Zhanna Palahniuk never doubted that her husband – a Ukrainian paratrooper whose bulletproof confidence was honed by years of combat – would be in the thick of the battle, or that he would always prevail.

Then, in late April, Russian forces engaging in a major new offensive bore down on 1st Lt. Oleksandr Palahniuk’s Ukrainian Army unit, on the Izyum front in northeastern Ukraine.

In daily video calls, he began telling his wife of serious challenges and morale-sapping shortages, even of vehicles. A born problem-solver, who grated against hierarchy yet found his calling in the military, the deputy company commander said he resorted to evacuating the wounded on his own motorcycle.

What he didn’t tell her was that the fight was becoming overwhelming – and that he had stepped on a landmine. The device clicked but did not detonate, momentarily sparing the experienced fighter from being added to Ukraine’s soaring daily death toll then of 100 to 200 soldiers.

“I could see that something happened, that he was really deep into his thoughts and depressed,” Mrs. Palahniuk recalls, her voice cracking at the memory of the decorated and exhausted paratrooper, called Sasha by all who knew him, who was long overdue for rotation.

“He was disappointed and stressed. He asked me to bring our daughter to the phone, so he could talk to her,” she says of 6-year-old Yulianna. “I made a screenshot of his face and sent it to him. I said, ‘Look at yourself now. You look pale, tired. ... You should look after yourself.’”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A portrait of Ukrainian 1st Lt. Oleksandr Palahniuk, killed in late April, and training certificates are kept in his childhood bedroom in the rural village of Pokutyne, south of Vinnytsia, Ukraine, June 21, 2022. A nine-year veteran with extensive combat experience and American and other NATO training, the lieutenant is one face of a Ukrainian death toll that has reached as high as 200 soldiers a day.

If his wife could detect a trace of vulnerability, it was not something he projected in those days to strangers. Dressed for combat, in a brief encounter with this correspondent April 25 in Druzhkivka, Lt. Palahniuk’s handshake was strong and his bearing confident, showing he was no stranger to the front lines.

He offered an “excursion” to the front, then late the next day and again the following messaged that he could not meet because things had escalated dramatically.

On April 28 he was killed when a Russian tank scored a direct hit on his armored vehicle. He was at the village of Kurulky, in Kharkiv Province, carrying orders to front-line troops – not to retreat.

“There was never even one thought that something like this could happen. Never,” says Mrs. Palahniuk, her arms folded protectively around Yulianna, both still reeling from the loss weeks later.

“I was confident in him, that he could find a way out of any hard situation,” she says. “That’s how I coped.”

The weight of sacrifice

Amid the high casualty numbers from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the death of a single soldier may appear barely significant, adding just one statistical notch to the toll as this war enters its seventh month.

But, as in any conflict, behind every number is a human face and a colossal impact on each family, which is left to grapple with loss.

In the case of Ukraine, which is being defended against a more powerful aggressor, the weight of sacrifice is clearly articulated in the tidy farmhouse ringed with rose bushes where Sasha Palahniuk was raised, in the rural western village of Pokutyne, near the border with Moldova.

“We have to keep living, we have to believe in victory, to understand that he didn’t go in vain,” says the paratrooper’s father, Mykhailo Palahniuk, whose work on his 15-acre wheat, barley, and soy farm has left his face sun-kissed and his fingers cracked.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Mykhailo Palahniuk holds flowers in the Ukrainian national colors at his home in the rural village of Pokutyne, south of Vinnytsia, Ukraine, before visiting the grave of his paratrooper son, June 21, 2022.

“Sasha died for Ukraine, he died so that something like Bucha would never happen again,” he says, referring to atrocities committed by Russian troops in the northern Kyiv suburb in March.

“We are Ukrainians, and Sasha defended us,” says the farmer. “That’s worth it. Sasha did something good, he meant something. We think he’s a hero.”

Despite the high personal cost, for this family and so many others, “without such a sacrifice” the country would be occupied by Russia, Mr. Palahniuk says, just as the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was captured in 2014 and then annexed by Moscow.

