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LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — There was a mass grave that held 300 people, and I was standing at its edge. The chalky body bags were piled up in the pit, exposed. One moment before, I was a different person, someone who never knew how wind smelled after it passed over the dead on a pleasant summer afternoon.

In mid-June, those corpses were far from a complete count of the civilians killed by shelling in the area around the industrial city of Lysychansk over the previous two months. They were only “the ones who did not have anyone to bury them in a garden or a backyard,” a soldier said casually.

He lit a cigarette while we looked at the grave.

The smoke obscured the smell.

It was rare to get such a moment to slow down, observe and reflect while reporting from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. But that day, the Ukrainian soldiers were pleased after delivering packets of food and other goods to local civilians, so they offered to take reporters from The New York Times to another site that they said we should see: the mass grave.

After leaving the site, I naïvely thought the palpable presence of death in the air could not follow me home — over all of the roads and checkpoints separating the graves in the Donbas — to my loved ones in the western part of Ukraine.

I was wrong.

I had returned to Kyiv, the capital, to the small apartment I had been renting, and was washing the smoke and dust of the front lines off my clothes when my best friend, Yulia, texted: She had lost her cousin, a soldier, fighting in the east.

I would soon have to stand over another grave.

It was an experience familiar to many Ukrainians. Five months after the full-scale Russian invasion began, the wars’ front lines mean little. Missile strikes and the news of death and casualties have blackened nearly every part of the country like poison.

Yulia’s cousin Serhiy was serving in an air mobile battalion around the city of Izium in the east. A few hours before he died, he sent his last message to his mother, Halyna: an emoji of a flower bouquet. Then he drove to the fight on the front line, where a Russian machine gun found him.

In Donbas, these tragedies are a backdrop to everyday existence, piling up in numbers that seem inconceivable even as they completely surround you, an inescapable reality that feels like the very air in your lungs.

There is no catharsis for the people living in the frontline regions. Instead, they seem overwhelmed by the vastness of what is going on around them — as if it’s an existential threat too big for them to do anything about. So they wait numbly for what often seems the inevitable outcome, hypnotized by indecision, all while often forgetting they are directly in harm’s way.

It felt different in the west, away from the front. In the Donbas, almost every sudden odd noise was exactly what you suspected it to be: something lethal flying nearby, seeking out the living.

In contrast, Kyiv was almost peaceful. With running water, gas, electricity and internet, it was far from the medieval conditions of a destroyed Lysychansk. People were playing Frisbee and walking dogs in the parks, devoid of the bodily stiffness and sense of dread that accompanies the threat of sudden death.

The chain of midsummer missile strikes on cities far from the fighting in the east and south had only just started, turning the daily news of killed civilians into a nightmare: unsuspecting people — children among them — blasted apart or burned alive inside malls and medical centers in broad daylight. It left tight knots in our stomachs, but they hadn’t transformed yet into something almost genetic, a terror that would be passed on to the offspring by the survivors of this war.

Another nightmare, a private one, was contained in Serhiy’s coffin, closed to spare the family the sight of his wounds. It heralded the war’s arrival in Lishchn, a postage stamp of a village in northwest Ukraine where Yulia’s family came from. There was no thud of artillery or shriek from a missile, just the quiet hum of a funeral procession.

Because of soldiers like Serhiy fighting on the front line, the village residents still had their present and future, distorted by war, but protected. That’s why, on that Saturday morning, hundreds of them came to Serhiy’s parents’ yard to share the weight of their grief and take a long farewell walk with the family.

As the priest read prayers to the crowd, a flock of swallows maneuvered high above us — a set of peaceful black spots crossing the blue sky. One of them flew down and sat on a wire just above Serhiy’s mother, who was wailing by the coffin, placed on a pair of kitchen stools outside the house.

I’ve watched these ceremonies before on reporting duty, but from the emotionally safe distance of an outsider. But that day, there was Yulia, trembling in the wind. So I put my arm around my best friend, as close to a person’s raw pain as ever before.

Hours later, when the prayers ended, Halyna could not cry anymore. She just spoke quietly to her son, the way she used to over 30 years ago, when he was a newborn, his face in the cradle as tiny as the face in the funeral photograph of the smiling uniformed man holding a rocket launcher.

Finally, we made the long walk to take Serhiy from the family’s yard to his grave.

Hundreds of people walked with Serhiy’s parents through his native village. There was a shop where he might have bought his first cigarettes, and a lake where he probably swam after ditching school with his friends.

Experiences from Serhiy’s life seemed to hide in every corner of their village. It made the walk excruciatingly long.

My steps that day fell in concert with the pain of one family — but just one. There are so many more in this war, which seems far from over.

It was hard to keep my thoughts from drifting back over the wheat fields of Donbas, to that yawning mass grave in Lysychansk.

There was no one present to mourn them there. After the Russians took over the city during the last days of June, the 300 body bags with name tags attached by Ukrainian soldiers were probably joined by many more, unnamed. But I figured that someone somewhere was quietly mourning each of them.

Now, as I’m writing this, others are walking those same tracks of remembrance and loss throughout Ukraine — over city alleys and wheat fields, over rubble and broken glass, through eastern steppes, western forests, liberated villages, trenches and bleeding cities at the edge of the front line.

Ahead, there will be a sunny afternoon for some of us to stop, take the hand of someone we love and let go of everything and everyone we lost to the war.

But how long is the walk to get there?

Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain is afraid to step outside his home in Albuquerque to water his plants. Or retrieve books from his car. Or even venture out onto his balcony.

“My kids won’t let me go outside of my apartment,” said Mr. Hussain, 41, whose younger brother Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, was fatally shot a week ago Monday just a few blocks away. He was one of four Muslim men who were killed recently in the city — three in the past two weeks — and authorities believe the deaths are connected and meant to target the Muslim community.

The latest victim, a Muslim man in his mid-20s from South Asia whose name has not been released by the police, was killed on Friday just before midnight. Another man, Aftab Hussein, 41, was fatally shot on July 26. Authorities say that the killings of all three might be connected to the November 2021 killing of Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, outside a business he and his brother ran.

As the Albuquerque Police, the F.B.I. and the State Police appealed to the public for help in finding the killer or killers — on Sunday authorities described a vehicle of interest, a dark-colored, four-door Volkswagen sedan — the attacks have left Muslims in a state of terror.

One member who attended the Islamic Center of New Mexico, the same mosque as all four of the victims, said that he may never return, citing a fear of becoming “bait.”

Other members have temporarily left the state to stay with family members in other parts of the country to wait out the investigation. One man, who immigrated from Iraq, said that he felt safer back when he first came to the country in the 1980s. Another member, Salem Ansari, said that some who attend the mosque and work night shifts have quit their jobs.

“This situation is getting so much worse,” Mr. Ansari said.

Ahmad Assed, president of the mosque, said that he grew up in Albuquerque attending the Islamic Center but never felt isolated as a Muslim in the city. But now, he said, the community is going through a “sort of managed panic.”

