Search on the Chinese food-delivery app Meituan for ejiao, and all sorts of goodies pop up. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor’s court, valued as a traditional remedy taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep, and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 vials; eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts, and black sesame at $7 for a tin of 30; or snack on ejiao-coated dates at just under a dollar a packet.

There’s just one problem: The collagenous substance is extracted from donkey hides. China’s domestic donkey population has plunged precipitously, and now the nation’s mass taste is stripping African farms of one of their most essential and valuable assets. In countries as far-flung as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Botswana, animals that are the mainstays of many small farms—where donkeys are used for plowing, hauling crops to market, and many other purposes—are instead being slaughtered for the cash value of their skins.

The drain has become so damaging to Africa’s rural economy that in February the 55-member African Union approved a continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their skins at its heads-of-state summit. Whether the governments of Africa can implement such a ban remains to be seen. If they do, they could seriously pinch the Chinese ejiao industry.

China’s rulers have done nothing to address the issue. On the surface, their inaction is bewildering. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has expended huge sums of political and financial capital on wooing the countries of the developing world, especially in Africa. Given that context, stepping in to regulate the ejiao trade and help preserve the African donkey would seem an easy, low-cost way of proving China’s willingness to be a constructive partner.

[Read: China’s latest food scandal: fox-tainted donkey meat]

“Leadership comes with responsibility,” Oscar Meywa Otele, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, told me. African countries would like to see China play “a more meaningful and acceptable role,” but the donkey issue is a big enough problem that it “may undermine [China’s] ambitions to be the leader of the Global South.”

Xi’s grand goals can conflict with China’s short-term economic and political interests. When this occurs, it opens a window onto Beijing’s true attitude toward its putative partners and raises doubts about China’s readiness to assume that leadership. That matters in Washington. As the developing world becomes a battleground between the United States and China, with both eager to gain adherents to their competing visions for a reformed world order, the contradictions of Xi’s approach could damage his efforts to portray Beijing as more sympathetic to the interests and needs of poor countries. The humble donkey has thus taken on geopolitical significance.

China’s consumption of ejiao has increased with the country’s wealth. Back in 1990, ejiao makers in China required some 200,000 donkey hides annually. Now they are believed to consume about 4 to 6 million skins a year. That amounts to approximately 10 percent of the world’s estimated donkey population of 53 million—a rate of attrition that is clearly unsustainable. The demand from ejiao producers outstripped domestic supplies years ago and led to a brisk import business.

Exactly how many hides come from Africa is unclear, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the world’s donkeys, so it’s safe to assume that African exports account for a large share. Because donkeys breed slowly—a jennet typically produces a foal only every other year—the drain is rapidly depleting Africa’s herd. One study suggests that South Africa’s donkey population declined from 210,000 animals in 1996 to 146,000 in 2019. On current trend, the donkey could completely vanish from the continent over the next two decades. In addition, the rising value of pelts has encouraged the illicit slaughter of donkeys, the bypassing of regulatory controls, and the widespread theft of donkeys from poor farmers.

Beijing could do much to alleviate the problem. Better regulating the donkey-skin trade on its end could assist African governments in monitoring and controlling exports, as well as ensure a more sustainable supply to China’s ejiao producers. Why Beijing has not bothered to react is a matter of speculation. One factor could be that the government likes to promote traditional medicine, at home and abroad, as a way of highlighting China’s ancient science and civilization; in that respect, it may see any restraint on the industry as counter to the national interest. Or the welfare of donkeys and the plight of African farmers may simply be below Beijing’s attention threshold, compared with its more pressing geopolitical concerns.

[Read: A donkey ambulance for women in labor in Afghanistan]

China’s abusive donkey trade is part of a wider pattern of Chinese exploitation of the global South’s resources. Chinese fleets have long been accused of aggressive overfishing, from the West African coast to the South Pacific. In the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters, Chinese vessels block fishermen from neighboring countries from traditional fishing grounds, which is a significant point of contention among governments of the region.

China’s commercial interests are also at odds with Beijing’s effort to promote itself as a champion of the world’s poorest nations. A lending binge by state banks, much of it to support Xi’s global infrastructure-building scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative, has been touted as a sustainable-development program and proof of China’s superiority as an economic partner. But these loans, which turned China into the world’s largest official creditor to the developing world, have contributed to a debt crisis in the global South as some low-income countries have become overburdened and unable to make repayments.

