The Shenzhen experience illustrates the tension that sometimes surfaces— not so much over safety versus personal liberty as over convenience. When security checks are nearly frictionless, there is support for them; when friction mounts, attitudes change. Bluntly, people like the safety state until it gets in their way, especially when controls seem out of proportion to the actual threat. A huge example was the zero-covid policy. The public initially supported the government’s restrictions, accepting the lockdown of Wuhan and subsequent quarantines of particular people and areas as a price paid by the few. But by late 2022 exhaustion had set in and rare protests erupted. In Beijing it was seen as a lesson in why officials must be alert to shifts in opinion before the clamour for relaxation becomes more political. These pivots do not happen readily. The issue is not that officials are naturally obsessed with safety. Rather, safety is core to their careers. In what is known as the “one-vote veto” system, they can lose out on promotion because of a single security breach or serious accident. Under Mr Xi that veto has been strengthened: officials are punished not just when something bad happens, but when they fail to enforce safety protocols. Inspection teams rock up at metro stations to check X-ray machines, or show up on streets to make sure patrols are in place. Visible controls have proliferated: helmeted guards in front of day-care centres, phalanxes of police at pop concerts and football matches (far more than are needed to watch over the peaceful crowds), and anti-riot shields at the ready in banks and shopping malls. The escalator warnings on the Jinan metro are at the comic end of all the theatre, a case of cover-your-pigu paternalism. There is a further trade-off for officials, one which will bite more over time. All the safety costs money. The bill for the guards alone runs to about a tenth of metro operating budgets. Their salaries are not high. But a shrinking labour pool will surely push wages up over time, an uncomfortable prospect for indebted local governments. Objectively, the layer upon layer of safety is overkill. China is, without question, a very safe country. The country averages nearly 100m riders a day on its metro systems, about half of the world’s total. Crimes, big or small, are vanishingly rare on them. But is that thanks to all the checkpoints? Surely ordinary Chinese deserve credit for their orderly behaviour. And to the extent that security measures prevent crime, the cameras that snoop on streets, stations and trains are more
useful—and less expensive—than the guards and X-rays. Yet that is not the calculation of officials, for whom safety is less about efficacy than about showing that they leave nothing to chance. And please remember: no walking on escalators. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/china/2026/08/10/chinas-officials-are-obsessed-with- safety-theatre
For a different kind of Democratic insurgency, look to Iowa Donald Trump is getting a new tariff weapon against Russia Donald Trump takes a fresh swipe at childhood vaccines Democratic moderates get a surprising reprieve in Wisconsin Donald Trump’s attack on mail-in voting looks doomed Florida was a swing state. Now it’s MAGA-land What Britain can teach Democrats about the ultra-Left
For a different kind of Democratic insurgency, look to Iowa Republican policies have left a red state reeling. Will voters spring for change? Aug 13th 2026 ROB SAND’s campaign gimmicks, to the extent that he has them, are better suited for a Norman Rockwell painting than a TikTok feed. The Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa begins his town halls with a sing-a-long of “America the Beautiful”. He invites Republicans in the crowd to reveal themselves; those who do are welcomed with applause. Yet the even- tempered Mr Sand, who serves as the state’s auditor, does not shy away from declaring a disaster where he sees one. Iowa, he insisted recently, is in the throes of three: an “economic crisis and a cancer crisis and an education crisis”. Many voters agree.