The elder Mr. Hussain said that he had lived safely in his neighborhood for eight years since moving to the United States with his wife and children. His brother Muhammad arrived in 2017, and both men would go to the library at midnight or buy coffees late into the evening while attending the University of New Mexico as international students.

“Now, I look outside the window and think, ‘Oh, this is the place where my brother was killed. Should we move?’” he said.

Mr. Hussain said that he had initially hoped to send his brother’s body back to be buried with family in Pakistan, but the numerous gunshot wounds had made his brother unrecognizable, and Mr. Hussain did not want his family to see him. The killer “wanted to finish him — the whole nine yards,” he said.

In general, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States have been trending downward. Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at San Bernardino and the director of the school’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said that the number of hate crimes reported against Muslims was lower in 2020 than in any year since 9/11, though he added that those numbers may be skewed because of pandemic restrictions.

But he said that hate crimes remain a concern: They rose more than 20 percent in 2021 and increased another 4.7 percent in the first half of 2022, the center reported. Also, “underlying anti-Muslim attitudes” are pervasive and resurface during times of national hardship, according to Professor Levin’s studies.

The authorities said that they are refraining from using the term “hate” in labeling the crimes until a motive could be established.

Just last year, the Islamic Center faced an attempted arson from a woman who the police say set three fires on the mosque playground and one fire at the mosque’s main entry. No one was injured, and the woman was arrested and charged with arson. The case is pending.

The Islamic Center has instructed its nearly 2,500 members to stay home as much as they can, use the “buddy system” when going out and refrain from “engaging with or agitating” anyone, Mr. Assed said.

He added that he still felt supported by other communities but that this time he also was feeling a sense of “hopelessness and despair.”

“I do watch my back and get in the car. I’m watching all my surroundings,” he said. “You don’t know whether they’re following you from the mosque, if they’re actually watching people going in and out of the mosque and following them elsewhere. The pattern is unknown.”

Some community members have expressed frustration about the lack of details from the police investigation, but Mr. Assed said he was in contact with authorities and understood why they have kept any developments under wraps. Authorities have neither elaborated on why they believe the killings are linked nor indicated whether there were any witnesses.

Mr. Hussain said that he wanted the federal and state governments to pour as many resources as possible into catching the killer.

But until someone is caught, nothing is likely to lessen his fear — or his grief.

“My 5-year-old keeps asking, ‘Hey, where is my uncle?’” he said. “She’ll see me crying and say, ‘Are you a crybaby? Why are you crying?’ But we can’t tell her. Not yet.”

BLACKSBURG, Va. — After years of spirited opposition from environmental activists, the Mountain Valley Pipeline — a 304-mile gas pipeline cutting through the Appalachian Mountains — was behind schedule, over budget and beset with lawsuits. As recently as February, one of its developers, NextEra Energy, warned that the many legal and regulatory obstacles meant there was “a very low probability of pipeline completion.”

Then came Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and his hold on the Democrats’ climate agenda.

Mr. Manchin’s recent surprise agreement to back the Biden administration’s historic climate legislation came about in part because the senator was promised something in return: not only support for the pipeline in his home state, but also expedited approval for pipelines and other infrastructure nationwide, as part of a wider set of concessions to fossil fuels.

It was a big win for a pipeline industry that, in recent years, has quietly become one of Mr. Manchin’s biggest financial supporters.

Natural gas pipeline companies have dramatically increased their contributions to Mr. Manchin, from just $20,000 in 2020 to more than $331,000 so far this election cycle, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission and tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Manchin has been by far Congress’s largest recipient of money from natural gas pipeline companies this cycle, raising three times as much from the industry than any other lawmaker.

NextEra Energy, a utility giant and stakeholder in the Mountain Valley Pipeline, is a top donor to both Mr. Manchin and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, who negotiated the pipeline side deal with Mr. Manchin. Mr. Schumer has received more than $281,000 from NextEra this election cycle, the data shows. Equitrans Midstream, which owns the largest stake in the pipeline, has given more than $10,000 to Mr. Manchin. The pipeline and its owners have also spent heavily to lobby Congress.

The disclosures point to the extraordinary behind-the-scenes spending and deal-making by the fossil fuel industry that have shaped a climate bill that nevertheless stands to be transformational. The final reconciliation package, which cleared the Senate on Sunday, would allocate almost $400 billion to climate and energy policies, including support for cleaner technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles, and put the United States on track to reduce its emissions of planet-warming gases by roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by the decade’s end.

A spokesman for Mr. Manchin said the Mountain Valley Pipeline “will help bring down energy costs, shore up American energy security and create jobs in West Virginia.” An official in Mr. Schumer’s office said the pipeline deal “was only included at the insistence of Sen. Manchin as part of any agreement related to this reconciliation bill.”

Natalie Cox, a spokeswoman for Equitrans, said the company maintained a “high standard of integrity” while engaging with policymakers. She declined to say whether Equitrans had pressed either senator on the pipeline. NextEra Energy, which also develops renewable projects across the country and stands to benefit widely from the bill, did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite concessions like the pipeline deal, major environmental groups as well as progressives in Congress have praised the legislation. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for the country to enact meaningful climate legislation.

But in Appalachia, where the Mountain Valley Pipeline cuts through steep mountainsides and nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands, the deal has highlighted the economic and social tensions in a region where extractive industries over the generations have produced jobs in coal mines and on fracking rigs but have also left behind deep scars on the land and in communities.

For years, environmental and civil rights activists as well as many Democratic state lawmakers have opposed the pipeline project, which would carry more than two billion cubic feet of natural gas per day out of the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia and through southern Virginia. Construction on the pipeline was supposed to be complete by 2018, but environmental groups have successfully challenged a series of federal permits in court, where judges have found the pipeline developers’ analyses about the effects on wildlife, sedimentation and erosion lacking.

The pipeline deal means Appalachia is again becoming a “sacrifice zone” for the greater good, said Russell Chisholm, an Iraq war veteran and a member of Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights, a coalition of groups that oppose construction.

He was visiting on Friday with a neighbor, Jammie Hale, who held up a jar of cloudy tap water. It was thick with sediment that Mr. Hale suspected had been dislodged by construction along the pipeline’s route, which runs alongside his property near Virginia’s border with West Virginia. Both men have clashed with the police at protests. They spoke beneath an American flag that Mr. Hale had hung upside down ever since workers started laying down pipe.

“If working people, poor people reaped the benefits, this bill could really help,” Mr. Chisholm said. “But it’s all beyond us, because it turns out they’ve been negotiating behind the scenes. It turns out the pipeline was on the negotiating table, and we weren’t at that table.”

“There’s a tendency to write off our region as a red state that got what was coming to them,” he added.

The concerns in Appalachia underscore the real-world fallout of the Democrats’ concessions to fossil fuels. The climate bill requires the federal government to auction off more public lands and waters for oil drilling as a prerequisite for more renewable energy sources like wind and solar. It expands tax credits for carbon capture technology that could allow coal- or gas-burning power plants to keep operating with reduced emissions.

Mr. Manchin has also secured pledges for a follow-up bill that would make it easier to greenlight energy infrastructure projects and make it tougher to oppose such projects under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act.

