One day in late August, shortly after China’s leaders reportedly gathered at the Bohai Sea resort of Beidaihe to put the finishing touches on the agenda for next week’s 20th Communist Party Congress, a government think tank posted an obscure academic article online, sparking a surprising debate.

The article challenged the mainstream view that the isolationism of China’s Ming (1398-1644) and Qing (1636-1912) dynasties severely weakened China, recasting the policies as targeted efforts to defend China’s territory and culture against “aggressive Western colonial forces.”

Chinese netizens and China watchers alike interpreted the article – unusual for having no named author – as a political bid to lend historical ammunition to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s drive to make China more self-sufficient and fortify it against foreign threats.

With Mr. Xi poised to gain a rare third term at the twice-a-decade political conclave that opens in Beijing on Sunday, a critical question is whether his emphasis on buttressing China will succeed in making it strong and autonomous – or instead deepen its isolation and bring economic stagnation.

Mr. Xi’s push for self-sufficiency has enormous implications for the rest of the world. China’s rise over the past 40 years was fueled by its market-oriented economic reforms and opening to trade, which unleashed the private sector and brought in foreign technology and investment. Now the top trading nation, China is the number one trade partner to more than 120 countries.

But since taking power in 2012, Mr. Xi has transformed China’s priorities. Mr. Xi’s approach is rooted in his darker view of the international environment compared with those of earlier Chinese leaders, experts say. In his eyes, China is besieged by “hostile foreign forces” bent on thwarting its rise and bringing about the party’s collapse. National security, Mr. Xi says, is China’s “top priority.”

“Xi places much greater emphasis on national security than he does on economic policy,” says Richard McGregor, senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, an Australian foreign policy think tank.

Xinhua/AP/File

Communist Party leader Xi Jinping (right), then secretary of the Ningde Prefecture Committee of the Communist Party of China, participates in farm work during his investigation in the countryside in 1988. Today, experts say his approach is rooted in his darker view of the international environment compared with those of earlier Chinese leaders.

China’s arch foe, in Mr. Xi’s view, is the United States – and he uses the rivalry to mobilize the party and silence internal critics, says Mr. McGregor. He says anyone who opposes Mr. Xi risks being “branded as disloyal and working against the motherland” as it faces “an epochal showdown with a rival superpower.”

Push toward self-reliance

Internally, Mr. Xi has moved aggressively to strengthen the Communist Party and tighten its grip over the economy and society. He’s subordinated the private sector to state-run firms and expanded industrial policy, using huge subsidies to try to outcompete the West in advanced technologies. His stringent COVID-19 controls have closed China’s borders to many foreign visitors while requiring all inbound travelers to quarantine.

To ensure China can fend for itself in a dangerous world, Mr. Xi seeks to make the country of 1.4 billion people self-reliant in food, energy, and advanced technology. His push for self-sufficiency has gained urgency with the U.S.-China trade war, tensions over Taiwan, and the sanctioning of Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, says Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. 

“Before 2018 and the trade war, their goal was aspirational. Today, it is existential,” he says, adding that China’s leaders “have elevated self-sufficiency to a level China has not seen since the end of the Mao era” in 1976, prioritizing it as “an issue of national survival.”

Yet China’s inward turn toward state-led self-reliance under Mr. Xi – together with his strict COVID-19 policy – has come at a cost in economic vitality and innovation, experts say.

Mixed results

Under Mr. Xi, annual gross domestic product has steadily declined and this year is expected to fall to 3.5% – missing the government’s goal of 5.5% – according to the Bank of China.

More importantly, economists say, China’s total factor productivity – a key measure of efficiency – has declined from an average of 3.5% a year in the 2000s to 0.7% in the 2010s, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Technological innovation is central to Mr. Xi’s economic strategy, but by directing investment through the state-owned sector, which is less productive, efficient, and innovative, Beijing undermines that goal.

“China has a system that’s really good at mobilizing resources. But innovation, technological creativity, needs … a lot of flexibility, it needs a lot of openness,” says Dr. Pei. “That is the fundamental dilemma faced by the Chinese government.”