Iowa has voted solidly Republican at the state and federal level for more than a decade. Republicans have dominated the state legislature since 2016; no Democrat has won the governorship since 2006, a Senate seat since 2008 or a congressional race since 2020. In the most recent presidential election, Donald Trump carried the state by more than 13 points. Yet Iowa is still home to a large bloc of independents—35% of registered voters—and they appear to be swinging left. Mr Sand is leading his Republican rival, according to an Emerson College/Nexstar poll published on August 6th. Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate candidate, is in a tight race. And three out of four congressional districts are competitive. As the populist left advances elsewhere, Iowa is offering a different example of how Democrats might return to power. Their opportunity is born of growing discontent with Republican policies, state and national alike. The political affinity that many Iowans felt toward Mr Trump is fading, with the president’s net approval rating at -8. That’s in part because the bite of his economic policies has sharpened, says David Peters, an agricultural and rural policy professor at Iowa State University. Last year Iowa’s soyabean producers saw net farm income fall by half. This year high fuel and fertiliser prices, inflated by the war in Iran, will make things worse. The administration’s crackdown on immigration is exacting another cost, limiting labour available to Iowa’s meatpacking plants. It is also deepening Iowa’s broader population problem. Because of the long-term ebb of residents to other states, foreign immigrants represented a crucial source of new workers. Backlash is growing over environmental policy, too. The administration filed a brief seeking to limit cancer-related lawsuits against Bayer, a chemicals giant that produces a common pesticide. The Supreme Court sided with the company in June. But in Iowa, home to both mega-farms and residents whose water is affected by their run-off, the issue is increasingly contentious. Iowa has the second-highest cancer incidence in the country. Scientists don’t know what, precisely, is driving this, but Iowa is one of only three states where rates are growing. For the past two summers, Des Moines has imposed restrictions on residents’ water, citing high levels of nitrate,
found in fertiliser. “You have 600,000 Iowans who can’t use their water the way they might want to,” says David Cwiertny at the University of Iowa. If Mr Trump seems more appealing to Iowans in theory than in practice, the record of Kim Reynolds, the state’s outgoing Republican governor, has been even more repellent. Conservative landowners were incensed by her veto of a bill to impose additional restrictions on a pipeline for a carbon-capture project. Moderate voters bristled at her restrictive new abortion policy, which bans the procedure after six weeks and allows an exception in instances of rape only if the crime is swiftly reported. A sweeping school- voucher programme has proved particularly polarising. Iowa’s public schools lost 13,000 students, or 3% of total enrolment, between 2022 and 2025. Some of that is down to population loss. However school vouchers, introduced in 2023, have accelerated the decline. Under the scheme, the state gives any family, regardless of income, about $8,000 per student to put toward private education. Because the state funds schools on a per-pupil basis, a school that loses students loses money. Rural schools, already scraping by with tiny registrations, are further depleted, but the impact is broad. “Just because you’re a large district or in a metro area in Iowa doesn’t mean you’re not feeling the same pressure of enrolment loss,” says Kurt Subra, the chief financial officer of West Des Moines Community Schools. At the end of May, Jenna Lewis, a second- grade teacher in central Iowa, got a job in Ames, a city of about 66,000 people. She was “really excited”, she says; Ames was a bigger, more affluent school district, and the position came with a $12,000 pay rise. Two weeks later, the principal called to revoke the offer. Because of low enrolment numbers, the school was cutting her class. Presented with voters’ frustration, Democrats are not so much grabbing the opportunity as greeting it politely. Mr Turek, a state lawmaker, won his Trump-friendly district in 2022 by focusing on the economy. In his race for an open Senate seat against Ashley Hinson, a Republican congresswoman, he calls himself a “prairie populist” and talks about pocketbook issues while suggesting that corruption is behind many of Iowans’ struggles.
Mr Sand is trying to project himself as a non-partisan pragmatist. In June, as state auditor, he released a report contending that nearly 80% of families who used vouchers in 2025 were already sending their kids to private schools, costing the state more than $250m. The theme of corruption figures into his town halls (as a former public prosecutor, he has some credibility), but he avoids villainising individuals. Instead he blames a system propped up by “two private clubs” that exploit political tribalism “to pick our pockets”. He would not bring a Democratic agenda to Des Moines, he argues, but one grounded in independence and accountability. Matt Paul, a Democratic strategist in Des Moines, remembers working on Tom Vilsack’s campaign for governor in 1998. Iowa had not elected a Democratic governor for more than 30 years. “Tom’s campaign came out with a very simple mantra,” says Mr Paul: “It’s time to rotate the crops.” He notes that Mr Sand and others have adopted the slogan. “It feels a lot like ‘98 to me.” Independents who voted for Mr Trump in 2024 now favour Mr Sand by a 17-point margin. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/13/for-a-different-kind-of- democratic-insurgency-look-to-iowa
Donald Trump is getting a new tariff weapon against Russia But the president will have plenty of discretion over who gets hit Aug 13th 2026 “LOOK WHAT we’ve done here,” remarked Lindsey Graham on learning in February that Donald Trump had launched America’s war against Iran. “I almost cried.” The Republican senator, who died last month, might have teared up again at the latest display of American muscle. On August 7th the Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act by 86 votes to 11. The bill is yet to clear the House, but has the backing of Mr Trump. Focusing on Russia, the legislation involves both a sanctions scalpel and a tariff sledgehammer. It imposes sanctions on Russian officials, oligarchs, banks, the defence industry and energy projects—even in areas, such as