“We live differently, we just want our country to prosper, to live well. That’s all we want,” he says. Nearby a portrait of his son in military dress uniform sits beside a pillow bedecked with medals.

Preserved in Sasha’s former bedroom are pictures of him in fighting gear with a camouflaged head wrap, and several certificates of training with American and other NATO troops. There is a paratrooper beret, a live large-caliber round, and a pair of fake hand grenades, painted black.

“Sasha’s brothers-in-arms are really missing him, because there are very few people like him left,” he says.

High on the wall is a depiction of the winged Angel Gabriel.

Trying to cope

Less than 100 yards from the house, up a cobblestone road covered with cracked asphalt, is the cemetery on the southeast edge of the village. Ukrainian and battalion flags fly over Sasha’s grave.

It is piled high with flower arrangements, and when his family members visit – this time with flowers in the Ukrainian national colors of blue and yellow – they each silently touch and kiss the wooden cross. The official death announcement notes that the “enemy takes the best sons of Ukraine,” but adds: “Eternal memory, heroes don’t die!”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Larysa and Mykhailo Palahniuk speak about coping with the loss of their son, Ukrainian paratrooper Oleksandr Palahniuk, at their home in Pokutyne, Ukraine, June 21, 2022. “We are Ukrainians, and Sasha defended us,” says Mr. Palahniuk. “That’s worth it. Sasha did something good, he meant something. We think he’s a hero.”

“It’s very hard for us; we are still trying to find a way to cope with it,” says Larysa Palahniuk, the lieutenant’s mother, her tearful face framed by a black headscarf.

“I can’t believe this happened to my son,” she says. “At the same time, we have part of his blood, we have someone to live for,” she adds, referring to her granddaughter.

The challenge of telling Yulianna the news fell to her mother. Throughout the war, the girl would ask: “Has Papa called?”

When her father failed to call on her birthday in early May – just a week after he was killed – Yulianna asked her mother why.

“Our father is already an angel,” she told her.

Weeks later, when the funeral had passed, Yulianna again asked why her father did not call.

Her mother then asked: “How do people become angels?” The girl replied: “So, was Father killed?”

It was an inevitable, excruciating moment: Yes, she was told.

A commander, not a farmer

Sasha was a “regular boy” who enjoyed fishing and camping, his parents recall. A special love was a 650cc motorcycle that still sits in a shed.

The officer-in-waiting rode the bike often, including to dances in nearby villages. But he detested farm work, dismissing it with a common Ukrainian aphorism, “This is not the business of the Czar.”

Sasha only went to college – where he met his wife – at the insistence of his mother.

“He was a commander,” Zhanna Palahniuk recalls of her husband-to-be. “Even when they lived with the boys in the dorm, he was giving orders and managing people, saying, ‘You will be washing dishes, you will be cleaning up,’ and everyone listened to him.”

He surprised her one day in 2013 when he signed up to join the army.

But he also disliked hierarchy, and would come back from training with callouses on his knuckles – from all the push-ups he did as punishment for not following orders.

He was sent to Crimea, and in the winter of 2014-15 was at the Donetsk Airport for a famous last-stand battle in the face of heavy Russian firepower.

“Sasha is a real warrior, and always was a real warrior,” his wife says.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Zhanna Palahniuk kisses her daughter, Yulianna, as they speak about the April combat loss of her husband, Oleksandr Palahniuk, in a wooded park in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, June 20, 2022.

And while his aversion to what he sometimes considered to be “stupid” orders appears to have slowed his advance to the rank of captain, it helped endear him to men under his command. Indeed, as the war increasingly imposed its will on his unit in April, the lieutenant told his wife he felt he had saved his men’s lives three times by not following all orders.

He told his parents his unit was suffering “very big losses” and had no vehicles; friends even gathered money to donate a car.

Near the end, “Sasha said there was no exit,” says his father. “He said, ‘We have a task, but not the tools to do it.’”

On his last call to his parents, just days before his death, it was “clear something had changed,” recalls his mother. “I saw he wasn’t holding it together, he was down.

“We had an intuition,” she says. “We didn’t sleep all night.”

Neither, in those days, did his wife.

