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Agriculture
This article is based on a new program called Alba that trains aspiring farmers and rents this land to them for as little as $130 per quarter acre per year. The article explains that Alba is an incubator farm program that lease land to aspiring farmers at affordable rental rates.

This article is related to the research I did for my case study because it focuses on the new advances that agriculture is beginning to develop as well as helping the economy by helping farm workers grow and become part of the farming industry. This helped further their education too based on teaching them about how to run a business.

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In California, near immense industrial farms, small plots are rented out to field laborers so they can try to create their own farm businesses.

By

Mr. Magdaleno, who lives in Ecuador and California, writes about immigration in Latin America and the United States.

Gerardo Acevedo of Acevedo Organic Farm loading strawberries onto his truck. Last year, he leased 60 acres in California's Central Coast area with two other graduates of the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association. Credit... Johnny Magdaleno

SALINAS, Calif. - The Salinas Valley is known for its enormous industrial farms that grow produce like lettuce and broccoli. But just southeast of the city of Salinas, a patchwork of much smaller organic fruit and vegetable fields breaks the industrial sprawl.

Start-up farmers tend these fields morning, afternoon and night. When the sun sets, they pull out headlamps and cellphones to illuminate their rows of crops.

Reyna Manriquez is one of those farmers. The 24-year-old manages three-quarters of an acre here - her very first farm. She arrives in the late afternoon after harvesting strawberries for an agriculture company nearby.

Ms. Manriquez is a recent graduate of the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, referred to here as Alba, which trains aspiring farmers and rents this land to them for as little as $130 per quarter acre per year.

"I've learned a lot here that I never would have known," said Ms. Manriquez, who sells bunches of fava beans and crates of mixed vegetables through her farm's Facebook page. "If I had just stayed picking strawberries, the only thing I'd know how to do is pick strawberries."

Alba is an incubator farm: a newer form of farmer training program that leases land to aspiring farmers at affordable rental rates. Some of these programs also connect farmers with business training. Nearly 200 such incubators have popped up throughout the United States in recent decades, according to the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at Tufts University.

Data is limited, but Tufts University surveys show that 40 to 60 percent of participants are still farming after they graduate these programs. Alba reports a similar success rate. "When I talk about incubator farms or any training programs, they're on the shelf with other successful models," said Juli Obudzinski, the interim policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, referring to Alba. "They're doing something right."

Starting a business in any industry is challenging. Bigger companies dominate, equipment is expensive, prices swing wildly. But farmers also have to worry about crop diseases and extreme weather events like droughts and floods. That cocktail is what makes agriculture such a demanding industry, and partly explains why farmers and farmland are on the decline across the country.

According to the Agriculture Department's most recent agriculture census, total farmland in the United States shrank by 21.9 million acres between 2007 and 2017. There are also 162,572 fewer farms than there were in 2007. Lori Sallet, the media relations director at the American Farmland Trust, said that urban expansion and the opportunity it presents for farmland owners to make real estate deals with developers drive this decline.

On the positive side, other Agriculture Department data says that more than a quarter of American farmers are beginners who started between 2007 and 2017. But newer farmers usually struggle to acquire the quality land and machinery that are within reach of industrial farmers or heritage farming families with big harvests and well-established businesses.

Alba and other incubator farms try to bridge that gap. They connect beginning farmers with these resources on affordable terms so they can see whether they actually like farming before committing to it as a career.

Alba trainees "go through a training course that is very thorough and will prepare them for what it's like to be out in a competitive farming environment," said Vivian Soffa, the executive director at the Agriculture Department's branch in Monterey County, Calif. After they graduate, Alba puts them in touch with peer organizations that help them fine-tune their business plans and find financing for farm real estate.

"I don't like to see people lose their entire life savings because they want to become a farmer, and this program really helps with that," Ms. Soffa said.

Alba students begin by applying for the program's ten-month training course, which teaches everything from business management, to meeting organic standards, to marketing. Tuition is based on the student's income and the number of dependents he or she cares for; the unsubsidized cost is $2,400, but most attendees pay about $300 for the entire course.

Graduates of the training course are then invited to pitch their farm idea to a selection committee for the incubator. If you demonstrate the grit needed to make a living out in the fields, you're granted a yearlong lease - usually to rent a half-acre at first - on Alba's 100-acre property.