Those provisions could encourage further construction of pipelines, gas-burning power plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure to the detriment of low-income neighborhoods, which already disproportionately host these industries and often have fewer resources to negotiate with developers.

“People like me who are just trying to survive don’t have the time to attend hearings and meetings,” said Crystal Mello, who has cleaned homes for a living in southwest Virginia for two decades. She listened in on local hearings on her earbuds as she swept floors, and found whatever time she could to support “sit-ins” in trees in nearby Elliston to stop pipeline workers from felling them. She is now a community organizer even as she continues to clean houses.

“These mountains are meant to have trees protecting them,” she said. “People are saying this is a good deal, but at what cost?”

The concessions to natural gas pipelines come amid what has been a dramatic turnaround in the industry’s fortunes. For years, a glut of natural gas had depressed prices, and the coronavirus pandemic further cut demand. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the U.S. economic rebound, has pushed prices higher.

As a result, natural gas pipelines and export terminals have become a key growth opportunity as Europe looks for ways to wean itself from Russian gas. And even as the United States takes steps to add more renewable sources of energy, natural gas and oil remain the bedrock of the U.S. economy, and much of that fuel moves around the country through pipelines.

Gov. Jim Justice, Republican of West Virginia, has said that the pipeline should be finished and has called on the Biden administration to encompass all forms of energy. “This country needs to be totally energy independent,” he said at a briefing in February. “Without any question, if it were, we would feel better, stronger and better off.” Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Republican of Virginia, has also said the pipeline is vital to his state.

Supporters point to other benefits that the legislation would bring to West Virginia. It would cement a federal trust fund to support coal miners who have black lung disease, for example, and offer incentives for building wind and solar farms in areas where coal mines or coal plants recently closed.

“If you look to the future, it’s going to help,” David Owens, a retired local firefighter, said after he had filled up his S.U.V. outside Blacksburg, Va. Pipeline opponents were only “delaying the inevitable,” he said. “It’s going to happen.”

It remains unclear precisely how Mr. Manchin’s pipeline deal will work. According to terms released by the senator, the agreement requires federal agencies to take “all necessary actions” to permit the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s construction and operation. The terms of the agreement, which would be included in the follow-up bill, would also give the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit jurisdiction over all future legal challenges, rather than keep that authority with the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., where environmentalists had found success.

The Fourth Circuit has overturned permits issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, saying that their analyses about adverse effects on wildlife, sedimentation and erosion were flawed. The pipeline project has particularly struggled to get approval to cross streams or wetlands in a part of the country with so many of them.

Joseph M. Lovett, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Appalachian Mountain Advocates who is fighting the pipeline, said that any change in legal jurisdiction mandated by Congress “was ridiculous.”

“We’re a nation of laws. The powerful people don’t have the right to choose judges,” he said, adding, “If rich people can pay to get a better day in court, that’s just corruption.”

Mr. Manchin has made clear his view that fossil fuels will continue to be necessary. He became a millionaire from his family coal business and has taken more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any of his colleagues have.

Mr. Manchin has attracted more contributions in part because he is the chairman of the Senate energy committee. Major pipeline companies that have made contributions include Enterprise Products Partners, Energy Transfer LP, Plains All American Pipeline and Williams Companies.

David Seriff, who has long opposed the pipeline, looked out on Saturday from Brush Mountain, where the pipeline would cross half a mile from his home. With construction stalled, sections of the thick pipe have laid exposed on the ground for years. “I don’t come out here much anymore because I hate to see this,” he said.

Mr. Seriff said he was encouraged by Congress’s action on climate. “But the Democrats and people who say they’re environmentalists are ready to build the pipeline, too,” he said.

KANGARI, Kenya — The helicopter swooped over the lush tea and coffee fields flanking Mount Kenya, Africa’s second highest peak, and touched down outside a small highland town where William Ruto, the self-proclaimed leader of Kenya’s “hustler nation,” stepped out.

Mr. Ruto, a front-runner in next Tuesday’s presidential election, is pinning his hopes on what he calls Kenya’s “hustlers” — the masses of frustrated young people, most of them poor, who just want to get ahead. He delights supporters with his account of how he was once so poor that he sold chickens on the roadside, and with his spirited attacks on rivals he portrays as elitist and out of touch.

“I grew up wearing secondhand clothes,” he boasted to a roaring crowd in Kangari, where farmers and traders crowded around his election vehicle, a canary yellow, blinged-out stretch S.U.V. “Every Hustle Matters,” read the slogan on its door.

The odd thing is that Mr. Ruto has already been in power for the past nine years, as the vice-president of Kenya. And he has become a very wealthy man, with interests in land, luxury hotels and, perhaps fittingly, a major chicken processing plant.

Contradictions abound in this Kenyan election, a blistering and unpredictable contest between Mr. Ruto, 55, and Raila Odinga, a veteran 77-year-old opposition politician who is making his fifth bid for the presidency, having failed in the first four. But the perennial outsider is now cast as the insider after striking an alliance with the man who for years was his bitter enemy — the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta.

Days from the vote, the race is a nail-biter — a sharp contrast with many other African countries, like Uganda and Mali, where once-high democratic hopes have given way to sham votes and military coups. To its Western allies, that underscores why Kenya matters more than ever. Since its first competitive multiparty elections 20 years ago, the East African nation has emerged as a burgeoning technology hub, a key counterterrorism partner, a source of world-class athletes and an anchor of stability in a region roiled by starvation and strife.

Kenyans are enthusiastic voters, with an 80 percent turnout in the 2017 election (compared with 52 percent for the United States presidential race a year earlier); on Tuesday 22.1 million registered voters will choose candidates for six races, including president, parliament and local bodies.

The vote comes at an anxious time for weary Kenyans. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have pummeled their economy, which is straining under billions of dollars in debt for Chinese-built road and rail projects. In the north, a devastating four-year drought threatens 4 million people with starvation.

But this race is less about issues than a titanic clash of personalities, of age against ambition — peppered with a steady stream of personalized attacks.

Mr. Ruto, a charismatic and ambitious leader with a ruthless edge, mocks Mr. Odinga as “the Riddle man,” a dig at his tendency to quote folksy proverbs and riddles, and as a “project” of his ally, Mr. Kenyatta.

Mr. Odinga, a veteran leftist who estimates that corruption costs Kenya millions every day, has another word for his opponent. “The thief is?” he asked the crowd during a rally in Machakos, 40 miles from Nairobi, on a recent afternoon.

“Ruto!” replied his supporters.

Accusations that Mr. Ruto’s team is prone to graft (or, at least, more prone than its opponents) were bolstered by the courts last week when the High Court ordered his running mate, Rigathi Gachagua, to forfeit $1.7 million in illicitly acquired government funds. Mr. Gachagua, whose bank accounts were frozen by a government anti-corruption agency in 2020, is appealing the judgment, which he rejected as politically motivated.

Mr. Odinga also faces accusations of unsavory compromise. The son of Kenya’s first vice-president, he spent most of his career on the opposition benches. He personalizes a sense of grievance among his fellow Luo, Kenya’s fourth largest ethnic group, who have never had a president.