Mr. Xi’s plan for China to dominate key technologies on its own underestimates the importance of international collaboration in achieving breakthroughs in areas such as semiconductors, experts say. 

“Every single success story is done through collaboration,” says Yasheng Huang, professor of international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “I think they are going to have a very humbling experience with semiconductors.”

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Visitors gather near a booth for Chinese technology firm Tencent at the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing on Sept. 3, 2022. Chinese officials warn that foreign restrictions on technology transfers to China will backfire and spur Beijing’s efforts at technological independence.

To be sure, China has enjoyed successes in homegrown technology, and over the past 10 years it has risen to 11th among countries ranked in the Global Innovation Index published by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a U.N. agency in Geneva. Chinese officials and experts warn that foreign restrictions on technology transfers to China – such as the recent U.S. tightening of controls on semiconductor chip exports – will backfire and spur Beijing’s efforts at technological independence. 

Tensions between China and the U.S., European countries, and other developed economies have grown during Mr. Xi’s tenure, as illustrated by sharply negative turns in public opinion toward his leadership. “Despite its attempts to build a new global order by courting other authoritarian regimes, and its trade and investment around the world, China has become more isolated from countries in the West,” says Anthony Saich, professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Inside China, Mr. Xi retains significant backing, especially from China’s nationalists. His poverty alleviation and anti-corruption campaigns have been widely popular, and his health policies have succeeded in keeping China’s COVID-19 cases and deaths far lower than in many other countries.

The path ahead

Next week’s party congress and related political events are expected to endorse both Mr. Xi’s third term and his broad agenda of self-sufficiency.

“For Xi’s third term, the trends in the recent years’ Chinese economy seemingly will continue, primarily the emphasis on self-sufficiency” and “the state-owned sector’s expansion at the cost of the private sector,” says Wu Guoguang, senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions at Stanford University.

But with no end in sight to Mr. Xi’s COVID-19 mandates, many Chinese worry that as they endure continuous tests and unpredictable lockdowns, their nation feels increasingly quarantined from the rest of the world.

Such concerns heightened the controversy over the recent academic article on Ming and Qing history, with its more positive reinterpretation of the ancient policy of “isolation and locking the country,” or bi guan suo guo, familiar to most Chinese from textbooks.

“The data are pretty clear that openness – both in history and contemporary periods – promotes economic growth and … technological development,” says Dr. Huang, who with colleagues in China has researched trends in Chinese inventiveness since ancient times.

In contrast, “the closed-door policy destroyed China’s economy,” says Dr. Huang, author of the forthcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the EAST: Examination, Autocracy, Stability and Technology in Chinese History and Today.”

Many Chinese posted comments online comparing China’s past isolationist policies with the zero-COVID-19 closures of today.

“Back then, the whole world was in full swing with the Industrial Revolution. We closed our country in isolation … fell behind and were beaten,” commented one person in Chinese on the popular Weibo microblogging website.

“The whole world is opening up,” wrote another, “and only we are locked away.”

California’s attorney general said this week that his office plans to investigate last year’s voter redistricting process in Los Angeles. The once-in-a-decade redrawing of the voting districts was the context for a secretly recorded conversation among Latino City Council members whose raw power-scheming over district boundaries and blatant racist comments sparked an explosion of outrage and hurt when the audio was made public on Sunday. 

Whether the state’s highest law enforcement official finds civil or criminal liability remains to be seen, but some people are now calling for an overhaul of the decennial mapping process. Proponents, including the outgoing Los Angeles attorney, are demanding that City Council members no longer have a say in the maps, and that the process be tasked entirely to an independent commission – as was approved by voters for California’s congressional and state legislative districts in 2008.

Could the transparency of an independent commission restore integrity and trust in LA’s government, as well as heal this racial gash in a city famed for its diversity and its racial clashes? 

“Because of the huge degree of distrust that this has already fostered and will continue to foster ... we absolutely must have an independent redistricting commission,” says Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. But that’s a baseline response, she says. “We need something else to reset” city government because of the serious consequences of intertwining politics with racism. 

Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP

Police officers stand guard as people shout slogans before a Los Angeles City Council meeting, Oct. 11, 2022. Two city council members are resisting pressure to resign after a recording surfaced of them joining in racist banter during a private meeting to discuss redistricting.