The market rental rate of Alba's land is about $2,100 per acre per year, but first-year students pay 25 percent of that rate. From there, farmers get bumped up to larger plots based on their performance. With each bump comes a rise in rent. Those who make it through the roughly four year long incubator usually end with a little under four acres to their name, renting at 85 percent of the market value.

"In talking to beginning farmers and anyone working in the field, land access always comes up as one of the most challenging pieces," said Ms. Obudzinski. "The incubator approach is pretty unique in that it takes that off the table and provides farmers access, albeit for a short period of time."

Many of Alba's students are Latinos who followed their families, or traveled on their own, to California to work in the state's multibillion dollar agricultural industry. About 70 percent are immigrants. "From our perspective, farmworkers are a great group to recruit from for the next generation of farmers," said Nathan Harkleroad, a program director at Alba. "They grew up around it and know the work that goes into it."

An Alba student, Ramiro Cenobio, and his brother Juan Carlos used to tend their father's small farm in Oaxaca, Mexico, when they were younger. Years later, Ramiro left a job picking strawberries in California and applied for Alba. The brothers now work on building up Cenobio Organics, their first farm business, where they're growing cilantro, tomatoes, carrots and strawberries.

Mr. Cenobio only makes about as much as he did when he was a field worker, but he said the jump to become an entrepreneur was worth it. "I prefer being focused on something that I'm creating myself than to be working for another company," said Mr. Cenobio, who is looking forward to graduating from Alba in the coming year.

In a 2018 survey of 104 alumni who had graduated from the business training course over the past two decades, 49 still had active farm businesses. Sixteen of those were running their businesses from Alba's incubator farm while 33 had moved on to land outside the incubator. All together they employ a total of 175 people and generate about $5 million annually in sales.

Most of those who didn't choose to open a farm outside Alba reported increases in their income after graduating and returning to jobs in agriculture and other industries.

Ana Melissa Garcia was running a bakery when she found out about Alba. She said farmers in the program's incubator were among the few purveyors of organic produce in the Salinas area. She sold her bakery, applied to Alba and started farming alongside them.

There, she built up a farm business selling edible flowers and herbs to restaurateurs in San Francisco. That enterprise was bought by another farm, but her experience at Alba helped her advance into supervisory roles at nearby produce companies.

Today she manages organic broccoli farmers in Mexico. "I came a long way," she said. "They taught me a lot - not just how to grow, but the business part."

Alba alone can't solve every new farmer's challenges. Real estate prices rippling out from Silicon Valley, and the grip that commodity farms have on good land throughout California's Central Coast, make obtaining farmland around Salinas a major hurdle.

A 2016 study by the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management notes that even those Alba graduates that do find plots of land nearby still face many barriers. Among them are short-term or insecure rental agreements that discourage long-term planting, and a lack of access to financing and legal advice.

"Not only do you have to farm exceptionally well, but you have to be a savvy entrepreneur, you have to be good at marketing, you have to be good at acquiring finances," said Mr. Adam Calo, one of the study's authors. Alba helps farmers acquire those skills, "but after the incubator the realities of the land market create a barrier that only those with lots of capital and privilege can overcome."

Jennifer Hashley, the director of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at Tufts University, says incubator programs throughout the country are grappling with these issues. They're exploring ways to connect graduates with networks of partners that can address land and capital needs as their businesses advance.

"They're still beginning farmers, but they're maturing farmers," said Ms. Hashley. "That requires a different set of assistance than helping some bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, young person into agriculture."

Incubators aren't the only programs that can prepare new farmers for the industry, Ms. Obudzinski said. Since 2008, the Department of Agriculture's Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, the largest funding source for farmer training assistance in the country, has invested over $160 million in an array of mentorship and training programs.

Many of those don't lease land to start farm businesses. "I think it is one tool, but it certainly isn't the only way," Ms. Obudzinski, from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said.

Yet Alba graduates and current students say the program matters, even if securing land afterward isn't a guarantee. "Alba gets you started," said Javier Zamora, who launched his company, JSM Organic Farms, with Alba's support.

Mr. Zamora, an immigrant from the Mexican state of Michoacán, now leases 44 acres of farmland along the southern edge of Silicon Valley. He's one of a handful of immigrant farm entrepreneurs who have graduated Alba in recent years and gone on to acquire land with help from California FarmLink - a financial institution that has provided $5.2 million in loans to Alba graduates.