After weeks of neck-and-neck polling, the latest figures give Mr. Odinga a clear lead. He is boosted by the buzz around his running mate, Martha Karua, seen as a principled politician with a long record of activism who, if elected, would become Kenya’s first female vice-president.

One wild-card is a third candidate, George Wajackoyah, who has captured a small but boisterous protest vote on the back of his proposals to legalize marijuana and, more outlandishly, to export hyena testicles to China (where they are said to have medicinal value).

If Mr. Wajackoyah can hold onto his slice of the vote, as much as 3 percent in the polls, he could deny Mr. Ruto or Mr. Raila the 50 percent majority needed to win, and trigger a second round of voting 30 days later.

One of the biggest forces in the race is not on the ticket. The current president, Mr. Kenyatta, turned politics upside down in 2018 when he struck a political deal known as “the handshake” with Mr. Odinga.

The alliance ended an enmity between Kenya’s two great political dynasties that stretched back to 1969, when Mr. Kenyatta’s father, then president, imprisoned Mr. Odinga’s father, an opposition leader, for 18 months.

But for many Kenyans, the handshake was little more than “the children of kings” doing a deal to benefit themselves, said Njoki Wamai, assistant professor of international relations at the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi.

Mr. Ruto, stung by a perceived betrayal, built up his own base in Mr. Kenyatta’s political backyard in Mount Kenya, the ethnic Kikuyu-dominated area that accounts for about one-quarter of the Kenyan electorate.

The vitriol between the two men is never far from the surface. “You have enough money, security and cars,” Mr. Ruto told a rally recently, addressing the president. “Now go home.”

“Don’t vote for thieves,” Mr. Kenyatta told his supporters days later. “Or you’ll regret it.”

One obstacle facing both candidates is apathy. Younger Kenyans in particular say they are turned off by the byzantine feuds, alliances and back room deals that preoccupy their leaders.

Evans Atika, a barber from Nairobi’s South C neighborhood, fits the profile of a typical “hustler.” But having voted in 2017, he intends to stay home this time. “They’re all the same,” he said. “They lie. They made promises they can’t keep.”

Kenya’s elections are among the most elaborate and expensive in the world. This one is expected to cost $370 million, using ballots with more security features than the country’s currency notes. But elections here have a history of going awry.

Widespread violence following a disputed result in 2007 led to over 1,200 deaths, displaced 600,000 people and triggered an International Criminal Court investigation into politicians accused of bankrolling death squads and fomenting ethnic hatred. Mr. Kenyatta and Mr. Ruto were indicted with crimes against humanity.

But by 2016, both cases had collapsed, following what one judge called “a troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling.”

Other Kenyan elections have resulted in courtroom disputes that ended with judges overturning the results. And days before the last poll, in 2017, a senior election commission official was found brutally murdered in a remote wood outside Nairobi.

The case was never solved.

This time, worries about widespread, election-related violence are lower, human rights monitors say. But in recent weeks, some residents in ethnically mixed areas, especially in the Rift Valley which saw the worst unrest in previous polls, have voluntarily moved to the safety of larger towns.

Much will depend, though, on the final result. Kenya’s election commission has one week to declare a winner, although analysts expect that the losing side will lodge a legal challenge, prolonging the contest.

One bright spot, amid the mudslinging, is the potential for a sea change in the corrosive ethnic politics that have dominated Kenya for decades. The shifting alliances mean that, for the first time, millions of voters are expected to cross ethnic lines, especially around Mount Kenya where, for the first time, Kikuyus will have to vote for a candidate from another group.

“I love that man,” Michael Muigai, a self-identified “hustler,” said after the rally for Mr. Ruto in Kangari.

Mr. Muigai, who is 22, is working construction on a Chinese road building project to make his fees for a deferred college placement. He said he didn’t care that Mr. Ruto is an ethnic Kalenjin, and shrugged off media reports linking him to corruption.

“Past is past,” he said.

Declan Walsh reported from Kangari, Kenya, and Abdi Latif Dahir from Machakos, Kenya.

Caroline Kennedy, the United States ambassador to Australia, and Wendy Sherman, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, stood together at dawn on Sunday on the island of Guadalcanal to honor the 80th anniversary of the World War II battle there that nearly led to the death of their fathers, and that redefined America’s role across Asia.

Then and now, there was violence, great-power competition and jittery concern about the future. Their visit occurred as China’s military was expected to wrap up 72 hours of drills around Taiwan simulating an invasion. And in their remarks at events with officials from Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Solomon Islands, both officials emphasized that the region — and the world — finds itself at another crossroads.

Ms. Kennedy, surrounded by local well-wishers, promised to “honor those who came before us and to work and do our best to leave a legacy for those who follow.”

Ms. Sherman was more pointed. “It is up to us to decide if we want to continue having societies where people are free to speak their minds,” she told a group gathered on a leafy ridge above Solomon Islands’ capital, Honiara. “If we want to have governments that are transparent and accountable to their people. If we want an international system that is fair and orderly, where everyone plays by the same rules and where disputes are solved peacefully.”

In many ways, the Guadalcanal visit was the bookend to a tense week that started with trips to Asia by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, whose brief time in Taiwan set off China’s military exercises. Across the region, history, diplomacy and a crisis intertwined, as they often do when great-power competition surges.

As Hal Brands, a global affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently wrote, the early years of the Cold War were also defined by “diplomatic collisions and war scares,” when Russia and the United States jockeyed for position in a still-unsettled world order.

Today’s superpowers are different, and the contested locations are too, with new proving grounds like Ukraine and Taiwan. But some spots on the map — including the Pacific islands — seem destined for repeat roles.

China has been working across the region to secure influence, resources and possibly military bases in what security analysts describe as an effort to disrupt the Australian and American presence in the island chains that played a pivotal role in World War II.

In Solomon Islands, one of the poorest of the Pacific island nations, the government has been especially accommodating. In 2019, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the self-governing island that China sees as a renegade province. A few months ago, he signed a security agreement with Beijing that could allow China’s navy to use some of the same islands where around 7,000 Americans died in World War II.

Mr. Sogavare, who met privately with American officials and did not attend Sunday’s ceremonies, has insisted no Chinese base is on the way. Nonetheless, the United States announced this year that it would reopen an embassy in Honiara, while adding embassies in Kiribati and Tonga — two other Pacific nations with a large Chinese presence.

And along with a formal diplomatic push, which Australia has also intensified, have come frequent reminders of American ties reaching to the 1940s.

Ms. Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, and Ms. Sherman, whose father, Mal Sherman, was a Marine, recently discussed their connection to the Solomons and the war.

“We reflected on how she wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be here, if our fathers hadn’t been rescued,” Ms. Sherman said in an interview before the trip. It was also clear, she added, that those stories offered an opportunity for “energizing our partners.”

In a video that featured images of Americans fighting, Ms. Kennedy visiting a World War II memorial in Australia, and Ms. Sherman touching her father’s uniform, they promised that the United States would “recommit to working with our allies and partners.”

