Millions of Chinese are venturing back to their hometowns this week to usher in the Year of the Rabbit and celebrate long-delayed family reunions. 

But casting a pall over the festivities are ongoing concerns that gathering will bring a new wave of COVID-19 to rural areas with limited health care, as the epidemic has claimed some 60,000 lives since the country abruptly reopened last month, according to official data. “Tough challenges remain,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in a holiday video chat with medical workers Wednesday, “but the light of hope is right in front of us.”

China’s chaotic emergence from its “zero-COVID” regime is one of several measures that made 2022 one of the nation’s most difficult years in decades, experts say. 

Beijing released economic data this week showing gross domestic product (GDP) growth declined to 3% in 2022, well below the government target of 5.5% and the second-lowest rate since 1976. It also announced a pivotal demographic shift – the country’s population declined in 2022 for the first time since the early 1960s. India is now expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country this year.

Although the economy is expected to rebound from the reopening, the long-term trends of slower growth, low productivity, and a graying, shrinking population are prompting a rethink of China’s projected path to become the No. 1 economic superpower – recalculations that have major implications for the world and especially the Indo-Pacific, where China has served for many years as an engine of regional economic integration and growth. 

China’s economy will “experience much slower growth going forward,” says Roland Rajah, lead economist at the Lowy Institute, an independent policy think tank in Sydney. “Demographic and external head winds have intensified, while there is still little sign of the kind of major reforms needed in boosting productivity that could provide an offset.” 

A Lowy report co-written by Mr. Rajah last year projected that while China would become the world’s biggest economy by 2030, “its size advantage over America would be slim and it would remain far less prosperous and productive per person than the United States and other rich countries, even by mid-century.” The Japan Center for Economic Research, which two years ago predicted China would surpass the U.S. in 2028, said in a forecast last month that “China’s GDP will not surpass that of the United States.”

Tingshu Wang/Reuters

A dog crosses a road at a financial district with buildings under construction, in Beijing Jan. 11, 2023. Economic data released this week by Beijing showed gross domestic product growth slowed to 3% in 2022, and the country’s population declined for the first time since the early 1960s.

Indeed, Asian observers are paying keen attention to the relative balance of power between China and the U.S.

“China made mistakes in 2022,” says Kishore Mahbubani, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. Still, this was likely an aberration, says the former senior Singapore diplomat and author of the 2020 book “Has China Won?” 

“If you judge China’s performance by what it did in 2022, the prospects look bad, but ... the last 30 years of China’s performance still remain the best in China’s history.”

A shaky pivot

China faces major hurdles in attempting to revive faster economic growth, not the least because Beijing’s COVID-19 controls and other policies have hurt confidence among consumers and private businesses.

After years of stimulating growth with investment in infrastructure like roads and high-speed rail and prioritizing less efficient state-owned enterprises, Beijing has signaled it seeks a model driven more by consumption and private companies. But economists say that shift has proved elusive.

“The shift to consumption-led growth” requires many changes “and they are all hard,” says Mary Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It’s also a challenge for the political system,” she says, as consumer choices gain more economic importance. “It’s pretty clear that you are going to change who makes decisions.”

Another challenge is that several of Mr. Xi’s signature policies – from draconian “zero-COVID” lockdowns, to a sweeping regulatory crackdown on technology companies and the reining in of high-profile entrepreneurs in the name of “common prosperity” – have rattled Chinese and foreign private investors.

“Xi Jinping in the last year has really made companies question China’s basic competence,” says Scott Kennedy, trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “China is going to have to do a lot to win back that confidence, first from their domestic population and then from the global business community.”

As Beijing focuses on its domestic recovery, it will likely continue to work to stabilize relations with other countries and reassure investors, he says. At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He pledged support for the private sector and market economy, adding, “China’s door to the outside will only open wider.”

Asian countries recalibrate

In Asian countries, where the impact of competition between China and the U.S. is felt most acutely, experts closely track the shifting power balance between the superpowers.

Last year, for the first time in three decades, the growth rate of Asian developing countries would surpass that of China, according to a projection in September by the Asian Development Bank.