Acevedo Organic Farm, Silva Organic Farms and Chelito Organics leased their first shared 60 acres south of Silicon Valley in 2018 and are being supported by operating loans through FarmLink. La Granjita Orgánica, started by a former farmworker, Victor Cortes, and his wife Veronica Ceja in 2014, also used FarmLink debt to purchase its first 11 acres nearby last year.

"I think that if we don't do more things like what Alba has done, preserving some land to stay in agriculture or allowing future generations to have agricultural land to farm, your kids and their grandkids will face very serious issues accessing local food," said Mr. Zamora, who is now an Alba board member.

That's what drew Ms. Manriquez, the recent graduate, to apply. Her business, La Key Farms, is a passion project for now - a few long rows of crop lines that her boyfriend and little brother help weed in the dusk.

But if it picks up steam she'll launch it outside the incubator as a small, community-focused farm, selling produce herself and leaving her strawberry-picking days in the past.

Johnny Magdaleno is a journalist and photographer who focuses on human rights and the environment.
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Opinion | Turning Farm Workers Into Farmers

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In California, near immense industrial farms, small plots are rented out to field laborers so they can try to create their own farm businesses. By Mr. Magdaleno, who lives in Ecuador and California, writes about immigration in Latin America and the United States. SALINAS, Calif.

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Bolivia
This article talks about how the indigenous people of Bolivia don’t want Evo Morales to quite because he is their voice. The main point is to illustrate that the indigenous groups are willing to travel 30 miles to join the blockade. This is due to them trying to keep the coca from being banned due to the stereotype that it is only used for cocaine but the indigenous people have used to for other resources.

This relates to the case study that a class mate talked about in class. But it is also important because it relates to the globalization topic based on the opinion Evo had on not joining forces with the United Sates to try to better their economy.

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In the coca-growing region where the former Bolivian president got his political start, farmers are loyal to him - and demanding his return.

Protests in support of the former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales. Credit... Federico Rios for The New York Times

By

Photographs by

It's also where the headquarters of resistance to Bolivia's new interim government is found.

Thousands of coca farmers - including children - are camped around the town's strategic river bridge, obstructing Bolivia's main highway and paralyzing its national economy. With no movement of goods, there are food and fuel shortages in major cities.

"Evo Morales is like a father to us," said Antonietta Ledezi, a coca farmer who traveled 30 miles to Villa Tunari to join the blockade two weeks ago. "If he doesn't return, there won't be peace."

Bolivia this week began to move toward resolving the vicious political crisis that led to Mr. Morales's resignation from office earlier this month after 14 years as president. His downfall came after violent protests over a disputed election that he claimed to win, and after he had lost the backing of the military and the police.

New elections - in which Mr. Morales is barred from running - are planned.

But farmers here in Villa Tunari, which I reached on a reporting trip in recent days, are determined to fight on for the return of their exiled leader.

For the 50,000 local coca farming families, the ousting of Mr. Morales represents more than the end of a government that gave them a political voice and vast improvements in infrastructure, education and health. It is a threat to the peace that Mr. Morales, called Evo by everyone here, brought to this stigmatized and violent region.

A mere mention of Evo can unleash uncontrolled wailing at the barricades. Many remember him personally as a fellow coca farmer who rose to become the president of the confederation of local coca unions, a title he nominally holds to this day.

"He was the only president we have ever seen," said Gregorio Choque, a coca farmer. "He was in the fields with us."

Farmers began to converge on Villa Tunari on Nov. 10, the day Mr. Morales announced his resignation from the country's presidency at the nearby headquarters of the coca confederation, an act that turned this gentrifying tourism hot spot into a war camp.

The next day, Mr. Morales fled the country to seek asylum in Mexico, departing from an airport in the coca region.

Bolivia's Indigenous people have used coca plants for centuries to fight fatigue and hunger, but the plant is also the raw material for cocaine. On coming to power, Mr. Morales legalized coca production for traditional use, but put in place strict output limits.

Under his rule, coca production in the region, Chapare, fell despite a large increase in the farming population and global cocaine demand, according to the United Nations. Local unions today regulate the planting area to protect prices and prevent excess crops going to cocaine labs.