In their speeches and free moments, they spoke of family anecdotes and shared experiences — selfless, victory, freedom, personal risk, united were the words often repeated. With Ms. Sherman calling China’s response to Ms. Pelosi’s trip “irresponsible” during a news conference, it was a visit meant to resonate for months.

“It’s part of the American comeback strategy,” said Clive Moore, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Queensland whose research has focused on Solomon Islands. “It’s obvious that they talked about what America needs to do to get back on track.”

In such a tense time, though, the personal sometimes overshadows the political. Ms. Sherman choked back emotion during her main comments at dawn. She has often said her father rarely told war stories beyond the basics: He dropped out of college two days after Pearl Harbor and was wounded while serving in the Guadalcanal campaign.

The story of Ms. Kennedy’s father is better known.

He was hardly a famous Kennedy at the time. He ended up in the Pacific after the six-month battle of Guadalcanal was officially over, with the war shifting but still uncertain as combat continued with the Japanese.

In April 1943, he took command of a patrol torpedo boat, the PT-109, which was “grimy and battle-scarred,” according to Fredrik Logevall’s biography, “JFK.”

On Aug. 1, that boat was one of 15 sent into Blackett Strait, northwest of Guadalcanal, to intercept a Japanese transport convoy. Just after 2 a.m., it was rammed by a Japanese destroyer.

Two of Kennedy’s men died instantly. He and 10 others survived, including an engineer, Patrick McMahon, who had been badly burned. Kennedy gathered the men together on the largest hunk of wreckage until dawn, then decided they had to swim for land.

Holding the strap of McMahon’s life jacket in his teeth, Kennedy took the lead, guiding them onto a small island, Olasana. The grueling swim took nearly five hours.

Kennedy swam out alone that night with a lantern in the hopes of finding an American boat to rescue them. After that failed — and he nearly drowned — he and another crew member set out for a larger island where, some distance away, they spotted what appeared to be two islanders in a canoe.

“They thought he was from Japan,” John Koloni, the son of one of them, Eroni Kumana, said in an interview in Honiara. “Then he put his hands up, waving, ‘Come, come, come, America.’”

The men seemed to disappear, but when Kennedy returned to Olasana late that night, the same two were there. They were teenage scouts, working for the Allies: Biuku Gasa and Mr. Kumana. After another effort to find a friendly boat failed, Mr. Gasa had an idea. Kennedy scrawled a message on the husk of a coconut that included the words: ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY.

The two scouts took the coconut through enemy waters to an Allied base 38 miles away.

En route, they stopped to inform a fellow scout, who told an Australian coast watcher, an intelligence operative who reported enemy ship and troop movements. The coast watcher promptly sent seven scouts in a large canoe filled with food, drink and cigarettes.

The following day, Aug. 7, the islanders put Kennedy in the bottom of the canoe, covered him with palm fronds to avoid detection by Japanese planes, and paddled him to an island controlled by Australian troops. Within hours, the entire crew was safe at a nearby base.

Ms. Kennedy said that in addition to her father, “Countless Americans and Allied families have Solomon Islanders to thank for their survival.”

Mr. Kennedy would have agreed. If he were still alive, he also might have a message for his daughter and others in the State Department facing today’s moment of uncertainty in Asia. Perhaps he would even have quoted from his own account of what wisdom could be drawn from what happened after his boat was rammed.

“Previous to that I had been somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off,” he told his parents in a letter. “But with the chips down, that all faded away.”

“For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough,” he added. “When it’s in the middle, then there’s trouble.”

Matthew Abbott contributed reporting from Honiara, and Jane Perlez from Seoul.

China’s 72-hour spectacle of missiles, warships and jet fighters swarming Taiwan was designed to create a firewall — a blazing, made-for-television warning against what Beijing sees as increasingly stubborn defiance, backed by Washington, of its claims to the island.

“We’re maintaining a high state of alert, ready for battle at all times, able to fight at any time,” declared Zu Guanghong, a Chinese navy captain in a People’s Liberation Army video about the exercises, which ended on Sunday. “We have the determination and ability to mount a painful direct attack against any invaders who would wreck unification of the motherland, and would show no mercy.”

But even if China’s display of military might discourages other Western politicians from emulating Nancy Pelosi, who enraged Beijing by visiting Taiwan, it also narrows hopes for winning over the island through negotiations. Beijing’s shock and awe tactics may deepen skepticism in Taiwan that it can ever reach a peaceful and lasting settlement with the Chinese Communist Party, especially under Xi Jinping as its leader.

“Nothing is going to change after the military exercises, there’ll be one like this and then another,” said Li Wen-te, a 63-year-old retired fisherman in Liuqiu, an island off the southwestern coast of Taiwan, less than six miles from China’s drills.

“They’re as bullying as always,” he said, adding a Chinese saying, “digging deep in soft soil,” which means “give them an inch and they will take a mile.”

Mr. Xi has now shown he is willing to bring out an intimidating military stick to try to beat back what Beijing regards as a dangerous alliance of Taiwanese opposition and American support. Chinese military drills across six zones around Taiwan, which on Sunday included joint air and sea exercises to hone long-range airstrike capabilities, allowed the military to practice blockading the island in the event of an invasion.

In the face of such pressures, the policy carrots that China has used to coax Taiwan toward unification may carry even less weight. During previous eras of better relations, China welcomed Taiwan’s investment, farm goods and entertainers.

The result may be deepening mutual distrust that some experts warn could, at an extreme, bring Beijing and Washington into all-out conflict.

“It’s not about to be a blow up tomorrow, but it elevates the overall probability of crisis, conflict or even war with the Americans over Taiwan,” said Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who previously worked as a diplomat in Beijing.

Taiwan has never been ruled by the Communist Party, but Beijing maintains that it is historically and legally part of Chinese territory. The Chinese Nationalist forces who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war also long asserted that the island was part of a greater China they had ruled.

But since Taiwan emerged as a democracy in the 1990s, growing numbers of its people see themselves as vastly different in values and culture from the People’s Republic of China. That political skepticism toward authoritarian China has persisted, and even deepened, as Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland expanded.

“The attractiveness of the carrots in China’s Taiwan policy — economic inducements — has now fallen to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War,” said Wu Jieh-min, a political scientist at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top research academy.

“The card it holds presently is to raise military threats toward Taiwan step by step, and to continue military preparations for the use of force,” he said, “until one day, a full-scale military offensive on Taiwan becomes a favorable option.”

Since the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders have tried to coax Taiwan into accepting unification under a “one country, two systems” framework that promised autonomy in laws, religion, economic policy and other areas as long as the island accepted Chinese sovereignty.

But in increasingly democratic Taiwan, few see themselves as proud, future Chinese citizens. Support for Beijing’s proposals sank even lower after 2020, when China imposed a crackdown on Hong Kong, eroding the freedoms that the former British colony was promised under its own version of the framework.

Mr. Xi has continued to promise Taiwan a “one country, two systems” deal, and he may return to offering Taiwan economic and political incentives, if he can influence the island’s presidential election in early 2024.

Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, must step down after her second term ends that year. And a potential successor from her Democratic Progressive Party, which rejects the “one China” principle and favors independence, may be more pugnacious toward Beijing.

In the years after that election, China’s leaders likely “want to show some substantive jumps forward on Taiwan, not necessarily unification, but some results there,” said Wang Hsin-hsien, a professor at the National Chengchi University in Taipei who studies Chinese politics. “Xi Jinping is the kind of man who repays enmity with vengeance and repays kindness, but when he takes vengeance it is repaid in double.”

One puzzle that hangs over Taiwan is whether Mr. Xi has a timetable in mind. He has suggested his vision of China’s “rejuvenation” into a prosperous, powerful and complete global power depends on unification with Taiwan. The rejuvenation, he has said, will be achieved by midcentury, so some see that time as the outer limit for his Taiwan ambitions.

“We now have a 27-year fuse that can either be slow-burn or fast-burn,” said Mr. Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who is now president of the Asia Society, citing that midcentury date. “The time to worry is the early 2030s, because you’re closer in the countdown zone to 2049, but you’re also in Xi Jinping’s political lifetime.”

In an agenda-setting speech on Taiwan policy in 2019, Mr. Xi reasserted that China hoped to unify with Taiwan peacefully, but would not rule out armed force.

He also called for exploring ways to update what a “one country, two systems” arrangement for Taiwan would look like, and the Chinese government assigned scholars to the project. Such plans, Mr. Xi said, “must fully consider the realities of Taiwan, and also be conducive to lasting order and stability in Taiwan after unification.”

“I still believe that the military capacity is first and foremost calibrated at present as a deterrent,” said Willian Klein, a former U.S. diplomat posted in Beijing who now works for FGS Global, a consulting firm, referring to China’s buildup. “Their strategy is to narrow the possible universe of outcomes to the point that their preferred outcome becomes a reality.”

But the proposals that Chinese scholars have put forward on Taiwan highlight the gulf between what Beijing seems to have in mind, and what most Taiwanese could accept.

The Chinese studies propose sending Chinese officials to maintain control in Taiwan, especially if Beijing wins control by force; others say that China must impose a national security law on Taiwan — like the one it imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 — to punish opponents of Chinese rule.

“It must be recognized that governing Taiwan will be far more difficult than Hong Kong, whether in terms of geographic extent or the political conditions,” Zhou Yezhong, a prominent law professor at Wuhan University wrote in a recent “Outline for China’s Unification,” which he co-wrote with another academic.

Taiwanese society, they wrote, must be “re-Sinified” to embrace official Chinese values and to “fundamentally transform the political environment that has been long shaped by ‘Taiwanese independence’ ideas.”

China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, said in a television interview last week that Taiwan’s people had been brainwashed by pro-independence ideas.

“I’m sure that as long as they are re-educated, the Taiwanese public will once again become patriots,” he said in the interview shared on his embassy’s website. “Not under threat, but through re-education.”

Polls of Taiwanese people show that very few have an appetite for unification on China’s terms. In the latest opinion survey from National Chengchi University, 1.3 percent of respondents favored unification as soon as possible, 5.1 percent wanted independence as soon as possible. The rest mostly wanted some version of the ambiguous status quo.

“I cherish our freedom of speech and don’t want to be unified by China,” said Huang Chiu-hong, 47, the owner of a shop that sells fried sticks of braided dough, a local snack, on Liuqiu, the Taiwanese island.

She said she tried to see the People’s Liberation Army in action out of curiosity, but glimpsed nothing at a pavilion overlooking the sea.

“It seems that some people are concerned,” she said. “For me, it’s just a small episode in the ordinary life of Taiwanese.”

WASHINGTON — A divided Senate took a crucial step on Saturday toward approving Democrats’ plan to tackle climate change, bring down health care costs and raise taxes on large corporations, with a test vote that paved the way to enact a significant piece of President Biden’s domestic agenda in the coming days.

The measure advanced on a party-line vote of 51 to 50, with all Republicans opposed and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.

The action suggested that Democrats, after more than a year of internal feuding and painstaking negotiation, had finally coalesced behind legislation that would provide hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and energy programs, extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and create a new federal initiative to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, particularly for older Americans.

Much of the 755-page legislation would be paid for by tax increases, which Democrats have said are intended to make the tax code more equitable.

The vote put the bill on track to pass the Senate as early as Sunday, with the House expected to give its approval by the end of the week. That would provide a major boost to Mr. Biden at a time when his popularity is sagging, and it would hand Democrats a victory going into midterm elections in November in which their congressional majorities are at stake.

“I think this legislation is long overdue and is critically important,” Ms. Harris said after casting her vote. “It’s going to lower costs for American families.”

The hard-won agreement, which includes the most substantial investment in history to counter the warming of the planet, came after a flurry of intense negotiations with two key Democratic holdouts, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Just weeks ago, Mr. Manchin, a conservative-leaning Democrat from a red state, had said he could not agree to include climate, energy and tax measures in the domestic policy plan this summer given his concerns that doing so would exacerbate inflation. But he and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, stunned lawmakers in both parties late last month with the news that they had quietly returned to the negotiating table and struck a deal that included those proposals.

And on Thursday, Ms. Sinema announced she, too, would move forward after extracting concessions, including dropping a provision that would have narrowed a tax break that allows private equity executives and hedge fund managers to pay substantially lower taxes on some income than other taxpayers do.

“The bill, when passed, will meet all of our goals: fighting climate change, lowering health care costs, closing tax loopholes abused by the wealthy and reducing the deficit,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor on Saturday. “This is a major win for the American people and a sad commentary on the Republican Party as they actively fight provisions that lower costs for the American family.”

Democrats were speeding the bill through Congress under the arcane budget process known as reconciliation, which shields certain tax and spending measures from a filibuster but also strictly limits what can be included.

Republicans remain unanimously opposed to the measure and have feverishly worked to derail it, fuming at the resurgence of a plan they thought was dead. Blindsided by the deal between Mr. Schumer and Mr. Manchin, they have scrambled to attack the bill as a big-spending, tax-hiking abomination that will exacerbate inflation and damage the economy at a precarious moment.

“Democrats are misreading the American people’s outrage as a mandate for yet another — yet another — reckless taxing and spending spree,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.

He condemned a “tidal wave of Washington meddling” that he said would result from the prescription drug plan, which he said would take “a buzz saw to the research and development behind new, lifesaving medical treatments and cures.”

But Democrats have rebranded the transformative cradle-to-grave social safety net and climate plan they once called “Build Back Better” as the Inflation Reduction Act. Operating with a razor-thin Senate majority that gave their most conservative members strong influence over the measure, Democrats have jettisoned hundreds of billions of dollars in proposed spending on domestic programs, as well as many of the tax increases they had pitched to pay for it.

Outside estimates have indicated that the measure would not force a huge increase in federal spending or impose substantial tax hikes outside of large corporations, and it is projected to reduce the federal budget deficit by the end of the decade.

That did not stop Republicans from arguing that it would be disastrous for the economy and for Americans. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, branded it the “Manchin-Schumer Tax Hike of 2022.”