What was said in that private conversation is “horrible and should never be tolerated,” says Dr. Romero. “When it’s intertwined with politics, it’s literally talking about people’s life chances,” because local government is so influential on people’s lives.

Dr. Romero laments not only the further erosion of trust in the political process, but also fears messaging that casts all Latino political leaders as racist pols out for themselves, playing a zero-sum game that pits one group against another. 

Meanwhile, she says, a “grenade” has just been tossed on decades of interracial community-building in Los Angeles, particularly between Black and Latino residents.

The recording

The recording, published by the Los Angeles Times after appearing on Reddit without an identified source, revealed a candid conversation among City Council President Nury Martinez, council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, and LA County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, as they discussed redistricting of City Council seats. Ms. Martinez and Mr. Herrera have both since resigned their positions. Mr. Cedillo and Mr. de León are resisting calls to do the same – despite widespread pressure, including from President Joe Biden. 

The 80-minute recording from October 2021 is punctuated with profanities and crass references to fellow council members. In a particularly shocking exchange, Ms. Martinez calls the Black child of white council member Mike Bonin a changuito, Spanish for monkey. She also likened the child to a luxury handbag and accused Mr. Bonin of using the toddler as a political ploy. In another section, she described Oaxacans in LA’s Koreatown neighborhood as “little short dark people.” 

In discussions about the redrawing of council districts, Ms. Martinez recalls telling a local business leader to convince Black council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson to “go after the airport” in Mr. Bonin’s district, which accounts for “billions of dollars’ worth of contracts.” They also discuss weakening the base for Nithya Raman, a South Asian immigrant. “You have to keep her on the fence. You have to make her work for it.” 

At another point, Ms. Martinez stated LA District Attorney George Gascon was “with the Blacks,” a phrase demonstrators repurposed for T-shirts and signage as they shut down council meetings with loud protests. Mr. Herrera, who hosted the confab at the Federation of Labor, states plainly, “My goal in life is to get the three of you elected. ... I mean, we’re like the little Latino caucus of, you know, our own.”

“A problem from the start” 

The City Council has final say over its own district lines – drawn by a commission appointed by council members and other elected officials. LA voters would have to approve a ballot measure to convert today’s setup to an independent redistricting commission. 

Although the 2021 Los Angeles City Redistricting Commission strove for independence by adopting integrity and transparency guidelines, holding public hearings with many community stakeholders, and making public its maps, “we did not have a truly independent commission,” says Fred Ali, who chaired the commission and is a longtime nonprofit leader in LA.

Being merely an “advisory” body to the council “was a problem from the start,” he says. Once the commission started producing maps that the council did not like, “then all the manipulation began.” The most clear and public example, he says, was the replacement of commissioners by council members who did not think that their commissioners were fairly representing their views. All the same issues that framed the recorded discussion – population trends, ethnic communities, economic assets – would still have to be handled by an independent commission, but the difference, says Mr. Ali, is that these sometimes tricky discussions would take place in public. 

“One of the ways that the city council can begin to earn trust back is by moving forward on a ballot initiative to create an independent commission,” says Mr. Ali, who notes that this is a trend across the country in states and municipalities.

Sarah Reingewirtz/The Orange County Register/AP

Los Angeles City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson speaks to fellow members Gil Cedillo, left, and Kevin de León, right, as the chamber fills with chants for Mr. Cedillo and Mr. De León to resign during a Council meeting on Oct. 11, 2022. They both left the room before the meeting resumed.

Need for transparency

But independent commissions are no guarantee of a process free of interference, says Zev Yaroslavsky, a former member of the LA City Council as well as the LA County Board of Supervisors who has been involved in several redistricting rounds himself. 

He praises Mr. Ali’s appointed commission for its transparency, but criticizes the work of LA County’s independent commission for producing a final map at “the 11th hour and 59 minutes” in a closed session. Independent commissions are not accountable to voters, he points out.  