Issei Kato/Reuters

An employee of the foreign exchange trading company Gaitame.com watches the Japanese yen exchange rate against the U.S. dollar, in Tokyo, Jan. 18, 2023. In Asian countries, where the impact of competition between China and the U.S. is felt most acutely, experts closely track the shifting power balance between the superpowers.

“The political and policy elites in many Asian countries constantly watch the Chinese economy, and they understand the head winds,” says Li Mingjiang, associate professor in international relations at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “There are doubts now” about how soon – or if – China will surpass the U.S.

“That is one of the reasons they [the elites] want to diversify and they are concerned about overreliance,” Dr. Li says.

China is the biggest trading partner of most Indo-Pacific countries, which see advantages in China’s huge market, infrastructure projects, established supply chains, and ease of negotiating trade agreements, says Dr. Li. 

“China has been very active in participating in and pushing for regional free trade agreements,” he says. But he says there are complaints about the quality of Chinese investments and the low wages, environmental damage, and corruption associated with the projects.

Asian countries also actively seek more trade and investment with the U.S., says Miura Hideyuki, associate professor of international relations at Kyorin University in Tokyo. “We are too dependent on China,” he says.

Yet like many observers in Asia, Dr. Miura says Japan and other countries were “shocked” in 2017 when then-President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama. Many experts consider the U.S. withdrawal a grave strategic mistake.

Japan helped renegotiate the agreement as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and, with other Asia states, has urged the U.S. to join it. China has already applied to join.

“Japan shares a view of most Asian countries, that China is increasing investment and technology and is very intent on increasing its influence in the region,” says Glen Fukushima of the Center for American Progress. “The hope in Japan is that the U.S. will get its act together politically and be able to sustain its role as a leading innovative country” in the region, he says.

Volodymyr Rybalkin, dressed in black and escorted by young soldiers, stands among the rubble of this battle-scarred town chatting with residents as they queue for bread. Appointed head of the Sviatohirsk military administration when Ukrainian troops liberated the area in September, he is overseeing the distribution of food parcels to local residents.

And he is using the opportunity to take the pulse of the community, trying to establish just who did what in Sviatohirsk during the Russian occupation. “We are undertaking stabilization measures,” he says. “Establishing incidents of collaboration is part of that process.”

About 650 people stayed in the town when it fell to the Russian army. Some of them were sympathetic to Moscow – not unusual in this part of eastern Ukraine – but did not necessarily break the law. Others, Mr. Rybalkin is discovering, did cross the line.

Determining who collaborated with Russia has been a top priority for the Ukrainian intelligence services whenever territory is restored to Ukrainian control. The task of identifying and punishing collaborators is complicated by the fact that many of the most important suspects have fled to Russia; others left the region and have melted into the general population elsewhere in Ukraine.

But the authorities have registered 2,319 cases of alleged collaboration in recently liberated areas of Ukraine, according to police figures, and legal proceedings have been launched against 456 suspects.

Ukraine broadened its criminal code in the wake of Russia’s invasion to punish acts of collaboration including fighting alongside enemy troops, assuming positions of authority in occupied territory, or spreading Russian propaganda in classrooms.

In this predominantly Russian-speaking region, close to Moscow-backed separatist republics that emerged from fighting in 2014, “the range of motivations [to collaborate] is quite wide,” says a spokesperson for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the domestic security agency, in an email interview.

Dominique Soguel

A collapsed bridge in Sviatohirsk, Ukraine, Oct. 27, 2022. The bridge was destroyed during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops.

Family ties and friendships can come into play: “Some people just wanted to survive and saw no other way out for themselves. Some were scared. But such cases are few,” the SBU says. “The most important drivers are ideology and money.”

In the nearby town of Lyman, also freed from Russian occupation in Ukraine’s fall offensive, police Chief Igor Ugnyvenko sees nostalgia as a key motivation. “Maybe they were expecting another Soviet Union and sausages for three cents,” he jokes.