Republicans spent much of the past week trying to devise ways of slowing or blocking the legislation by arguing that it violated the reconciliation rules. (They did, however, refrain from forcing the Senate clerks to read the bill aloud, after a similar maneuver last year prompted an outcry.)

Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, and her staff labored into the early hours of Saturday morning to determine whether the bill’s components violated those rules, which require that each provision have a direct effect on federal spending or revenue. Early Saturday, she instructed Democrats to trim the scope of a proposal intended to keep the increase in drug prices from outpacing inflation, saying that a proposed rebate could apply only to drugs purchased by Medicare, not by private insurers.

But top Democrats announced that most of the legislation remained intact after Ms. MacDonough’s review, including a plan to allow Medicare to directly negotiate the price of prescription drugs for the first time, restrictions on new electric vehicle tax breaks and a fee intended to curtail excessive emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is commonly emitted from oil and gas leaks.

After Saturday’s test vote, senators girded themselves for an overnight session as Democrats edged closer to a final vote on the bill. Around midnight, Republicans began forcing a rapid-fire series of votes on amendments to the bill — an hourslong ritual known as a vote-a-rama that reconciliation measures must survive in order to be approved. In the evenly divided Senate, all 50 members of the Democratic caucus will have to remain united to ward off changes proposed by Republicans and win final passage.

“What will vote-a-rama be like? It’ll be like hell,” vowed Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. Of Democrats, he said: “They deserve this.”

Democrats, too, still could change the bill. They are expected to essentially dare Republicans to strip a proposal to cap the cost of insulin for all patients, a popular measure that violates the budget rules because it would not directly affect federal spending.

And at least one member of the Democratic caucus, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, hoped to win changes to the legislation. “This is a totally inadequate bill, but it does, to some degree, begin to address the existential threat facing the planet,” he said in an interview on Friday. “I’m disappointed.”

Most Democrats, however, were trying to rally their colleagues to stay united against any amendments — including those that could be offered by fellow members of their caucus — to preserve the delicate consensus around the bill and make sure it could become law.

“What I care about is that we get to 50 votes, OK, at the end, and that means we have got to keep this deal together,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, told reporters. “What matters is that we’ve cut a deal, and we need to keep that deal intact.”

Lisa Friedman, Stephanie Lai and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.

Over informal, private meals with American leaders, China’s Xi Jinping let his guard down a little. It was a decade ago, relations were less strained, and Mr. Xi, still cementing his power, hinted he worried about the Chinese Communist Party’s grip.

Speaking privately with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Mr. Xi suggested that China was a target of “color revolutions,” a phrase the party adopted from Russia for popular unrest in the name of democracy and blamed on the West. The recent “Arab Spring” uprisings across the Middle East had reinforced his concerns that China was vulnerable to public anger over corruption and inequality, both of which the country had in abundance.

“Xi couldn’t have been more forthright that China is beset by malevolent forces and internally prey to centrifugal forces,” said Daniel R. Russel, a former senior American diplomat who accompanied Mr. Biden to China in 2011.

“He would talk all the time about color revolutions. That’s clearly a sort of front-of-mind issue for him,” said Ryan Hass, the National Security Council director for China when Mr. Xi later visited the White House.

Such fears have come to define the era of Mr. Xi. Over the past decade, he has pursued an all-encompassing drive to expand the very meaning of “national security” in China, bolstering the party’s control on all fronts against any perceived threats abroad that could pounce on weakness at home.

He has strengthened, centralized and emboldened an already pervasive security apparatus, turning it into a hulking fortress that protects him and positions him as the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Xi has built what he calls a “comprehensive” system designed for a world he sees as determined to thwart China — politically, economically, socially, militarily and technologically.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to support Taiwan against Beijing is likely to reconfirm his worldview that the United States and its allies are ready to exploit any potential weakness — and that China must always show steely vigilance. Since her visit, he has mobilized the military off the coast of Taiwan, sending the warning that China wants to curtail America’s backing for what Beijing considers a breakaway region.

To Mr. Xi, national security is a “people’s war,” enlisting not just military officers, but also elementary schoolteachers and neighborhood workers.

On National Security Education Day, children have lessons about dangers that include food poisoning and fires, spies and terrorists. Neighborhoods have founded “National Security People’s Line-of-Defense” groups to ferret out potential dissidents and “suspicious” foreigners. The Ministry of State Security recently offered rewards of up to $15,000 for citizens who report information on security crimes.

“This evil wind of ‘color revolution’ has never ceased,” Wang Linggui, a party official in China’s office for Hong Kong affairs, wrote recently in a new Chinese journal on national security. “Like the Covid virus, it constantly mutates.”

Under these pressures, China is becoming a country where — as in grim eras in its past — vigilance can easily spiral into paranoia, where officials treat even local problems as the work of ideological subversives and foreign enemies.

When residents in Shanghai, confined in their homes for weeks in a pandemic lockdown this spring, banged pots and pans in protest, local authorities used loudspeakers to warn that their display of public anger was being fanned by shadowy “foreign forces.”

“It was a spontaneous local action,” said Jia Xiaolong, who was twice taken from his home in Shanghai and questioned by the police over the kitchenware protests. “But internally that’s how officials think now — that behind every problem, every protest, is also a plot.”

As Mr. Xi prepares to claim a breakthrough third term as leader at a Communist Party congress this fall, he has signaled that national security will be even more of a focus. Strains over Covid and pandemic restrictions, superpower divisions deepened by Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as rising food and energy prices, are part of a constant onslaught of challenges.

“What is so important and worrisome is that Xi Jinping isn’t making a distinction anymore between internal security and external security,” said Mr. Russel, now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Xi Jinping is determined to take more forceful action — preventive action, but also pre-emptive action — and use the various tools at his disposal to meet those threats and to break through what he sees as a kind of stranglehold of the West.”

Since rising as Communist Party leader in 2012, Mr. Xi has wielded security powers in ways that seemed unlikely when he took office. He authorized mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim ethnic groups in the western region of Xinjiang. In Hong Kong, he abolished freedoms that China had promised to leave in place for 50 years when it regained the territory from Britain in 1997.

In the run-up to the congress, officials have been gathering in meetings to reverently study a new textbook that explains Mr. Xi’s vision. Defending China against the myriad threats, the book says, depends on “political security,” with the party and ultimately Mr. Xi as the guardians of national unity and survival.

“Unless political security is assured, the country will inevitably fall apart, scattering like a box of sand, and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will be out of the question,” the book says.

Opponents of China’s claims over Taiwan, it warns, are “the biggest obstacle to unification of the motherland, and the gravest hidden peril to national reunification.”

‘Getting out of hand’

When he came to power, Mr. Xi moved quickly, worried that his predecessors had let corruption and cronyism rot away China’s defenses against domestic and foreign threats.

Jiang Zemin, the party leader from 1989 to 2002, had dabbled in creating a Chinese equivalent of the United States’ National Security Council, but political inertia stood in the way. His successor, Hu Jintao, increased spending on the military and domestic security, but let their chiefs turn them into fiefs where they promoted cronies and collected kickbacks, including company shares and hoards of cash and gems.