Still, he’s with Mr. Ali on the benefits of changing the city’s approach. “A truly independent commission of qualified people who have familiarity with the Voting Rights Act and other laws pertaining to drawing districts would be superior to elected officials drawing their own district lines,” he writes in a follow-up email. “It is imperative that they have an open and transparent process that solicits and considers stakeholder input and communities of interest. In short, voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.”

Los Angeles has undergone profound demographic changes over the past few decades, with Latinos growing to about half the population and the Black population declining to around 9% as people leave to find higher-paying jobs and cheaper housing. The fastest-growing group is now Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which account for 13% of the population. These changes produce “tensions” and “jealousies,” says Mr. Yaroslavsky, “but I refuse to believe that what those people said in that room reflected what real people think in this town,” adding that “thousands and thousands” of people have worked hard to address racial tensions and bring communities together. 

He consistently finds rankings of race relations as the highest area of satisfaction in LA County, which includes the city, in the annual “quality of life” surveys by the University of California, Los Angeles, which Mr. Yaroslavsky oversees. “This is not the city of 50 years ago,” he says. 

“This is the city where people of different colors and different ethnicities work together, go to school together, marry each other, go to the market together. Communities are more integrated now than before,” he says. The government, too, reflects a much greater diversity both on the City Council and in the mayorship, where polls indicate voters may well elect the city’s first woman, Karen Bass, who is Black, to the job.

Mr. Yaroslavsky points out that a political strategy that pits groups against each other is counterproductive. In a city this diverse and complex, “you want to find ways for everyone to win, and not make it a zero-sum game. What went on in that room was the philosophy of, ‘If I win, you have to lose,’ and that’s not true.” 

The tape and what it uncovered is a “terrible stain” on the city, Mr. Yaroslavsky says, “and there’s going to have to be healing process and a coming together and a cleansing of the house.”

“Take stock of their hearts” 

Resignations are a first and important step, he and others say. Beyond an independent redistricting commission, several council members are proposing a ballot measure to expand the number of City Council seats from its current 15 – which was set in 1925, when the population was about a quarter of its present size.  

The expanded size would increase representation, allowing for smaller districts and presumably closer relations between council members and their constituents in America’s second-largest city, says Marcia Godwin, professor of public administration at the University of La Verne in La Verne, California. But a larger body might be even harder to govern, she says. America’s largest city, New York, has 51 City Council seats and Chicago, the third-largest city, has 50.

But there’s a human component to the healing, she and others emphasize. “I’m really looking to see what kind of leadership we will have from the next mayor of Los Angeles and the next council president.” They can take the lead on diversity, equity, and inclusion – and push a new code of ethics.

Mr. Yaroslavsky says that everybody on the City Council needs to “take a deep breath, take stock of their hearts a little bit more. ... And hopefully, the goodness in them will come out and operate on the assumption that people ought to have mutual trust, mutual understanding.” 

Tony Gutierrez/AP/File

Plumber Roberto Valerio (left) and his nephew Hector Valerio discuss how to repair a residential pipe break that occurred in cold weather, on Feb. 20, 2021, in Dallas. Some plumbers are self-employed as independent contractors and others are employees of plumbing companies – an example of the economy's varied mix of worker classifications. A proposed federal rule would tilt toward more workers being designated as employees.

In trying to answer the question – When are workers employees? – the Biden administration has reignited a long and roiling controversy over fairness in the workplace.

Is it best to try to protect workers from unscrupulous firms that don’t offer minimum wage or benefits? Or by applying such traditional standards to a new and burgeoning freelance workforce, is the federal government holding back entrepreneurial Americans from supplementing their income?

There is no easy answer because these workers – part of the so-called gig economy – vary greatly in their needs and outlook. Whatever the administration implements in the coming months, it could affect the incomes and livelihoods of more than a third of Americans.

Aren’t all Americans guaranteed a minimum wage?

For more than seven decades, the United States has made a distinction between employees, who have rights such as a minimum wage and overtime pay, and contract workers who don’t have such rights. Under current law, for example, a plumber hired by a firm to install new pipes is pretty clearly a contractor, who negotiates their price, rather than an employee of the firm, who is guaranteed a minimum wage.

In cases where the distinction is not so clear, the courts over the years have developed multifactor tests to determine between the two with occasional guidance from the U.S. Labor Department. 