Yet Beijing has shown its debtors little sympathy, and the state banks have been squeezing poor countries hard. They have resisted writing down some of the loan principal—a common practice in debt restructurings that is aimed at speeding a return to solvency—and typically insist on cutting deals in secret to beat other creditors to what’s left in the depleted coffers of debtor countries. When, for instance, Angola had to restructure a $15 billion loan from China in 2020, the state-owned China Development Bank first began paying itself interest from a mandated escrow account. Then, anticipating the exhaustion of that source, the bank demanded that the cash-poor government replenish it.

Developing countries “are getting to know China in a different role,” Bradley Parks, the executive director of the research lab AidData at William & Mary, told me. Less for its largesse, and more “as the world’s largest debt collector.” And he added: “Debt collectors don’t win a lot of popularity contests.”

At the same time, new lending from Beijing has all but dried up over the past five years. As a result, the flow of funds that once went from China to the global South has reversed. A 2023 study of China’s lending program published by the American Economic Association revealed that developing countries are now paying more to Chinese banks to service their debts than they are receiving in new loans.

[Read: The rich men who drink rhino horns]

Chinese leaders’ approach to developing-world debt “is in direct tension with their desire to enjoy influence with the general public and with governing elites within the developing world,” Parks said. Throughout this push for influence, Chinese leaders have been at pains to portray themselves as selfless partners, interested in the global good, in contrast with the West. “In promoting its own development process, China always insists on mutual support with the countries of the South, complementing each other’s strengths, and jointly building a modernized Global South,” Liu Jianchao, the influential head of the Communist Party’s international department, recently reiterated in a top ideological journal.

Yet the reality is that China’s ascent presents as many risks as benefits to emerging economies. Xi still appears to believe that he can lead the rising voices of the global South in a struggle against their former colonial masters in the West. But China’s actual policies toward the developing world are beginning to echo that old colonialism: the exploitation of resources to benefit the center, the metropole’s self-perception that its superior civilization confers special rights, the use of capital to extract more wealth from the less fortunate.

“It’s African governments that need to be much more proactive. You can’t afford to let China dictate to you,” Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South Africa–based think tank, told me. “That’s been the big challenge, the difficulty, in this relationship.”

The African Union donkey ban is a sign that the continent’s leaders are deciding to act in that more proactive way. Implicit in the ban is a strong message that China can’t have all it wants, on its own terms, from the global South. If the African Union succeeds in shutting down the trade in donkey hides to China, Beijing will no longer be able to pretend that its actions have no detrimental effect on African countries or its reputation on the continent. The ejiao industry is already damaging China-Africa relations, Lauren Johnston, a China expert at the University of Sydney, told me. “It’s making people hate China.”

In May 1995, Pat Buchanan appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. “We have an illegal invasion of this country,” Buchanan warned. To resist it, he called for a “Buchanan Fence” patrolled by the military along the southern border, a five-year moratorium on legal immigration, and a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

The platform was designed to stave off something Buchanan had long dreaded: “If present trends hold,” he noted a few years earlier, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan was the first major politician to transform white anxiety about that prospect—which the Census Bureau first predicted in 1990—into an organizing principle for the conservative movement. (Never mind that the idea of a majority-minority tipping point is contested by social scientists, who argue that ever-changing norms about racial self-identification are blurring the numbers.) “The question we Americans need to address, before it is answered for all of us, is: Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country?” he wrote in 1990.

This article has been adapted from Berman’s new book.

Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition.

“People are just alarmed by what they see in the changes in the demographics in our country,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Trump surrogate, said in Iowa this year. A few weeks earlier, Trump accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

[From the October 2022 issue: The long unraveling of the Republican Party]

For Buchanan and Trump, immigration isn’t just about America’s ethnic identity. It’s also about electoral power. Even as the GOP slowly diversifies, white Americans continue to make up a disproportionate share of its base, leading many conservatives to view nonwhite immigration as an existential threat. “Either the Republican Party puts an end to mass immigration,” Buchanan wrote in 2011, “or mass immigration will put an end to the Republican Party.”

Buchanan may have been the first prominent politician to focus on the majority-minority tipping point, but the American right’s preoccupation with declining white power isn’t new; it shaped the right’s defense of slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. By the time Buchanan ran for president, it wasn’t new for him either. He’d begun politicizing white resentment at the start of his career, creating a blueprint that would prove hugely influential for the GOP.

As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Buchanan helped conceive of the “southern strategy” that Republicans used to appeal to white voters who were alienated by the civil-rights movement. Buchanan counseled Nixon to ignore “liberal issues” like housing, education, and unemployment. “The second era of Reconstruction is over,” he wrote to the president in 1970. “The ship of integration is going down.”

When he ran for president in the 1990s, Buchanan was still criticizing the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, trying to court revanchist white voters, such as supporters of the Klansman turned presidential candidate David Duke. He described the Voting Rights Act as “regional discrimination against the South” and visited Confederate monuments while campaigning in states such as Georgia and Mississippi. “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans?” he asked. “Is it not time to take America back?”