Zhanna Palahniuk today pulls her daughter in tight and kisses her nose, eliciting giggles.

“The child makes me laugh,” she says of her warrior husband’s “beautiful legacy.”

“At least he has a legacy,” she says. “There are many others who don’t.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

Oleksandr Kamyshin, the CEO of Ukraine’s state-owned train company and one of the country’s most powerful men, mingled in a crowd of about 60 children aged 10 to 16 and at least a dozen pets.

At the Children’s Railway, a Kyiv park complete with a miniature train station, they were all celebrating the many Ukrainian people and pets evacuated by rail. Students at the associated Children’s Railway School, training to one day work in the train system, had dressed appropriately in conductor outfits.

It was a fitting, rare few hours off for Mr. Kamyshin, wearing a navy polo and cargo pants himself. That week in June, he’d spent five of his last seven nights in an overnight car. So even on a morning he wasn’t working, what was one more short ride on the park’s short loop? Ukrainian Railways’ accomplishments, he says, should be celebrated.

“Before the war, [the railwayman profession didn’t have] that good of a reputation,” he says. “Now you say the term ‘railwayman’ and you will get a hug.”

Before February, Ukrainian Railways was better known for its halting bureaucracy than bringing people to safety. Since then, the company has evacuated 4 million people from the country’s south, east, and center, and brought another half a million into neighboring countries, says Mr. Kamyshin. Its cars deliver military equipment and diplomats, ship goods amid the Black Sea blockade, and have carried some 100,000 tons of humanitarian aid, he says. “Some people say that we are the second army because we ... are close to them in importance.”

Natacha Pisarenko/AP

A boy wearing a train guard uniform waits for the departure of a train at the Children's Railway in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 4, 2022. The Children's Railway lets children drive trains and learn about working in the railway industry.

Crises often expose an institution’s existing flaws – a trend so often seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ukrainian Railways’ success in the last five months is a moment where the crisis didn’t win. Facing artillery attacks, altered routes, and enemy occupation of 20% of its network, the country’s train system has adapted, kept running.

That work fits the zeitgeist in Ukraine right now – extraordinary perseverance meeting extraordinary challenges. Among so many other institutions also adapting, Ukrainian Railways has become a symbol of national pride even as it sustains the nation’s war effort. In the last five months, pronouncing its name, Ukrzaliznytsia, has become a way to prove a person’s Ukrainian accent.

“We’re just doing our job,” says Mr. Kamyshin. “It’s not something special. It’s not something heroic. We just don’t stop.”

“We are no longer only conductors”

On Feb. 23, Svitlana Kravchuk, a 22-year-veteran train attendant based in Lviv, was traveling on an overnight route to Odesa. Early in the morning, passengers woke to the news that their country was at war. When they arrived, the platform at Odesa’s station was already packed and panicked. People banged on windows as others crowded inside. Two hundred people fit into cars that usually carry 40. Many didn’t have space to sit down.

Ms. Kravchuk used to collect tickets and clean rooms. Now she had to console people fleeing their homes. She worked as many evacuation routes as possible, barely taking a break for three weeks. When they had to stop to avoid shelling, she sometimes spent more than 24 hours on a train.

“We are no longer only conductors,” she says. “We sometimes have to be friends, psychologists, even parents for children.”

“The war is really changing everything.”

For weeks, starting Feb. 24, Mr. Kamyshin measured his life in conference calls, speaking with regional traffic managers each hour. Those managers suddenly needed to manage bottlenecks at each station and artillery barrages that made travel more difficult.

As of June 8, the Kyiv School of Economics estimates that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused some $2.7 billion in damage to railway infrastructure and rolling stock. About a fifth of the train system’s reach is now under occupied territory. Since February, according to Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, CEO of Ukrainian Railways’ passenger division, 170 of its employees have been killed. One of the worst moments of the war occurred when a Russian cluster bomb hit a train platform in Kramatorsk, killing almost 60.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Scores of Ukrainian evacuees from the embattled city of Lysychansk board an evacuation train to safer cities to the west, from the train station in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, June 24, 2022. Russian invasion forces are focused on capturing the industrial Donbas region of Ukraine, after a failed attempt to seize the capital, Kyiv, in late February.

