The Morning: Chinese dissent

The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
To: news@emailtest.eu

2025-09-03 12:10

View in browser|nytimes.com

September 3, 2025

Good morning. Here’s the latest:

Google: A judge spared the company harsh penalties after it was found to have a monopoly in online search.

Deportations: A federal appeals court blocked President Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans.
Boat attack: The U.S. bombed a vessel in the Caribbean that officials said was transporting drugs and gang members.
Los Angeles: A federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of troops to the city was illegal.

More news is below. But first, we have an update on President Trump’s health and a unique protest in China.

Is Trump OK?

The side of President Trump's face is seen from a car window. He's wearing a hat and using his phone.

President Trump on Sunday. Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Rumors of President Trump’s death swirled on social media over the weekend. He hadn’t been seen in public for a few days, and some viral photographs showed bruises on his hands. Katie Rogers, a White House correspondent, explains what happened:

Trump is definitely alive. He appeared yesterday in the Oval Office, where he took questions from reporters and announced plans to move the U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama.
Talk of his untimely demise peaked Saturday and then dipped Sunday, when he was spotted golfing in Virginia. “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE,” he wrote on Truth Social that day.
Trump, 79, was recently diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition that can cause swelling and pain. He also takes aspirin to reduce the risk of cardiac problems; White House officials blamed it for the mysterious bruising. Trump’s doctor wrote in July that he remained in excellent health. “For years, justifiable concerns and questions about Mr. Trump’s health have often been met with minimal explanation or obfuscation from the people around him,” Katie writes. “Mr. Trump’s physicians have not taken questions from reporters in years.”

There’s no reason to believe something sinister is happening. But many voters had the impression that President Biden and his allies hid his age-related decline, so the push for transparency now is not entirely mysterious.

A short video showing Chinese writing projected onto the side of a tall building.

Act of defiance

By Li Yuan

I write about Chinese society.

China has spent decades stamping out dissent, censoring the corners of the web where it lives and punishing the people who utter it. But last week, an activist in a city of 30 million people showed how hard it can be to silence all the haters. He didn’t just stage a protest; he also turned the tools of surveillance on the state. It was proof that defiance still existed, even in one of the world’s most surveilled places.

At 10 p.m. on Friday, a large projection on a building in Chongqing lit up the night with slogans calling for the end of Communist Party rule. “Only without the Communist Party can there be a new China,” read one. Another declared: “No more lies, we want the truth. No more slavery, we want freedom.”

The projection came from a nearby hotel. But when the police arrived 50 minutes later to shut it down, the activist was gone, and he’d left cameras behind. He soon released footage of officers fiddling with the projector. A handwritten letter addressed to the police was on the coffee table. “Even if you are a beneficiary of the system today, one day you will inevitably become a victim on this land,” said the letter, which the activist also circulated online.

A short video showing Chinese police officers conducting an investigation in an interior setting.

The next day, the man who staged the protest, Qi Hong, published another image from surveillance footage showing police officers questioning his frail, hunched mother in front of her village home.

The act was both a protest and a performance, documented in real time. The visuals, when seen together, seemed to mock the Communist Party security apparatus, which had poured enormous resources into ensuring stability ahead of a military parade today.

By the time the police arrived, Qi had already left China nine days earlier with his wife and daughters. He had turned on the projection and recorded the police’s response remotely from Britain.

Technology has strengthened the Chinese government’s ability to control its people. Qi illustrated how the same tools can enable resistance. “My only intention was to express myself,” he told me in his first media interview. “The party installs surveillance cameras to watch us. I thought I could use the same method to watch them.”

Read about how Chinese people online viewed Qi’s act of defiance.

Related: Beijing hosted a military parade today, with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un in attendance. It was China’s most ambitious display of power in years.

THE LATEST NEWS

Google Ruling

A judge ordered Google to hand over its search results and some of its data to rival companies to curb its dominance of the online search market.
The judge did not force Google to sell its Chrome web browser, which the government had argued was necessary to remedy Google’s monopoly.
Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, jumped more than 8 percent in after-hours trading. Here’s what the ruling means for the company.

Trump’s Deployments

An officer close-up in shadow, out of focus, with a line of people in camouflage carrying riot shields that read “California National Guard” in the background.

