another. A canopy of trees in summer can prevent “heat islands” that drive people off the streets. With more trees, people tend to be outside more where they can meet neighbors. Shared gardens not only root useful plants but also a community. With more natural greenery around them, neighbors have a stake in protecting their environment.

Places without such leafy cohesion have “tree inequity,” according to American Forests, the nation’s oldest conservation organization dedicated to protecting and restoring U.S. forests. Since 2018, the group has launched a campaign to plant trees in marginalized communities.

“A map of tree cover in virtually any city in America is also a map of income and, in many cases, race in ways that transcend income,” writes Jad Daley, president and CEO of American Forests. By 2030, the group wants every neighborhood in the 100 largest cities to reach tree equity, based on a score that combines three indicators: tree canopy, climate projections, and public health data.

Racial inequities have many causes and thus many solutions. Changes are needed, for example, in schools, housing, and police. In Minneapolis, residents are showing an additional route to racial equity – in the shared love and respect of their trees and gardens.