These policies brought economic stability that allowed farmers to diversify into other crops. They also brought social peace after decades of territorial infighting and repression by the military's coca eradication squads.

Mr. Morales's party got 90 percent of the vote in Chapare in the last elections in October. But not everyone here supports the blockade.

The tension is largely generational. Many of the region's older coca farmers have since invested in shops, small hotels and restaurants in Villa Tunari, becoming the town's new middle class and helping to convert it into an outdoor tourism hub.

Now, as the blockade grinds into its third week, the town's shuttered hotels are already looking worn down, with jungle vegetation growing freely around abandoned swimming pools. Empty restaurants are cooking one meal a day with firewood.

Locals without land have also been hard hit. Nora Choque, who works in a motel, last week began walking with her two small children to the closest city, Cochabamba, 100 miles up the mountains, because she said she had run out of food.

"There's nothing left for us here," she said, as she trudged through Villa Tunari in the afternoon heat.

The blockade has also swept up unexpected bystanders.

Groups of Chinese road builders sat gloomily by their isolated campsites on the blockaded highway. Families of Haitian labor migrants heading on foot to Chile sat stranded in a tollbooth. A lone European backpacker scoured for food amid the barricades near Villa Tunari's hostel.

The barricades fully come to life at dusk.

With a reprieve from the heat, the blocked-off road becomes a bustling human sea. Street sellers appear out of nowhere with steaming pots of giant corn kernels, freeze-dried baby potatoes, yucca and spicy peanut sauce for those with a couple spare dollars. Those less fortunate chew on the coca leaf to beat the hunger.

After dinner, the union members gather for a roll call and a discussion, usually in the local Quechua language, of the day's political news from La Paz, before setting down to rest on the asphalt or bare earth under skimpy tarps or tree branches.

The silence of the road at night is occasionally broken by the screeching of buses carrying reinforcements to the protest's front line, outside Cochabamba.

"It's tough being here, while our crops rot in the fields," said Serafino Oliveros, a coca farmer, while perched under a six-foot wet tarp with four union companions. "But we understand that this is a necessary sacrifice so that our children have the same rights we had under Evo."

Norman Chinchilla contributed reporting from Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Cesar Del Castillo from La Paz.

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In the coca-growing region where the former Bolivian president got his political start, farmers are loyal to him - and demanding his return. By Photographs by It's also where the headquarters of resistance to Bolivia's new interim government is found.

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Education
This article discusses the New plan for K-12 that is expensive and expansive. It also talked about the elimination of high state testing that would prevent categorizing children from certain levels of advance, medium, and low. As well as how the act of no child left behind just was left alone after a couple of years.

This article relates to globalization in education because there’s new programs every year that are supposed to help children achieve their educational success. The factor that globalization plays in certain parts of the world or even in the U.S affects more children who come from poor backgrounds that don’t have the advantages that other kids have such as attending camps to help them read, write, or do extra curriculum activities.

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Her K-12 proposal includes ending such testing, but there's less than meets the eye.

Senator Elizabeth Warren with striking teachers in Chicago on Tuesday. Credit... Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated Press

On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released a plan for K-12 education. It is expansive and expensive, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for impoverished children, aggressive efforts to promote racial integration, and sharp limits on federal support for charter schools.

Ms. Warren also pledged to "eliminate high-stakes testing," a promise that has appeal to the public, which has widespread misgivings about such testing. She declared, "As president, I'll push to prohibit the use of standardized testing as a primary or significant factor in closing a school, firing a teacher, or making any other high-stakes decisions."

That language sounds like a blow against the school reform movement, which has long championed holding schools accountable for test scores, especially the achievement of low-income and minority students. But when pressed on the issue, the Warren campaign responded in a way that suggests her plan would do almost nothing to alter the use of standardized testing in K-12 schools.

The key words here are "significant factor" and "other high-stakes decisions." To understand why, we need to go back to 2015, when Congress was in the middle of contentious negotiations over revising the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The previous version of the act, the No Child Left Behind Act, passed Congress with wide bipartisan support in 2001 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush, who enthusiastically supported school reform. It required states to administer standardized math and reading tests in Grades 3 through 8, and once in high school. Schools where too few students scored as "proficient" on the tests were subject to an escalating series of interventions and sanctions.