Members of the California National Guard in Los Angeles in June. Philip Cheung for The New York Times

In ruling Trump’s Los Angeles deployment illegal, a federal judge accused Trump of turning Marines and National Guard soldiers into a “national police force.”
Asked about his proposal to send troops to Chicago next, Trump said, “We’re going in.” Illinois officials said they were ready to fight the administration in court.
The Los Angeles ruling complicates Trump’s plans to send troops into Chicago and other U.S. cities, Charlie Savage explains.

More on the Courts

A federal appeals court blocked President Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, rejecting the administration’s argument that they were part of an “invasion.”
Lower-court judges aren’t sure how to handle the Supreme Court’s emergency orders. A judge apologized after failing to apply one such order to a new case.

Politics

Representative Nancy Mace walks down an ornate hallway holding a hand to her face as if to wipe away tears.

Representative Nancy Mace was visibly shaken after a meeting with Epstein victims. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A House committee released more than 33,000 pages of records that the Justice Department turned over last month in connection with Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump blamed A.I. for a widely shared video of a trash bag being thrown from a White House window — though officials had already confirmed the video was real.
Trump demanded proof that Covid vaccines work. That proof is easy to find.

Climate

The Amazon rainforest has been getting drier. That change is directly linked to deforestation, a new study finds.
Scientists say a report from the Trump administration that downplays the threat of climate change is filled with errors and cherry-picked data.

Natural Disasters

Hundreds of Sudanese villagers were killed by a landslide in Darfur, a region already stricken by famine and war.
An earthquake in Afghanistan killed 1,400 people on Sunday. The Times interviewed villagers on the ground.

International

A docked military boat in the water, behind a white building with a brown roof.

A U.S. Navy warship in Panama. Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The strike in the Caribbean, which Trump said killed 11 people, raises tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela. Trump posted video of the attack on social media.
Just a day before the strike, Venezuela’s president warned that he would respond to any U.S. military action with an “armed fight.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet today with Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, to discuss drug cartels. Her country’s domestic politics will require her to tread lightly.
Israel’s leaders are divided over how to end the war in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists on a comprehensive deal, but some high-power opponents want a temporary truce first.
French judges issued an arrest warrant for Bashar al-Assad, the ousted Syrian ruler, for killing and wounding journalists in 2012.
The Times reviewed testimony and documents to piece together how Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, tried to stay in power after losing the 2022 election.

OPINIONS

Climate change is altering the physical world, worsening already-tense border conflicts. But it’s also a reason to set those conflicts aside, Peter Schwartzstein writes.

As his immigration policies reduce the American work force, Trump should invest in high-skilled labor so that manufacturers can do more with fewer workers, Oren Cass writes.

Here is a column by Bret Stephens on Europe’s rightward shift.

Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience.

Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.

MORNING READS

A photo of an orange thermometer that reads 19.8 degrees Celsius and a short video of a woman in sunglasses running.

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Extreme heat: Our reporter visited a lab that recreated hot days to understand how heat affects the human body.

Career change: Meet the millionaire who left Wall Street to become a paramedic.

Brew at home: Instant coffee has undergone a transformation. It’s actually good now.

Your pick: The most-clicked article in yesterday’s newsletter was Wirecutter’s guide to the best travel backpacks.

Press Corps encyclopedia: Mark Knoller, a White House correspondent for CBS News, died at 73. He was known for his voluminous records of presidential minutiae, from vacation days to teleprompter use, which he shared freely with other reporters.

SPORTS

Online rage: Internet vigilantes went after a C.E.O. who snatched a souvenir hat from a young fan at the U.S. Open. They also went after an unrelated business owner in Poland.

U.S. Open: Novak Djokovic beat Taylor Fritz to advance to the semifinals. There, Carlos Alcaraz awaits him.

VOGUE’S NEW EDITOR

Chloe Malle poses in a powder-blue wraparound dress, with her arms behind her back.

Chloe Malle’s official title is head of editorial content. Amir Hamja for The New York Times

For the first time in 37 years, there is a new editor of American Vogue: Chloe Malle, the 39-year-old editor of the magazine’s website and a host of its podcast. Malle succeeds Anna Wintour, a titan in fashion, who will continue to oversee all 28 international editions of Vogue.

“Placing my own stamp on this is going to be the most important part of this being a success,” Malle told The Times. “There has to be a noticeable shift that makes this mine.”

But in today’s media landscape, our fashion critic writes, Vogue may need a new identity.