“It needs to be done”

Most collaborators took positions in Russia’s occupation administration, such as the law enforcement officers who switched sides, according to the SBU. Last July, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired the SBU chief, citing dozens of cases of collaboration with Russia by officials in the agency.

The security service has set up a telephone hotline and two chatbots, inviting citizens to denounce collaborators and to report Russian war crimes.

Fieldwork is also essential. SBU counterintelligence units are among the first to move into newly liberated towns and villages, asking questions, and local police officers also play a major role gathering intelligence and conducting searches. 

“It needs to be done,” says Olga, a woman working at a charity point in Sviatohirsk who turned down an offer to be evacuated to Russia. While she supports the police work, she is also critical of the town’s “low-life alcoholics” who inform on collaborators hoping to profit no matter who is in charge, and did not want to give her family name.

In high-profile cases, tipoffs are unnecessary. “Most of the enemy’s major supporters are public figures,” the SBU says. “Usually, they are quite active in expressing their support for the enemy.”

In Sviatohirsk, about 10 people tried to build a local administration, according to Mr. Rybalkin, a native of the town who served in the territorial defense forces before being appointed mayor. “Everyone who could be held criminally liable for their collaboration left for Russia,” he says.

Dominique Soguel

Volodymyr Rybalkin, head of the Sviatohirsk military administration, stands in front of property destroyed during the fight to expel Russian forces from the Ukrainian town, Oct. 27, 2022.

Among them was his predecessor, Volodymyr Bandura. “I knew him personally,” says Mr. Rybalkin. “At some point he decided to betray Ukraine. He was very young, and he belonged to a pro-Russian political party. He decided that with Russia he could be more important.”

Mr. Bandura appeared last June in a video posted by the Russian Defense Ministry, promoting Ukraine’s inclusion in a so-called “Russian world.” He has been declared a suspect in a case of high treason.

A focal point for suspicions in Sviatohirsk is the forest-framed Monastery of the Caves, a whitewashed complex with turquoise roofs and golden cupolas embedded into chalk hills that has been a spiritual center for Orthodox Christians since the 16th century.

Its monks are loyal to the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchy, viewed as an agent of Russian influence in Ukraine, and during the fighting with Russian-backed separatists in 2014, they were accused of allowing separatist snipers to shoot from the monastery.

Senior monk Archimandrite Feofan insists, however, that the reports were untrue and that since the invasion the monastery has had no contact with the Russian side, while remaining in constant touch with Ukrainian authorities. Those authorities do not appear to regard the monastery as a threat.

Dominique Soguel

The Sviatohirsk Monastery of the Caves sits on the Siverskyi Donets River, on the edge of Sviatohirsk, Ukraine, Oct. 27, 2022. The monastery carries the scars of artillery duels between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

Protecting the innocent

The hunt for collaborators has spread across the liberated territories in eastern Ukraine. In Lyman, for example, an important railway junction that was a battleground in 2014 and again in 2022, anyone aspiring to return to work for the municipality is subject to a security check.

Volodymyr, an older man with a solid set of gold teeth who did not give his family name for security reasons, pedaled his bike to the police station on a recent rainy day to answer questions. “It took only about 30 minutes,” he reports. “Of course I was treated well; I am Ukrainian. It’s right that they do these checks.”

Most of those who collaborated were older people, says police Chief Igor Ugnyvenko, simply because almost all the younger people had fled Lyman before the Russians arrived. And all those accused of serious collaboration fled the town when the Ukrainian army arrived.

In Izium, where the first priority was to identify those complicit in Russian torture, efforts to identify collaborators are now part of routine police work. “We talk to the locals,” says Izium police Chief Dmytro Griuchak. “They tell us who was pro-Russian, who pro-Ukrainian.”

Relatively new to the post, he says he receives dozens of allegations of collaboration each day. Such tipoffs led to the recent detention of two people who had worked for the “People’s Police,” a Russian-backed entity that did police work in occupied Izium. But not all accusations are serious.

“We are trying to separate real cases of collaboration from those of neighbors trying to settle personal scores,” says Mr. Griuchak. “We need to approach this very carefully in order not to accuse someone who is not at fault and is really innocent. We only want to charge those who are guilty.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this article.