Why is this controversy bubbling up now?

In its waning days, the Trump administration issued a formal Labor Department rule that streamlined the designation process by reducing the number of factors to be considered. Proponents argued that the economy had changed since the 1940s and that, among other things, most Americans no longer worked for a single employer their entire lives and craved more flexibility in their schedules.

The new rule was supposed to go into effect in early 2021, but the incoming Biden administration withdrew it and, on Tuesday, proposed its own. The new proposal restores the mutlifactor tests developed by the courts and tilts the decision toward an employee rather than a contractor designation. 

How many people does this new rule affect?

The poster children for this controversy are the roughly 2 million Uber and Lyft drivers. But the rule could touch the lives of the 60 million or so Americans who do freelance work – from home delivery to writing magazine articles or software. 

Uber and Lyft saw their stock prices dive more than 10% on the Labor Department news, recovering a bit of the lost ground in subsequent days – signals of the uncertainty surrounding the rule’s ultimate impact. 

I don’t freelance. Why should I pay attention?

The political and economic stakes are enormous. For decades, companies have used the contract provisions to shed expensive union workers or keep themselves from being unionized by designating their workers as independent contractors. By encouraging courts to designate workers as employees, the Biden administration is giving the labor movement more people they could potentially organize. A boost in unionization would give labor more power to bargain for bigger paychecks and better working conditions.

Ben Margot/AP/File

Instacart worker Saori Okawa loads groceries into her car for home delivery in San Leandro, California, July 1, 2020. After the state passed a law to classify many gig workers as employees, the Proposition 22 ballot measure called for exceptions for companies including Uber and Instacart. Ms. Okawa opposed the ballot measure because she wanted more protections for drivers, but it passed in November that year.

More generally, the Biden position leans in on the value of full employee status for more U.S. workers – with the prospect of a benefits package, plus access to unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation.

On the other side of the ledger, the gig economy is burgeoning. By one estimate, the number of gig workers is growing three times faster than the labor force. And a 2020 Mastercard study estimated that total wages of gig employees on online platform services would double from 2018 to 2023, reaching nearly $300 billion – five times what U.S. hotels and motels pay their workers in a year.

Studies by other economists suggest that the short-term freelance jobs that knowledge workers get on gig platforms might not even exist if it weren’t for the technology those platforms employ. It would be too expensive for companies to hire out those jobs using traditional means.

Would the new rule enhance workplace fairness?

It’s important to note two things. First, whatever the final version of the rule – there’s still a public comment period, and it’s likely to get challenged in court – it will serve more as guidance than a binding rule, legal experts say. Courts don’t have to follow it. States have their own rules and laws, which won’t be affected by the federal guidance.

Second, the rule is likely to prove most effective if it recognizes the increasing importance that workers place on nonmonetary rewards, especially flexibility in hours. Freelancers come in so many shapes and sizes that a one-size-fits-all approach is difficult. A full-time worker doing the occasional side-hustle or the software engineer taking on an 80-hour project may not need or want minimum-wage and overtime rules. But a worker trying to make a full-time living from Uber or DoorDash is likely to need that help.

This is a relatively small group. In a study late last year, the Pew Research Center found only about 3% of working Americans said gig work was their primary work. Such work is especially popular among Hispanics and low-income adults. Even the majority of active Uber drivers work less than 12 hours a week, according to a 2019 study.

And the efficiency of these gig-platform jobs offers value even if it’s not reflected in actual pay. The ease of getting hired and paid saves time over traditional freelancers who have to take time to search for work and bill for their services. And the flexibility of hours offers enormous benefits to those juggling work and life duties, such as parents who want to pick up their children from school at 2 p.m. but can tuck in a few hours of freelance work afterward. It may be impossible to find a traditional job with those hours. This time saving can be a huge boon for both gig employers and workers, says Christopher Stanton, an economist at Harvard Business School.    

In a study of knowledge workers last year, Professor Stanton and Catherine Thomas of the London School of Economics estimated that of the 36,000 gig jobs they examined, companies earned some $9 million more than had they used traditional means, and that workers hired for these jobs gained the equivalent of $6 million in compensation – or about $2 an hour more than if they had gone the traditional route.