Still, given the train system’s importance to Ukraine’s war effort, it’s almost surprising that the Russian military hasn’t targeted such infrastructure more. After invading the country from multiple fronts this winter, the Russian attack has now concentrated on eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. It’s now under immense fire, and Russia for now may be content to damage more infrastructure in fewer places.

Of course, the Russian military is highly dependent on trains for its own supplies. Many speculate that it has avoided targeting Ukrainian rail infrastructure in the hope that it will be able to make use of it later, should the war go Russia’s way.

Or, the train system may just be too big a target. “We have thousands of important places in the railway [system],” says Denys Rynski, a volunteer who helped coordinate logistics for Lviv’s train station. “It’s impossible to bomb all of them.”

“We have to find a way to keep a sense of normalcy”

When the train system is bombed a few things happen immediately, says Mr. Pertsovskyi, the passenger head. As soon as it’s safe, teams deploy to assess the damage and start repairs. A regional traffic manager reroutes the delayed train and others to limit disruptions. A dispatch team communicates with the conductor, who communicates with the attendants, who communicate with the passengers. Everyone on board gets free food and drinks.

“Part of this calmness is that people are not asking questions,” says Mr. Pertsovskyi. “They’re just doing their job.”

He compares them to Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who emergency-landed a passenger plane in the Hudson River.  

In Ukraine, the emergency isn’t just one day, one flight, or one ride. It’s every day, and it looks like it will be for a while. “Even during the war, we have to live on,” says Mr. Kamyshin. “We have to find a way to keep a sense of normalcy in our lives.”

That’s come at the cost of normalcy in his own life. Riding around the short loop at the Children’s Railway, in the small train decorated with pictures of Minecraft and Thomas the Tank Engine, Mr. Kamyshin keeps silencing phone calls. But one he picks up. For a few minutes, he looks only at the small screen in his hand, pointing the camera around the car. 

It’s one of his two sons. During the war, Mr. Kamyshin has only seen his family three times. “That’s one of the worst things in this war for me,” he says. “I’ve got two boys and I really miss them.”

To him, the sacrifice is worth it. To others, it has been as well.

For weeks, Oleksa Vozniak volunteered to help serve refugees arriving at the Lviv train station. Early in the war, some 50,000 people would show up each day, more than 10 times the usual number of arrivals in pre-war days. They needed places to eat, sleep, and stay warm during winter. Mr. Vozniak learned he could work 24 hours straight.

But in a country with so many different regions and regional identities, he saw something he’d never seen before: a mix of Ukrainians coexisting from all over Ukraine. Some refugees later became volunteers too. Ukraine’s train system, he says, helped make Ukraine.

“This is the place, this is the time when the Ukrainian nation was built, because I saw so many people volunteering,” says Mr. Vozniak.

“There is no difference between a person who is from Kramatorsk or from Dnipro or from Lviv,” he says. “This is just one united nation.”

Oleksandr Naselenko in Lviv and Olya Bystritskaya in Kyiv supported reporting for this story.

Reuters

A screen grab from a video shows demonstrators holding up signs during a protest over the freezing of deposits by some rural-based banks, outside a People's Bank of China building in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, on July 10, 2022. The sign in the foreground reads, "Henan Bank, return to us our legal deposits! The people's life-savings deposits!"

Wu Jian’s collapse of confidence in China’s local banks started with a click on his cellphone.

It was mid-June, and Mr. Wu was at home in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, preparing to go to neighboring Henan province to protest a freeze on his accounts by two struggling banks there that is threatening a big chunk of his family’s savings. 

But when the information technology professional checked his health code – a QR code showing COVID-19 risk status – he was shocked to see it had turned from green to red, meaning he was barred from traveling. He soon discovered he was not alone – more than 1,300 frustrated depositors and consumers from around the country, sharing information on China’s WeChat messaging app, had also received unexpected red codes in a ham-handed move by Henan authorities to block anti-bank demonstrations, which had already been breaking out around the province.