Paul Ratje/Reuters

Venezuelan migrants wave American flags during a protest to demand an end to the immigration policy called Title 42, in downtown El Paso, Texas, Jan. 7, 2023. The recent extension of parole will continue to provide an option for entry for some Venezuelans, though they must arrive by airplane.

Ukrainians fleeing war, Afghans airlifted out of Kabul, Venezuelans escaping political crisis – many recent arrivals to the United States have legally entered through a process called parole.

Parole isn’t technically an immigration status. It’s a temporary state for noncitizens without the promise of long-term residence.

The Department of Homeland Security this month announced that a parole process for Venezuelans will now be extended to vetted nationals of Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua – and their immediate family members. Up to 30,000 individuals from those countries, per month, may come to stay and work for up to two years, but must secure a sponsor for financial support and arrive by airplane.

What is parole?

Parole is a permission of entry that allows certain noncitizens to stay in the U.S. temporarily. Parole can be granted in numerous ways, including at ports of entry like those along the southern border or through a major parole program like the federal Uniting for Ukraine initiative.

The Immigration and Nationality Act states that parole may be granted on a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

An example of “public benefit” could mean granting someone entry to testify as a witness in a trial. The Uniting for Ukraine program, by contrast, has provided a “humanitarian” parole process for Ukrainians since spring 2022. Many Afghans have also been granted humanitarian parole since summer 2021.

To remain in the country lawfully, parolees will need to apply for asylum, pursue other immigration pathways, or try to extend their parole before it expires.

Odelyn Joseph/AP

Haitians line up outside an immigration office waiting to apply for a passport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 10, 2023. President Joe Biden announced an expansion of parole on Jan. 5 for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans that is reserved for those who apply online, pay airfare, and have a financial sponsor.

How does parole compare with asylum or refugee status?

Unlike asylum and refugee status, which may be granted to noncitizens who were persecuted or fear persecution in their country of origin, parole does not provide a direct path to lawful permanent residence in the U.S. 

Generally, parolees aren’t guaranteed federal public benefits, though there are exceptions. Parolees can apply for work authorization, but that can take a while.

Jill Marie Bussey, director for public policy at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a resettlement agency, says it’s been “encouraging” to see U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency that grants parole, streamline and expedite work authorization applications within the last year. In the past, she says, “it would take six, eight months – not six, eight weeks – and sometimes even longer than that” for parolees to secure work permits.

That hints at a larger question, she adds: “How do they stabilize themselves once they enter the community?” 

How political is parole? 

The U.S. has granted parole for decades. The newly announced process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans is part of a broader suite of border changes as Title 42 remains in place. (That court-challenged, pandemic-era public health order was invoked by the Trump administration. Critics say Title 42’s expulsion of asylum-seekers, among other noncitizens at the border, violates their legal right to seek asylum.)

“I think parole is a really useful mechanism for getting people to safety,” even if it doesn’t provide a path to permanence, says Suchi Mathur, senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy group.

However, she adds, the new rules around the expulsion of noncitizens from those four countries seeking protection across the border is “weaponing” the parole process. (If they attempt to cross the border unlawfully, they face expulsion to Mexico.) Requiring these parole-seekers to secure a passport and plane fare means “more well-off immigrants will be privileged.”

Ms. Mathur also argues the monthly cap – 30,000 from four nations, total – “doesn’t really reflect the number of people who are fleeing persecution with very legitimate claims.” 

By contrast, Simon Hankinson disagrees with the expansion of parole and favors more enforcement of immigration law at the border.  

“We can’t solve the social problems – and the economic problems, the political problems – of every country on Earth,” says Mr. Hankinson, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

Plus, he argues, parole is meant for rare, case-by-case use: “I object to this unprecedented attempt to solve a problem through extralegal – or extra-constitutional – means that doesn’t really have a simple solution.”

On that last point, all sides might agree: Little about immigration law is simple.

String lights, boxes full of postcards to share a story, or a sign on the door that lists the top five David Bowie songs with the message, “Come in and argue”: There are many ways to make people happy to come out of the cold and into a public warm space, says Maff Potts. The key, he adds, is to make sure they feel welcome and not judged.