Starting Dec. 31, Washington state will implement rules with a kind of minimum wage that doesn’t lessen the flexible hours of Uber and Lyft drivers. They will be guaranteed at least 34 cents per passenger minute and $1.17 per passenger mile or at least $3.00 per trip, whichever is greater. (These minimums are higher in big cities.) The following day, they’ll start accruing a paid sick day for every 40 hours they work.

When Samuel Tshabalala lined up at the start of the Comrades ultramarathon on a chilly morning in May 1989, few people had ever heard of the lanky railway worker in a candy-striped running jersey. 

The race he was about to begin, though, was iconic. Cut off from the international sporting world by boycotts against apartheid, South Africans had become obsessed with this annual 56-mile run between the cities of Pietermaritzburg and Durban. By the late 1980s, it drew thousands of runners, tens of thousands of spectators, and millions of TV viewers each year. 

But never in its 67-year history had the Comrades had a Black winner.

Five hours and 35 minutes after the starting gun popped that morning, Mr. Tshabalala, who died Oct. 2, changed that. His victory catapulted him into the race’s history – but its importance also extended far beyond that. In the violent final days of apartheid, Mr. Tshabalala – along with other elite Black distance runners of his era – became a quiet source of hope for millions. 

“It was something for the Black nation of South Africa to see that one of our Black brothers had done this,” says Andrew Kelehe, an elite Comrades runner who began competing in the race a few years after Mr. Tshabalala’s victory. “We owe a lot to him, because he was the one who showed us what was possible.” 

Mr. Tshabalala grew up herding cattle and sheep near Frankfort, a small farming town slotted into the corn fields and prairie of South Africa’s Free State. He left school in fourth grade, and later found work doing maintenance on the railway line between Frankfort and the nearby town of Tweeling. 

In the afternoons, Mr. Tshabalala often waited hours in Tweeling for a train home. And so, one day, he decided to run the 35-kilometer (22-mile) distance instead. Soon, he became a fixture on the narrow country road between the two towns, a lone figure in rubber rain boots, commuting a near-marathon home from work each afternoon. 

Comrades Marathon Association

Samuel Tshabalala (Comrades race number 6051) was the first Black athlete to win the Comrades ultramarathon race.

“When you saw him, you knew this man isn’t idling – he can really run,” says Pieter Potgieter, a farmer who noticed Mr. Tshabalala running and helped him join his first running club. 

At the time, South African road running was in the midst of a quantum leap. In the early 1970s, desperate to be allowed to return to the Olympics and other international sporting events, the apartheid government had decided to desegregate running as a kind of feel-good token of racial unity. It was a minor sport at that point, so its integration was a kind of curious sideshow. But over the next decade, fueled by a global jogging boom, road running took off in South Africa. 

Many running clubs desegregated, and formerly white clubs began offering sponsorships to top Black runners like Mr. Tshabalala. In the process, they became one of the first multiracial social spaces many of their runners and spectators ever encountered. 

By the mid-1980s, South Africa’s premier distance race, the 56-mile Comrades, was being broadcast live in its entirety on the country’s single, state-run TV channel. And what audiences saw was a revelation – Black and white runners racing alongside each other, hugging as they crossed the finish line. 

But still, a first-place finish for a Black runner remained elusive. Across the 1980s, the men’s race was dominated by a jovial blond archaeology student named Bruce Fordyce, who won every year between 1981 and 1988. 

“In those years, there were Black ... [winners] of all the other big races,” says Willie Mtolo, an elite distance runner of the era. But Comrades was the country’s most prestigious race, “and that one we didn’t have.” 

Then, in 1989, Mr. Fordyce organized a 100-kilometer (62-mile) world championship, and decided not to compete in the Comrades. His choice flung the field wide open. 

Still, few expected Mr. Tshabalala to take the lead. He had only been racing a few years at that point, and while he was fast, many saw his potential as unpolished. “It was a huge surprise for almost everyone,” says Louis Harmse, a runner who trained with Mr. Tshabalala before the 1989 Comrades. 

“It was a reflection of the adversity of the times that there hadn’t been a Black winner until then,” says Mqondisi Ngcobo, chairperson of the Comrades Marathon Association. “He became a symbol.” 