“I was pretty surprised,” Mr. Wu says. “You resort to this kind of a trick to stop people – doesn’t that mean you won’t give us our money back?” 

The Henan bank scandal highlights growing concerns over China’s more than 300 high-risk local banks, and it isn’t the only sign of waning trust in a key sector of China’s economy. Recent weeks have also seen a national wave of mortgage boycotts, as people stop or threaten to halt payments on homes purchased in advance as part of now-delayed housing construction. 

The confidence of middle-class Chinese like Mr. Wu in Beijing’s promises of ever-rising prosperity is waning, as they are increasingly paying a price for the country’s economic slowdown after decades of debt-fueled growth. Moving to protect their money and property, they are exerting leverage with their pocketbooks, organizing on social media, and even taking to the streets with legitimate demands to safeguard their hard-earned resources. 

“One of the new things ... is that it’s a middle-class phenomenon, not the type of labor strike or farmer protest that we’re used to seeing,” says Bruce Dickson, a political scientist at George Washington University. “This is people who’ve got a very legitimate gripe that they put their money down and the builders have not finished their homes to be able to move into. And the last resort is to stop paying,” he says, referring to the mortgage strikes. 

Reuters

A screen grab from a video shows uniformed and plainclothes security personnel running toward demonstrators outside a People's Bank of China building in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, on July 10, 2022. Some authorities have responded to protests with controversial tactics, such as manipulating the COVID-19 health code system and using plainclothes enforcers to beat protesters.

Yet some authorities have responded with controversial tactics that further undermine people’s trust in government – such as manipulating the COVID-19 health code system, using plainclothes enforcers to beat protesters, and imposing stiff penalties through China’s sweeping social credit system. 

“From the party standpoint, anything that’s organized that’s not under party control is seen as a threat,” says Dr. Dickson, author of “The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century.” “At the local level, [changing people’s health codes] might be a clever strategy to deal with an immediate problem. But ... once you’ve done that, you’ve destroyed so much of the public trust that public health depends on.”

A middle-class mortgage strike

From Liaoning province in the north to Guangdong in the south, Chinese homebuyers are threatening to boycott mortgage payments for some 320 unfinished housing projects in more than 100 localities, according to an online tally of the growing strike.

In China, more than 85% of homes are sold months or years before construction is complete. Many Chinese families invest a large portion of their savings into these homes, encouraged to do so by the government and by decades of steadily rising housing prices. At the heart of the boycott that has surged in recent weeks are buyers’ doubts that debt-strapped developers will ever complete their promised homes. 

“People who are actually threatening to not pay are in a little bit [of a] desperate situation,” says Liqian Ren, an economist who hosts a podcast on China and Asian markets and works as a quantitative investment specialist at WisdomTree Asset Management in New York. “Because they are not getting the house they were promised, they have to rent a house on the side and still pay the mortgage.”

And although the mortgage boycott still represents a small share of the overall mortgage market, it and other debt problems could worsen if China’s economic slowdown continues.

Beijing, alarmed by the spreading movement, has started censoring social media discussions about the mortgage strike and deleting shared files tracking its scale.

Yet unless the government intervenes with more concrete steps to boost resources for homebuilders, analysts say, the boycott could snowball as jittery banks withhold credit to China’s troubled property sector, further delaying houses and causing more people to stop paying mortgages. 

Real estate makes up more than a quarter of China’s economy, but has been hurt by policies such as a regulatory crackdown on credit and China’s growth-stifling zero-COVID-19 policy. China’s economy grew 0.4% in the second quarter, marking a two-year low.

Who foots the bill?

Beijing has pressed provincial governments to address the banking and housing-project crises, seeking to avoid setting a precedent by footing the bill. “If the central government steps in, the local government has no incentive” to act, says Dr. Ren.

Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Reuters

Cranes are seen at a construction site in Jiangsu, China, on June 14, 2022. The vast majority of Chinese homes are sold months or years before construction is complete, but lately, buyers are feeling doubtful that debt-strapped developers will ever finish their promised homes.