“What gets people in is that it’s not a church. It’s not a charity,” says Mr. Potts, who founded Camerados, a social movement that’s been opening public living rooms in communities across the United Kingdom since 2015. “There’s no fixing, no answer. There’s just permission.”

And this winter, the need for warm banks – or warm spaces, as they are being called to remove any stigma – is high.

With the cold settled in and the war in Ukraine unsettling markets, energy prices are up. While the U.K. Health Security Agency is encouraging people to warm their homes to at least 18 degrees Celsius (64.4 F), more than 3 million low-income households cannot afford to heed this advice. According to analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, around 710,000 households across the U.K. cannot pay for warm clothing, heating, and food, with approximately 2.5 million households – a fifth of all low-income households – going without both food and heating.

And with power prices hitting record levels and energy costs double what they were last year, warm spaces have popped up all over the country. To avoid any potential stigma, they’re being presented as communal spaces where people can come to chat rather than charitable offerings of heat or food. While the main reason someone would go to a warm space or public living room is most likely to be warmth, it’s the camaraderie and conversation that keeps people there. 

Or, as Mr. Potts says, “Less soup and blankets. More friends and purpose.”

Months without access to energy

Britain’s poor people face the worst winter in living memory, tweeted former Prime Minister Gordon Brown in December. “A year ago we talked about people having to choose between heating and eating, now many can’t afford either,” he wrote. Two-thirds of the country will be in fuel poverty come April, which includes 70% of pensioners and 96% of single-parent families with two or more kids, he noted.

Alastair Grant/AP

Protestors from the Fuel Poverty Action group demonstrate in London, Jan. 19, 2023, over the deaths of pensioners who could not afford to heat their homes in winter because of rising fuel costs.

In October, the U.K. raised its energy price cap, the maximum rate a supplier can charge for their default tariffs, by 80%. Gas prices have risen to record levels following Russia’s war on Ukraine. Combined with inflation at over 10% and interest rates and rental costs rising at the highest rates on record, much of the British population is struggling to afford the basics. Fuel poverty and energy efficiency charity National Energy Action (NEA) estimates that there are already 6.7 million households living in fuel poverty. And with bills almost double what they were last winter, 2.4 million people have used credit cards or borrowed money to pay them this year.

If you’re struggling to pay to heat your home, you only really have three options, says Matt Copeland, NEA’s head of policy: You could rack up debt with your energy supplier, ration your energy and use less than you need to stay warm, or simply turn off the heating, the impact of which can be significant. Research shows that more people die from cold homes than they do from alcohol’s short- and long-term effects, Parkinson’s disease, or traffic accidents.

“We know of households with prepayment meters who just can’t afford to top them up at all,” says Mr. Copeland. “They’re going days, weeks, and sometimes months without access to energy. That’s really the worst situation, but unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more common.”

Where the government is failing, communities are stepping up. “It is completely absurd that one of the 10 richest countries in the world can’t put a sufficient priority on things and make the right choices so that we have somewhere to keep people warm,” says Mr. Potts of Camerados, whose public living rooms are now being used as templates for warm spaces around the country. After almost 30 years of working with people at the margins, Mr. Potts says he doesn’t have faith that the solution lies in the civil service.

“Governments might come in for four years, ministers might last a couple. Their ideas are transitory and political. What we need are ideas that last longer than those. And those are coming from communities themselves.”

“People have stuck together”

An LGBTQ+ community space in Brighton. A bakery in North Yorkshire. A gaming cafe and “geek culture” store in Ipswich. A vegetarian restaurant in Tunbridge Wells. A brewery in Devon. A former shoe store in Worcestershire. Warm spaces are popping up all around the country, in all manner of ways, in a community effort that started organically, from the grassroots, without a central organizer.

In addition to community halls and churches, hotels, hairdressers, and cricket clubs are opening up their doors for anyone who needs some warmth, some company, and perhaps even a drink. Even legendary soccer club Manchester United has gotten in on the action and is offering Old Trafford, the club’s stadium, as a free warm hub, with its restaurant, the Red Café, opening its doors on Monday and Wednesday evenings “to help those facing difficult months ahead.”