Over time, No Child Left Behind became deeply unpopular. Critics said it was unjust to hold schools educating students from vastly different social and economic circumstances to the same standards. People also objected to using tests as the sole measure of school performance. When negotiators convened in 2015, it was clear that the heavy reliance on standardized testing would need to be scaled back. The question was how much.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the powerful chairman of the Senate Education Committee, was on the side of those deferring to the longstanding role states have played in financing and governing K-12 schools. If states didn't want to use standardized tests, he believed, the federal government shouldn't compel them. Mr. Alexander, a Republican, was joined by national teachers' unions, which saw No Child Left Behind as a punitive law that unfairly demonized their members.

On the other side were Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House education committees, and the Obama administration. They believed it was crucial for standardized tests to remain the backbone of school accountability, for the same reason that schools don't let high schoolers grade their own algebra exams and the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn't let corporations invent their own accounting rules. Accountability requires objectivity. That's why the tests are standardized and scored by state departments of education.

Ms. Murray, Mr. Scott and Obama administration officials were especially concerned with the progress of low-income and minority children, students with disabilities, and those from families where English was not the primary language spoken at home. Historically, states left to their own devices have not always acted with the best interests of such children in mind.

At one point in the 2015 negotiations, Ms. Warren voted against a version of the bill because, she later said, it lacked "minimum safeguards" and needed "stronger accountability" to ensure that federal dollars reached "those schools and students who needed them most." It was a view of accountability substantially based on standardized tests.

A protracted debate over language threatened to scuttle the whole deal. Obama administration officials wanted tests to be the "primary" method of measuring school success. Republicans and the teachers' unions pushed back. The final compromise allowed states to include several additional measures in their school ratings, including high school graduation rates and metrics of student growth on tests, which give credit when scores improve but still fall short of proficiency.

Each of these indicators must be given "substantial weight" and, collectively, "much greater" weight than another set of newly added indicators that include measures of school safety and student "engagement."

That's why Senator Warren's use of the phrases "significant factor" and "high-stakes decisions" could be, in theory, a big deal. "Significant" sounds a lot like "substantial," and the identification of low-performing schools for interventions and penalties is generally what people mean when they refer to, or call for the elimination of, "high-stakes testing."

And yet, when pressed on this question, the Warren campaign repeatedly declined to confirm that those words mean what they seem to mean. A Warren aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not say that the Warren plan changes or undoes the 2015 compromise. Instead, the aide referred back to the specific examples cited in the plan, saying that Ms. Warren does not believe tests should be used to close schools or fire teachers.

That means the Warren plan, if enacted, would change very little, because standardized tests are hardly ever used to close schools or fire teachers today. According to Chad Aldeman, an analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, only 231 of the nation's 98,000 public schools were taken over by the state because of bad test scores during the No Child Left Behind years. Of those, nearly 80 percent were in a single state, Hawaii, which lacks local school districts to do the taking over. Fewer still were converted to charter schools. Even after the Obama administration pushed states to create teacher evaluation systems that incorporated some test data, real-world examples of test-driven systems being used to fire teachers are practically nonexistent.

Two-thirds of public school parents say there is "too much emphasis" on standardized tests in their community's schools. Nearly half believe parents should be able to excuse their children from taking such tests, a sentiment fueling the testing "Opt Out" movement in New York and elsewhere. President Obama called for a cap on the amount of time students spend taking tests, a move Ms. Warren supported.

While the other major Democratic presidential candidates haven't included similar anti-testing language in their platforms, they have also shied away from the kind of strong accountability stances that previous presidents of both parties have embraced.

Yet every state continues to use tests to rate schools and provide the public with information about student learning. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, despite her enthusiasm for private school vouchers, has duly implemented the accountability compromise of 2015. High-stakes standardized tests are a durable, integral part of modern K-12 education. And that's something that Ms. Warren does not really seem willing to change.

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America. You can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarey1.

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Warren's Education Plan, and Why High-Stakes Testing Seems Here to Stay

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Her K-12 proposal includes ending such testing, but there's less than meets the eye. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released a plan for K-12 education. It is expansive and expensive, calling for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for impoverished children, aggressive efforts to promote racial integration, and sharp limits on federal support for charter schools.