Provincial authorities in Henan and neighboring Anhui province last week started repaying smaller victims of the recent banking scandal – those with deposits of $7,400 or less – and also reportedly pledged to refund deposits of up to $14,800 starting this week. They have also punished five local officials over the scandal.

But China’s highly indebted local governments are in a tight spot. They have been hit particularly hard by the real estate crisis because they depend on revenue from land sales. Meanwhile, the zero-COVID-19 policy has imposed new burdens on local leaders.

“Localities are having to bear the cost of all the COVID testing and other COVID-related policies. That is a big chunk,” says Jean Oi, a professor of Chinese politics at Stanford University. “Their revenues have suffered severely.”

“So as the economy keeps tanking with the continued lockdowns ... the center is going to have to start intervening,” she says. “You can’t just lay it all on localities.”

For his part, Mr. Wu agrees. “We hope the central government can take action, because everyone knows Henan province handles its own problems badly,” he says.

Mr. Wu hopes he will recover the $110,000 he deposited in the Henan banks. But if he does, he vows to never put it back into any of China’s nearly 4,000 small and medium-sized banks. 

“If I get the money back, I may put it in the ‘big four’ banks,” he says, referring to China’s largest national banks. More than likely, though, “I will exchange it for cash and keep it in my house,” he says with a laugh.

Andy Wong/AP

A Chinese couple ride on an electric bike with decals of the American flag in southwestern China's Yunnan province on July 16, 2022.

What the world needs now is a new Cold War.

Yes, you read that right.

And jarring though it will sound to those who remember Cold War I, it is that thought that is motivating intensified U.S. efforts to prevent a contentious relationship with China from becoming steadily – perhaps dangerously – worse.

This is not about pining for a reprise of the U.S-Soviet Cold War. It is simply acknowledging that Washington and Beijing are already locked in superpower competition, but they lack Cold War-style “guardrails” around their rivalry to prevent it from breaking down into hot war.

What’s still largely missing from the U.S.-China relationship is what might be called the “good” part of the old Cold War: the intricate shared architecture of state-to-state interaction and crisis management built up with Moscow; the arms talks and hotlines; the latticework of political and diplomatic and military exchanges; the regular summits and other high-level meetings that preserved the peace.

A reliable fabric of frank, forthright communication.

With Moscow, that had the long-term aim of narrowing differences. But it had a more immediate, practical objective: to ensure that each superpower adversary understood the other’s thinking and its “red lines” well enough to avoid potentially dangerous miscalculations, and an accidental escalation.

The absence of such understanding and trust when it comes to China has been worrying President Joe Biden since he entered the Oval Office 18 months ago. He and his top officials have been pressing Beijing to begin building crash barriers around their competition to stop it from degenerating into conflict.

But there’s been little sign of progress so far. And as Mr. Biden prepares for a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday, with an eye to a possible in-person meeting in November, a number of factors have ramped up his administration’s urgent search for ways to reduce the chance of potential miscalculations on either side.

Alex Brandon, Eraldo Peres/AP/File

U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington, Nov. 6, 2021, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Brasília, Brazil, Nov. 13, 2019. Mr. Biden is planning to speak on Thursday with his Chinese counterpart for the first time in four months, with a wide range of bilateral and international issues on the table. Communications between Beijing and Washington are poor.

The immediate issue is the democratic island state of Taiwan, which Mr. Xi is on record as saying will eventually be “reunified” with mainland China, by force if necessary.

For the last few months, Washington’s overriding focus on the Ukraine war has overshadowed its concern over Taiwan. The hope has been that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failure to win a lightning victory in Ukraine might give Mr. Xi pause in considering any military action of his own.

That may well be true.

U.S. officials have been encouraged by the Chinese leader’s response to Mr. Biden’s explicit request in March that he show restraint on Ukraine. There are no signs that China has helped resupply Mr. Putin’s military, and major Chinese businesses have largely abided by Western sanctions against Moscow.

There was also a symbolic show of superpower amity in recent days: Mr. Xi responded to the announcement that Mr. Biden had tested positive for COVID-19 by wishing him a speedy recovery.