Buchanan first ran for president in 1992 under the slogan “Make America First Again,” a riff on Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.” He mounted a strong challenge to incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, winning more than a third of the GOP electorate. After capturing nearly 3 million votes that year, Buchanan received a coveted keynote spot at the GOP convention, where he spoke apocalyptically about “a cultural war … for the soul of America.”

Although Buchanan didn’t win a single state, Republicans adopted some of his positions on immigration as the official party platform, pledging to “equip the Border Patrol with the tools, technologies and structures necessary to secure the border.” (Buchanan’s sister and campaign manager, Bay Buchanan, insisted that “structures” meant walls; “they don’t build lighthouses on the border,” she said.)

Four years later, Buchanan ran again and won the New Hampshire primary. During the campaign, he portrayed his effort to preserve Judeo-Christian values and white power in the face of a massive demographic shift as part of America’s oldest struggle, calling his followers “the true sons and daughters of the Founding Fathers.”

After he lost the nomination, Buchanan was sidelined by the GOP establishment. Instead of getting a prime-time slot at the convention, he was blocked from speaking entirely. Buchanan became disillusioned and left the GOP for Ross Perot’s Reform Party, where he briefly squared off against Trump in the 2000 primary. “Look, he’s a Hitler lover,” Trump said of Buchanan on Meet the Press in 1999. “I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the Blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.”

Buchanan won the Reform nomination but received fewer than half a million votes in the general election. He spent the 2000s in the political wilderness, watching as the country’s white population grew by just 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, and the Hispanic and Asian populations by 43 percent. Every few years he published screeds with titles like The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “The people who put the GOP in power are not growing in numbers nearly as rapidly as immigrants and people of color who want them out of power,” he wrote in 2006. “The fading away of America’s white majority entails an existential crisis for the GOP.”

These writings, mostly ignored at the time, appeared prophetic after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when Republicans fretted over the diverse coalition assembled by the first Black president. As Buchanan became more marginalized, his ideas paradoxically found greater favor within the GOP. His concerns about white displacement, which Republican leaders had mostly tried to downplay in the 1990s and 2000s, were now being pushed into the mainstream of the party, with GOP activists questioning Obama’s claim to the presidency. “For the first time in our lifetimes, outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise,” Buchanan observed in 2010. He seemed emboldened, writing the following year that “equal justice for the emerging white minority” was more important than extending rights to formerly marginalized communities.

When the RNC conducted its high-profile “autopsy” after Obama’s reelection in 2012 and urged congressional Republicans to pass immigration reform to improve the party’s standing with minority voters, Buchanan told the GOP to focus instead on courting white voters who hadn’t gone to the polls. At the start of Obama’s second term, when the Senate took up immigration reform, Buchanan warned that it would “create millions of new citizens who will vote to bury the Party of Ronald Reagan forever.”

[Ronald Brownstein: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’]

These views clearly influenced Trump and his advisers. In August 2014, the GOP consultant Kellyanne Conway released polling showing that white voters who were unhappy about demographic change would turn out in higher numbers if a candidate emphasized “stricter enforcement of current immigration laws” and demanded that “illegal immigrants … return to their home countries.” While Trump prepared to launch a seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, his chief strategist Steve Bannon called the missing-white-voter theory and Conway’s polling on immigration “the intellectual infrastructure” of Trump’s campaign.

If Buchanan helps explain the start of Trump’s presidency, he also helps explain its culmination on January 6. One year after the insurrection, the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats released a study of the more than 700 people charged with breaching the Capitol. It had a surprising conclusion. Unlike many Republicans, the insurrectionists didn’t come from the country’s reddest or most rural counties. Instead, they were more likely to reside in counties whose white populations had experienced significant declines, such as Harris County, Texas, a majority-minority area that includes Houston. The study described a political movement “partially driven by racial cleavages and white discontent with diversifying communities.”

In a larger national poll, the Chicago Project found that 8 percent of the public believed both that Joe Biden’s presidency was “illegitimate” and that force was “justified” to return Trump to power. Of these 21 million Americans, three-quarters agreed that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate … with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” Fears of a “Great Replacement” were the “most important driver of [the] insurrectionist movement,” the survey concluded.

The fact that Trump has found so much more political success than Buchanan did 30 years ago in exploiting white anxiety suggests that it will worsen as the supposed majority-minority tipping point approaches. That’s coming sooner than Buchanan once feared; white Americans, census data now suggest, will technically be a minority by 2045. Buchanan may have failed to hold back demographic change, but the backlash he sparked is only getting stronger.