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Technology
The article explains, that China and the U.S are not only dividing in trade but as well in the digital market known as the digital Berling Wall. For 40 years’ prosperity and accelerations in technology and globalization has benefited both countries, however it has come to an end due to mutual efforts by the United states and China to exclude one another.

This relates to globalization because the new technology advances are happening and both countries as well as across borders. This topic relates to the book ancient futures in a way because in the book they begin to introduce new advances such as technology in solar panels.

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The U.S.-China divide isn't just about trade.

The site of a meeting in June between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

SINGAPORE - One of the most negative byproducts of the Trump presidency is that all we talk about now is Donald Trump. Don't get me wrong: How can we not be fixated on a president who daily undermines the twin pillars of our democracy: truth and trust?

But there are some tectonic changes underway behind the Trump noise machine that demand a serious national discussion, like the future of U.S.-China relations. Yet it's not happening - because all we talk about is Donald Trump.

Consider this: On Nov. 9, European leaders gathered in Berlin to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an anniversary worth celebrating. But no one seemed to notice that almost exactly 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new wall - a digital Berlin Wall - had begun to be erected between China and America. And the only thing left to be determined, a Chinese business executive remarked to me, "is how high this wall will be," and which countries will choose to be on which side.

This new wall, separating a U.S.-led technology and trade zone from a Chinese-led one, will have implications as vast as the wall bisecting Berlin did. Because the peace, prosperity and accelerations in technology and globalization that have so benefited the world over the past 40 years were due, in part, to the interweaving of the U.S. and Chinese economies.

The messy, ad hoc decoupling of these two economies, driven by miscalculations by leaders on both sides, will surely disrupt those trends and the costs could be huge. We might want to talk about that.

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson gave a speech here a year ago trying to kick-start that discussion. "For 40 years," Paulson noted, "the U.S.-China relationship has been characterized by the integration of four things: goods, capital, technology and people. And over these 40 years, economic integration between the two countries was supposed to mitigate security competition. But an intellectually honest appraisal must now admit both that this hasn't happened and that the reverse is taking place."

That reversal is happening for two reasons. First, because the U.S. is - rightly - no longer willing to accept China's unfair trade restrictions on importing of U.S. goods and its stealing of the intellectual property of U.S. firms - something we tolerated for many years before China became a technology powerhouse.

And second, because, now that China is a technology powerhouse - and technological products all have both economic and military applications, unlike the toys, T-shirts and tennis shoes that used to dominate our trade - the two sides are struggling to figure out what to buy and sell from and to each other, without damaging their national security.

The net result, argued Paulson, is that "after 40 years of integration, a surprising number of political and thought leaders on both sides advocate policies that could forcibly de-integrate the two countries across all four of these baskets." And if that trend continues, "we need to consider the possibility that the integration of global innovation ecosystems will collapse as a result of mutual efforts by the United States and China to exclude one another."

That, Paulson concluded, is "why I now see the prospect of an Economic Iron Curtain - one that throws up new walls on each side and unmakes the global economy, as we have known it." Yikes!

One could argue that a digital Berlin Wall began rising years ago when China created its Great Firewall to seal off the internet inside China from the global internet - so Beijing could censor all news and online internal discussions, freezing out Google, Facebook and Twitter. China, as well as other countries, has also begun ring-fencing certain data pools, software and technology stacks to make sure that all of them, or at least key elements, are stored on domestic servers and not accessible from abroad.

But the digital Berlin Wall took a big step up on May 17, when Trump placed China's Huawei - the world's second-largest maker of smartphones and the world's largest manufacturer of 5G telecom equipment - on the U.S. "Entity List."

That meant that China's most important technology manufacturer and scores of its affiliates across the globe were blacklisted and could no longer buy parts from their major U.S. suppliers - such as Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Micron and Microsoft - without a special license. U.S. officials argued that Huawei was guilty of facilitating Chinese espionage - or would do so in the future if China's government asked it to - and had engaged in fraud, technology theft and violations on U.S. sanctions against Iran.

However much justified, this move was the equivalent of China freezing out Apple and Microsoft. In was an earthquake in China's tech lands. It "woke up everybody in China," a prominent Chinese telecom executive told me. "We now have to think about this world differently," the executive explained. "We need to build on a mix of our own technologies to be sure that we are safe. They totally underestimated what they have done."