Still, the Chinese military has recently been far more assertive in confrontations with U.S. naval patrols exercising their right to sail in the South China Sea, which Mr. Xi has unilaterally claimed as Chinese territory.

And on Taiwan, there’s a new, potentially fractious, point of dispute: reported plans by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make an official visit to Taiwan next month – prompting Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijan to vow “firm and forceful measures” if the trip goes ahead.

Though ultimately the decision on whether to go rests with Ms. Pelosi, the White House has made clear it would be happier if she delayed the trip.

One key reason is a potentially unpredictable political context inside China itself.

Mr. Xi’s attention is focused on a Communist Party congress in the fall, at which he is widely expected to secure an unprecedented third term in power. The concern among U.S. experts is that, especially at a time when Mr. Xi’s pandemic restrictions have led to a slowdown in economic growth, he might be more likely to indulge in a show of military assertiveness against Taiwan.

President Biden’s conversation with Mr. Xi tomorrow may clarify some of these uncertainties. Other long-standing issues of contention, such as whether Mr. Biden may start to ease his predecessor’s trade sanctions against China, could also come up.

But the new dispute over Taiwan has served to reinforce U.S. concern over the more fundamental problem in the relationship with China: its opaqueness, and the lack of sufficiently robust avenues of communication to offer mutual understanding amid inevitable points of disagreement.

Mr. Biden is almost certain to make that case again in his talks with Mr. Xi. One indication of potential progress would be an agreement to open talks on “strategic stability” between the rival powers, which Washington sees as a foundation stone of a Cold War-type architecture of communication.

That could be a step toward the broader U.S. aim, which Mr. Biden first put directly to the Chinese leader late last year – a set of “commonsense” agreements to “ensure that competition does not veer into conflict.”

AP

A woman holds up a banner during a protest in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. The country voted Monday for a new constitution expanding presidential powers.

In Tunisia, where the Arab uprising against autocracy began a decade ago, democracy has suffered an apparent setback. Voters approved a new constitution on Monday that gives the president unchecked powers. That marks an about-face for a country that just eight years ago adopted a progressive legal canon based on “freedom, dignity, justice, and order” after 24 years of dictatorship.

Tunisia’s turn may reflect a regional trend. A new survey of Arab public opinion found instability and weak economies are eroding trust in democracy across the Middle East and North Africa. More than 50% of Arabs express a lack of confidence in elected government, as do 7 in 10 Tunisians. Yet in one important way, the annual Arab Barometer noted, Tunisia remains a pacesetter: It saw the greatest increase in the percentage of citizens – from 40% in 2018 to 56% now – who support female leaders.

Most of that gain has come since the rise last September of Najla Bouden, a geology professor, as the Arab world’s first female prime minister. “We didn’t see a drastic shift in public opinion on women’s rights prior to this appointment,” Amaney Jamal, Arab Barometer co-founder and dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, told the BBC. Ms. Bouden’s prominence has “allowed people to say, ‘Guess what, women can be just as effective as political leaders as their male counterparts.’”

By one metric, the number of seats held by women in Arab parliaments, their gains appear modest. Since 2010, prior to the uprisings, female legislators in the region have increased from 10% to about 16%. In some countries, quotas have made a difference. The United Arab Emirates, for example, now requires gender parity in its parliament.

But representation alone may offer too narrow a view. Female civil rights activists fill prominent leadership roles in pro-democracy movements in countries like Iran and Sudan. Female filmmakers from Morocco to Kuwait are transforming narratives of the region. Their works are reaching a wider audience. Earlier this month, Netflix released 21 movies by Arab female directors.

“Women filmmakers have beautiful, complex, and nuanced stories to tell – stories which have the power to resonate with people not just in the Arab world, but across the globe,” the streaming company said. One depicts a young girl yearning for a normal childhood in the shadow of her father’s fanatical beliefs.

Not all the Arab Barometer’s conclusions are hopeful. It found that 61% of Tunisians, for example, think violence against women has risen. But two of its main findings – declining confidence in democracy and growing support for female leaders – may be two sides of the same coin. They show that the popular aspirations for equality and good governance that poured into the streets a decade ago remain.