Mr. Tshabalala’s victory also catapulted him to national fame. TV reporters swarmed to sleepy Frankfort, and sponsors cut big checks (the race itself had no prize money at the time). He used the money to build a house for his family and children in the nearby oil refinery town of Sasolburg.  

Seven months later, on Feb. 2, 1990, South African President F.W. de Klerk made a surprise announcement: He was unbanning the country’s liberation movements, and releasing their leaders from prison. A week later, Nelson Mandela walked out of a Cape Town jail, clutching his wife Winnie’s hand, both of them thrusting a fist toward the sky. 

Four years later, Mr. Mandela would go on to win the country’s first democratic, multiracial elections. But the man who broke the color barrier at the world’s largest ultramarathon almost didn’t live to see that. On Easter weekend in 1991, Mr. Tshabalala was traveling to church when his minibus taxi flipped. Three passengers died, and Mr. Tshabalala went into a coma. 

When he woke up, he had to learn to do everything – including run – all over again. And though he returned to the Comrades the next year, his career as an elite runner was over. 

For the rest of his life, Mr. Tshabalala lived near Sasolburg, working as a cleaner at a rubber factory, raising his children, and training young runners from the area. 

He is survived by his wife Julia, seven of his eight children, and the race his victory helped to transform. 

Today, the Comrades attracts 15,000 to 20,000 runners annually. And in a sport known globally for its lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity, the Comrades has a mostly Black field, many from working-class backgrounds like Mr. Tshabalala’s. 

It became that because of the performances of a pioneering generation of Black runners in the 1980s, says Mr. Ngcobo, the Comrades chair. 

“Sam’s victory was the beginning of a new era.” 

Reuters

People in Beijing look at two protest banners off Sitong Bridge and smoke from a fire Oct. 13.

As a protest slogan, it’s hardly new. Yet in three of the world’s most oppressed societies – China, Iran, and Russia – you can now find protesters demanding “freedom,” not just personal liberty but a civic freedom that allows individual choice in shaping governance along shared values.

The most brazen example came Thursday on a Beijing bridge. Just days before the Chinese Communist Party was set to rubber-stamp another five-year term for autocrat Xi Jinping, a man unfurled two banners over a busy highway. The hand-written banners called for “dignity, not lies,” “elections, not a great leader,” “citizens, not slaves,” and of course “freedom.”

Mind you, this rare street protest in China came after police had arrested 1.4 million people across the country over months to ensure no embarrassing dissent for the party’s giant gathering. 

The protest evoked popular support on social media and a massive crackdown online by government censors. The Chinese people, political analyst Wu Qiang told The New York Times, are still not in an era where they “totally obey” Mr. Xi.

In Russia, the call for freedom started in February after the invasion of Ukraine. Protesters have demanded a right to freedom of assembly in order to protest the war – even to call it a war rather than the official “special military operation.” At least 17,000 Russians have been arrested for various sorts of protests, according to OVD-Info, an independent human rights media project.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of Russian men have protested the war by fleeing the country to avoid a harsh conscription drive. One man who fled to Kazakhstan explained why he supports freedom for Ukraine. “Russia and the Russian people need to realize that all people are equal ... that we have no choice but to live morally, without any kind of claims to an empire,” the unidentified man told Radio Free Europe.

Calls for equality and freedom often go hand in hand during protests, and that’s certainly the case in Iran over the past few weeks of mass demonstrations after the death of a young woman charged with improper head covering. 

Led by thousands of fearless women throwing off their hijab, the leaderless protests are focused on unequal laws about compulsory female dress. Yet they include calls for democracy to replace the current dictatorial rule by clerics. The shorthand slogan of the protests is Zan, zendegi, azadi (“Women, life, freedom”). The rights of women and their right to life, in other words, require the freedom to ensure such rights in free and fair elections.

As in China and Russia, the rulers in Iran claim the power to enforce what they see as right and good for society. Protesters in these countries say otherwise, starting with chants and banners about freedom – and then acting as best they can, even for minutes or hours amid bullets and arrests, with the freedom they claim for themselves.