Beijing's increasing influence has led to speculation that Hong Kong's days of an independent football scene are numbered.

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.”

Analysts see the parliamentary election victory as support for closer ties with Beijing.

The top three finishers of the Beijing half marathon are stripped of their medals after an investigation into the controversial result.

Migrants are caught in China's manufacturing battles with the West, as Beijing tries to save its economy.

There are signs that Beijing may be getting cold feet about its deepening entanglement.

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”

Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.

What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.

The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.

[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]

Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.

“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.

In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.

Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”

“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]

“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)

At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.

Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.

But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.

Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]

Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.

The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.

Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.

The impoverished Solomon Islands is holding its first election since the country's pivot to Beijing.

The three-day visit of Germany's leader to China comes after Beijing slammed the EU as “reckless” following investigations into whether state subsidies are giving Chinese companies an unfair advantage.

Israel stopped an Iranian drone and missile barrage last night, with help from the United States Navy, Britain’s Royal Air Force, and Israel’s Arab allies.

Israel’s Arab allies is a strange phrase to write in the midst of the war in Gaza, but it’s important to understand. The Jordanian air force shot down many of the Iranian drones, Reuters reported—meaning Arabs flew and fought to protect Israel. The Economist speculated that Saudi Arabia may have provided surveillance and refueling assistance to the Jordanian planes. Alliances are a powerful asset. They also come with a price, which is that allies’ views need to be consulted. Those allies, especially the United States, are saying: Pause here. That’s advice Israel may not like but would be wise to ponder.

Early in April, Israel scored a big win against Iran. It struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed important figures in the Iranian terror system. Iran acknowledged the death of two top commanders and five other senior officers.

Last night, Iran struck back with a lot of noise and commotion but impressively little result.

Iran attacked Israel directly from its own national territory—a risky escalation from Iran’s past practice of striking by proxy. That escalation should not get a pass because Israeli defensive technology and the solidarity of the international community together outgunned the Iranian missiles. Iran struck Israel to maim and kill and terrorize. Those malign intentions mostly failed, but not because Iran was merciful or restrained—only because of the limits of Iranian power. Israel has an open account with Iran. But that account does not need to be settled immediately.

Every item in the ledger of Iran’s offenses against peace should be carefully preserved for future repayment: the missile attacks on Red Sea shipping by Iran’s proxies in Yemen; the Hezbollah missiles against Israel’s north; and the Iranian role in the Hamas massacre of October 7. But the repayment can wait until the right time and then be settled in the right way.

Iran put on a big show for the world. Like the sword-waving warrior in the first Indiana Jones movie, Iran made a spectacle of its weapons. Indiana Jones did not perform an equal show. He simply shot the swordsman. In the same way, Israel does not need to meet like with like. It needs only to inflict an appropriate cost that Iran will feel. The less fuss, the better. Maintaining Israel’s network of regional and international partnerships matters as much for Israel’s security as a conspicuous retaliation.

The action that most urgently needs to follow this Iranian attack is not action in the Middle East. It is action in Washington. The drones fired at Israel are the same drones terrorizing Ukraine: an Iranian design originally exported to Russia, now manufactured in Russia. Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian aggression has been sabotaged by Trump-loyal Republicans in Congress.

In 2022, Congress approved four aid packages to Ukraine totaling about $75 billion. Republicans took control of the House in January 2023. Since then, Congress has refused any further aid to Ukraine. President Joe Biden asked for a fifth package in August 2023. No action. Biden asked again in October 2023. Again, nothing. Over the winter, Ukrainian forces ran short of ammunition and other military supplies. Ukraine’s successes in 2023 are fading in 2024 because congressional Republicans are blockading Ukraine into defeat.

Anti-Ukraine Republicans offer many excuses for their refusal to assist a friendly democracy under attack. One by one, each of those excuses has been discredited. Aiding Ukraine did not provoke nuclear war with Russia. The European allies are not freeloading—in fact they have provided more than twice as much as the United States. Aid to Ukraine does not distract the United States from commitments in Asia: This past week, the prime minister of Japan addressed a joint session of Congress to insist that the defense of Asia begins in Ukraine, saying, “Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow.”

When each story collapses, Trump Republicans replace it with a fourth or sixth or eighth. The rationalizations shift and twist. The anti-Ukraine animus remains fixed.

Pretty obviously, some deeper motive is at work.

Iran’s attack on Israel has, at least temporarily, complicated the political calculus for Republicans in Congress. Republicans want to sound strong, to criticize President Biden as weak. But when Trump Republicans thwarted aid to Ukraine, they also stalled Biden’s request to help Israel bear the immense costs of its self-defensive war after the Hamas terror attack. Last night’s defense will be expensive: Hundreds of interceptors must now be replaced; fighter-jet operations burned fuel and weapons.

Because of Donald Trump, Republicans are now the party of foreign-policy weakness, passivity, and surrender—and not only to Russia. Trump accepted an invitation from the billionaire donor Jeff Yass, who holds a large stake in ByteDance, and then flip-flopped on TikTok, one of the firms in which Yass holds an interest. The Republican refusal to aid Ukraine has also denied Israel money to replenish its Iron Dome defenses. Biden’s October 2023 request included funds to add 100 new anti-missile launchers to reinforce or replace the existing 30 to 40. Israel is still waiting for that assistance. Ukraine is waiting—and bleeding. The border is waiting, too, because Trump Republicans first demanded a border deal as the price of Ukraine aid—then rejected the toughest deal in a generation because they feared that Biden might get credit for it.

After months of nonaction, House Republicans have now proposed to schedule next week a vote on aid to Israel—separate from the requests for Ukraine aid and border security that President Biden combined in his October 2023 request. A vote on only the Israel portion of Biden’s defense program does too little of the job of defending America’s allies and honoring America’s promises.

So far, the Biden administration has not made much of an issue of Republican weakness. Biden’s superpower is his ability to work with unlikely people. His administration continues to hope that Speaker Mike Johnson will someday allow a vote on Ukraine aid.

After the Iran attack, now is the time for Biden to make Trump’s foreign-policy weakness painful and personal to Trump’s party. Say: “Trump’s not even for ‘America Second,’ never mind ‘America First.’”

In June 1994, President Bill Clinton traveled to Normandy to commemorate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Imagining a more triumphant ceremony would be hard. Leaders of the former Allies attended to honor the day. Yet the president also paid tribute to former adversaries, and above all to the newly reunified Germany. “Liberated by our victory,” he said, the former Axis states now ranked with “the staunchest defenders of freedom.” Clinton offered words of praise, too, for a long-estranged ally: Russia, the president said, had been “reborn in freedom.”

Three decades after Clinton’s 1994 speech, a dictatorship is again waging a war of atrocity in Europe. And although a long queue of Republicans will be eager to travel to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, their voting record is on the other side of the great issues at stake, then and now.

On social media, on cable news, in speeches to security conferences, Republicans are pretending that they still live in the bygone world in which they were the party of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and John McCain. When it comes time to schedule and cast votes, however, they reveal the new reality in which they are the party of thugs, dictators, and aggressors from Tehran to Beijing to Moscow to Palm Beach.

Ukraine is one casualty. Israel could be the next. President Biden should make it clear, make it hurt, and make it change.