Lots of Chinese tech companies are now thinking: We will never, ever, ever leave ourselves again in a situation where we are totally dependent on America for key components. Time to double down on making our own.

At the same time, U.S. manufacturers are saying to themselves: We'd better think twice about building our next factory in China or solely depending on a supply chain from there.

The ripping sound you hear is the sound of two giant economies starting to decouple.

And now that tear is moving to people. Since June 11, the State Department has been restricting visas for Chinese graduate students studying in sensitive fields - like aviation, robotics and advanced manufacturing - to one year, instead of five years. There has also been a crackdown on Chinese investments in anything close to American infrastructure or military-related industries.

On June 25, M.I.T.'s president, L. Rafael Reif, warned the M.I.T. community that "looking at cases across the nation, small numbers of researchers of Chinese background may indeed have acted in bad faith, but they are the exception and very far from the rule. Yet faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge - because of their Chinese ethnicity alone."

Protracted visa delays and "harsh rhetoric against most immigrants," Reif added, are sending a message that "the U.S. is closing the door - that we no longer seek to be a magnet for the world's most driven and creative individuals."

Over dinner last week in Bangalore, India, with a group of young Indian tech starter-uppers, I heard this message: The number of people who want to stay in India and work on local start-ups versus going to the U.S. has sharply increased in the last two years. And many of those who do go abroad now prefer Canada and Australia over America. We will pay a price for that over time.

This decoupling is not all Trump's fault - not by a long shot. China's president, Xi Jinping, also overplayed his hand, taking over islands in the South China Sea, announcing plans to invest massive amounts so China can dominate critical technologies of the 21st century, and worse, tightening Communist Party rule over Hong Kong and horrendously sending Muslims in Western China to "re-education" camps. He's also resisting pressures to reduce China's most abusive trade practices.

The country benefited tremendously from the globalization system that the U.S. and its allies built since World War II, but Beijing has often been grudging about making any sacrifices to maintain it.

Speaking broadly about America's role in the world versus China's, a senior Indian diplomat remarked: "America has been fighting without winning for 20 years. China has been winning without fighting for 20 years."

All this has fed a backlash in the U.S., where even Democrats are now supporting Trump's hard line on China. "There's a very quiet debate in China in the party on who lost America," Jim McGregor, chairman of APCO Worldwide for greater China, said during the recent Times DealBook conference discussion on China. "The extreme direction China has gone has really pushed America away."

What to do?

I am not blasé about letting China sell technologies in America that might be used for espionage, but I am increasingly of the view that everyone spies on everyone - and always will. I am increasingly of the view that while surely some Chinese students are engaged in espionage, a vast majority are not, and their talents nourish our industries and schools. And I am increasingly worried that by imposing more and more export and visa controls we will be cutting ourselves off from the access we need to the global investment pools, customers and collaborative scientists and engineers to maintain our technological lead.

I still believe that the most open systems win - they get all the signals of change first, they attract the most high-I.Q. risk-takers/innovators and they enrich and are enriched by the most global flows of talent, ideas and capital. That used to be us.

We need to pause and ask ourselves exactly where we are heading with this whole tech/trade war with China. And Beijing needs to do the same.

China is our economic competitor, economic partner, source of talent and capital, geopolitical rival, collaborator and serial rule-breaker. It is not our enemy or our friend.

The only effective way to manage a relationship this complex is: 1) with an all-of-government approach. You can't have the Justice Department doing one thing, the Pentagon another, the Treasury another, the trade negotiators another, the State Department another and the president tweeting another. There has to be a tightly coordinated strategy to get the best out of this relationship and cushion the worst. And 2), we need as many Pacific and European allies as possible so it's "The Whole World Versus China" on the right rules for trade and technology integration in the 21st century, not just Trump versus Xi over who has the biggest tariff.

Unfortunately, Trump has deployed a totally disjointed, impulsive "America First" strategy that has ended up "America Alone" - and weaker. And Xi has been no better. So a relationship that the world needs to work, to drive growth and deal with global problems like climate change, is slowly unraveling. We will miss it when it's gone.

Or, as Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean academic, former diplomat and author of the forthcoming book "Has China Won?" said to me: "I wonder if one day future historians will look back at this contest between Americans and Chinese and compare them to two families of apes fighting with each other while the forest around them is burning."
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