This article has been adapted from Ari Berman’s new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—And the Fight to Resist It.

Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the teeth—one, two, three, four, five, at least. They seemed much like the ones he stares at all day at work.

The jawbone appeared at once very humanlike and very old, and the dentist took his suspicions to Reddit. Could it be that his parents’ floor tile contains a rare human fossil? Quite possibly. It’s “clearly hominin,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who also blogged about the discovery, told me in an email. (Hominin refers to a group including modern humans, archaic humans such as Neanderthals, and all of their ancestors.) It is too soon to say exactly how old the jawbone is or exactly which hominin it belonged to, but signs point to something—or someone—far older than modern humans. “We can see that it is thick and with large teeth,” Amélie Vialet, a paleoanthropologist at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, wrote in an excited email to me about the jawbone. “That’s archaic!”

An international team of researchers, including Vialet, is now in contact with the dentist to study the floor tile. (I’m not naming him for privacy reasons.) This thin slice of jawbone has a story to tell—about a life lived long ago, in a world very different from ours. It is in fragments of hominin bone like this one that we begin to understand our past as humans.

How could a hominin bone have ended up in someone’s tiled floor in the first place? Travertine, the type of rock from which this tile was cut, is a popular building material used perhaps most famously by ancient Romans to construct the Colosseum. Today, a good deal of the world’s travertine—including the floor tile with the jawbone, according to the dentist—is quarried in Turkey, from a region where the stone famously forms natural thermal pools that cascade like jewels down the hillside. Travertine tends to be found near hot springs; when mineral-rich water gurgles to the surface, it leaves a thin shell over everything that it touches. In time, the layers accrue into thick, opaque travertine rock. If in the middle of this process a leaf falls in or an animal dies nearby, it too will become entombed in the rock. “Fossils are relatively common in travertine,” says Andrew Leier, a geologist at the University of South Carolina.

Hominin fossils, specifically, are rare, but at least one has been found in Turkish travertine before. In 2002, a Turkish geologist named M. Cihat Alçiçek discovered a slice of human-looking skull sitting on a shelf in a tile factory. He brought the 35-millimeter-thick fragment to John Kappelman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and later also to Vialet in Paris. The skull turned out to belong to Homo erectus, an archaic human species that walked the Earth more than 1 million years ago, long before modern humans. Vialet thinks the newly discovered jawbone could be just as old.

Vialet and her collaborators are now hoping to extract the tile, ideally intact, from the hallway where it’s been cemented in place. (The dentist is soliciting suggestions on Reddit for how to do so without also destroying his parents’ floor.) Then, chemical signatures in the rock can be used to date the fossil. Vialet also hopes to generate a 3-D model of the jawbone with micro-CT scanning, tracing the curve of the mandible and the roots of the teeth to find anatomical clues about its origin.

The teeth could prove to be the real gold mine. Their hard enamel likely contains carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotopes whose presence could hint at what the hominin once ate. Shooting high-energy X-rays at the teeth can also reveal how quickly they grew, which is useful because different hominins developed at different rates, Kappelman told me in an email. The spongy insides of teeth also tend to be good sources of ancient DNA. (Given the high temperature of the hot springs where travertine deposits form, Kappelman thinks DNA probably wasn’t well preserved, but extracting it is still worth a try.) Bit by bit, researchers will begin to piece together a portrait of the hominin, who died by a hot spring so many eons ago only to be unearthed and then cut into floor tile for someone’s home.

Paleotonologists and quarries, as Hawks wrote in his blog post, exist in an “uneasy symbiosis.” The industrial extraction process unearths far more rock than scientists could ever hope to, but it leaves science at the whim of commercial practice. Alçiçek, the Turkish geologist who spotted the skull in the early 2000s, says far fewer fossils are being found in travertine quarries these days because the technology has changed. Twenty years ago, companies were able to extract only the “uppermost part of the travertine body, which is rich in fossils,” he wrote in an email, but now they can dig deeper, into layers devoid of fossils. Today, he says, discovering a fossil in the travertine quarries is rare.

Industrial quarrying can also damage the fossils it does uncover. That Homo erectus skull, for example, was already chopped up by the time Alçiçek saw it, and the rest has never been found. In 2007, back when the skull discovery was first announced, his collaborator Kappelman mused in a draft of a press release about where other pieces might have ended up. “Turkish travertine is sold all around the world today,” Kappelman said back then. “Some lucky shopper at Home Depot might just be surprised to find a slice of Homo erectus entombed in her kitchen countertop.”

To this day, Kappelman told me, he still goes straight to the travertine-tile section whenever he shops at Home Depot. The rest of this jawbone has to be somewhere.