“Xi Jinping’s argument was, look, internally, we have been too weak. The power decentralization is getting out of hand,” said Yun Sun, the co-director of the China Program at the Stimson Center.

One year after Mr. Xi took office, he announced before hundreds of senior officials that China would establish a National Security Commission. “Strengthening centralized, unified leadership of national security matters is a pressing need,” he declared.

Some political insiders initially assumed that the commission would mimic the White House’s National Security Council and focus on foreign policy. But at the commission’s first meeting in 2014, Mr. Xi told officials that the threats demanded a “comprehensive view of national security.” Under this approach, domestic and foreign dangers were often seen through a prism of ideological rivalry with the West.

“It legitimizes from their point of view a stronger coercive dimension in nearly every area of government,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University who has studied Mr. Xi’s security policies.

Li Ming-che, a community college worker from Taiwan, felt the brunt of this heightened vigilance. For years, he had stayed in contact with human rights activists in China, supporting them and their families after growing numbers were detained under Mr. Xi.

When Mr. Li made a visit to China in 2017, security police seized him as soon as he crossed the border, and interrogators accused him of plotting “color revolution.”

In previous times when Chinese leaders were less alarmed, Mr. Li might have been expelled or briefly imprisoned. In 2017, he was sentenced to five years for subverting state power. In prison, he said, he and other inmates worked nearly every day, making gloves, shoes and backpacks. He was barred from talking to all but a few approved prisoners.

Mr. Li, who was released in April and returned to Taiwan, was among a handful of human rights activists who met with Ms. Pelosi during her visit.

“Xi Jinping has written this system into law, and it’s really emblematic of the constant expansion of the state security system,” he said. “It’s fully entered people’s lives.”

‘The edge of an abyss’

Four years passed between the founding of the National Security Commission and the next time it surfaced in major state media, in 2018.

The commission is one of the most secretive bodies of a secretive state. Its size, staffing and powers remain unclear. Its officials rarely meet foreigners. The full membership gathers roughly once a year, like other top bodies of Chinese leaders. But mentions of the security meetings usually emerge only on local party websites summarizing its orders for officials.

Behind the scenes, it has become increasingly active and organized, such websites indicate. The commission had “solved many problems that we had long wanted to but couldn’t,” Mr. Xi said when it met in 2018.

The national commission established local security committees across provinces, cities and counties. These local committees focus on domestic threats like protests and dissent. They often remind cadres that crisis or insurrection are not remote threats; they could break out on their doorstep.

Chinese universities were pressed to observe and report on “ideological” problems among teachers and students, which included keeping track of their online comments. Security officials ordered cadres to closely monitor persistent protesters, people with histories of mental illness, former prisoners and others deemed risks to safety and stability.

“Don’t simplistically equate ‘nothing has gone wrong’ with ‘nothing will go wrong,’” the local security committee of Yongchuan District in southwest China said last year. “At every moment always act as if we’re walking on thin ice, as if on the edge of an abyss.”

Through new rules and personnel appointments, Mr. Xi has made sure that this expanding system stays firmly in his hands.

Mr. Xi is the chairman of the National Security Commission, and a senior aide of his, Ding Xuexiang, is widely believed to be head of the Commission’s administrative office, steering its operations, though Mr. Ding’s role has not been officially confirmed. The chief deputy in the office is Chen Wenqing, the minister of state security.

“The world is confronting great changes of the kind not seen in a century, and in particular China-U.S. relations are undergoing a new test,” Mr. Chen wrote in a party journal in 2019, one of his rare public statements.

By then, China’s economic and military reach, and Mr. Xi’s hard-line policies, were stirring anxiety in Washington and other capitals — which in turn was raising concern in Beijing about Western intentions.

Mr. Xi’s alarm intensified in 2019 when demonstrations filled streets in Hong Kong for months. As protesters clashed with the police, Beijing warned that Hong Kong risked succumbing to a “color revolution” backed by Western governments.

“Points of turbulence and danger across the globe are growing,” Mr. Xi told officials in that same year, according to a lecture by a professor from the People’s Public Security University of China. “The new trends and features of color revolution are increasing the political and ideological risks bearing down on China.”

Nobody is a bystander

In April of this year, Ukraine was at war with Russian invaders. Shanghai was under an exhausting pandemic lockdown. Tensions with the Biden administration were festering.

Yet when officials across China gathered to hear about the latest secretive meeting of the National Security Commission, its paramount demand was “political security” — that is, defending the Communist Party and Mr. Xi in the lead-up to the party congress.

Across China, a flow of similar announcements points to how the party’s focus on security — especially political security — is likely to deepen, reshaping the country.

The National Security Commission has claimed a role in making government rules, including data security legislation. It has ordered financial security assessments of banks. When Chinese regulators fined the ride-hailing giant, Didi Global, $1.2 billion in July for breaches, they cited unspecified “serious” national security violations.

China’s first full National Security Strategy, an internal document laying out broad goals through 2025, has filtered through the bureaucracy since its approval last year. It calls for ensuring that China can provide more of its own food and core technology and for developing ways to defuse social unrest before it erupts, according to a summary issued when party leaders approved it late last year.

The new, 150-page textbook on Mr. Xi’s “comprehensive outlook on national security” offers clues about that strategy. China must deepen its partnership with Russia to withstand international threats, says the book, whose authors include officials from the National Security Commission.

“Hostile forces at home and abroad have never let up for one moment in their strategy to Westernize and split apart our country,” a section on political security says.

Only a few prominent voices in China openly question the security expansion, warning that it risks locking the country into intransigent policies.

“Pursuing absolute security is, first, unrealistic; second, too costly; and third, will harm the country in pursuing other values,” Jia Qingguo, a professor at Peking University who is a senior member of a Chinese government consultative council, wrote in a Chinese journal this year. “A necessary balance must be struck between national security and carrying forward democracy.”

On the same day that Ms. Pelosi left Taiwan, state security officers in eastern China detained a Taiwanese man, Yang Chih-yuan, whom Chinese media described as a supporter of independence for the island. Chinese television news showed him being held on each arm by officers as another officer laid out the accusations.

“Now and for some time to come, the situation of national security struggle across the Taiwan Strait will be more complex and grim,” a Chinese policy journal for Taiwan said last year. “The United States is always playing the ‘Taiwan card’ more.”

Officials cite national security to restrict lawyers and their clients, or to silence public complaints about financial or land disputes. Academics face tighter monitoring of their teaching and research. Beijing’s combative worldview, other Chinese critics have said, has pushed China too close to Russia and deterred debate over its invasion of Ukraine.

Children also absorb Mr. Xi’s precepts each National Security Education Day on April 15, which commemorates the first meeting of the National Security Commission in 2014.

In one school in Beijing, children this year drew pictures of vigilant citizens beating up masked villains. “In defending national security, nobody is an outsider or a bystander,” said a presentation at an elementary school in northwest China.

It reminded the pupils of the Ministry of State Security’s phone number for reporting anything suspicious: 12339.

Additional reporting by Amy Chang Chien.