The Warm Welcome campaign, an organization that has encouraged thousands of faith groups, charities, and businesses to provide such public spaces, said they’d seen 80,000 people use their facilities during December’s cold snap. The campaign notes that there are now warm spaces in every town and city in the country, and lists over 3,200 venues on their website, which include spaces run by local authorities, charities, and businesses. More than half of the 355 councils (local governments) in England and Wales are setting up or supporting groups to open warm spaces.

“What we have in Brighton and Hove is a tremendous community-mindedness among residents. Despite the stark reality facing residents this winter, people have stuck together and they’ve really helped each other through some of the starkest problems,” says Brighton and Hove City Council Leader Phélim Mac Cafferty, who notes there are more than 40 warm spaces available to the public across the city. “Without the goodwill, the solidarity, the community aspiration around all of this, we’d be nowhere.”

This nationwide response to the energy crisis is unique in how much of a community effort it is. The effort to create warm spaces was neither government- nor council-led, nor the work of any one particular organization. As the need became obvious, first volunteers, then organizations, and later local councils jumped in feet first.

Both public and private money is funding the warm banks initiative to ensure that the most vulnerable – particularly children and the elderly – are not forced to sit in unheated homes through the winter months. Several venues offer free or discounted drinks, and many have planned activities for visitors who may be battling isolation in addition to the cold.

Mr. Potts says his organization’s efforts are most popular in towns that get very little help and are often seen as hopeless. Camerados’ open living rooms, which have spread internationally, tend to be in places where people expect to have to rely on themselves. “The warm banks campaign is exactly that,” he says. “Help isn’t coming. And so we’re just going to get on with it.”

But often, Mr. Potts suggests, making an effort ends up making a difference.

“Lately,” Mr. Potts says, “I’ve been doing pavement living rooms. I turn up in a town with a van full of furniture, and I put it on the pavement and just talk to everyone who goes by. We don’t ask for permission. I suppose it’s illegal. [But] every time the police come, well, ... they sit down and join us.”

Reuters

A bicyclist rides near the Eiffel Tower.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide several cases on the regulation of social media platforms, raising questions about the limits of free speech and the internet’s capacity to spread information that can cause harm. The European Union already compels internet companies to filter content promoting hateful or terrorist ideologies.

Yet during the pandemic, which deepened parallel crises of loneliness and mental health, another discussion about social media has been gaining momentum – one that may help curb the effects of disinformation not by limiting freedom, but by expanding it. That discussion requires a different metric: happiness.

Take, for example, a study published by Nature journal’s Scientific Reports last week. It found that an uptick in bicycling during and since the pandemic, more as a means of transportation than exercise, has an unanticipated social dividend. By breaking isolation and contributing to environmental well-being, it has made people happier.

A similar “simple and profound conclusion” has emerged in a Harvard University survey that has been running continuously since 1938. The study’s directors, Professors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, note that prior to the pandemic the average American spent 11 hours a day engaged in solitary activities such as media consumption. That number likely rose during the isolation of COVID-19. Breaking those isolating habits, they wrote in the Atlantic, amounts to a kind of social fitness. “Good relationships lead to health and happiness,” they wrote. “The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.”

Gianna Biscontini, a behavioral scientist, agrees. Her decision to leave social media, she wrote in Newsweek, has resulted in stronger relationships, more curiosity, and balance. “These days, I call my friends,” she wrote. “Sometimes they answer and sometimes they don’t. But when they do ... I find myself smiling and excited to speak to them – a feeling I never experienced with social media.”

The internet cases before the Supreme Court may result in a profound turning point for free speech in the digital era. Or not. But statistics pointing to a leveling off or even modest decline in social media use, coupled with large-scale layoffs at companies like Meta (Facebook) and Google, hint at shifting social attitudes about individual and civic health. Self-government based on discretion, selflessness, and caring needs no further restraint. Its outcome can be joy instead of social division.