In 2016, Taiwan’s president called Donald J. Trump to congratulate him after he won the presidential election. Mr. Trump took the call, becoming the first American president or president-elect to speak to a Taiwanese leader in decades.

This time, after Mr. Trump won a second term in the White House, Taiwan was quick to deny reports that its current leader, Lai Ching-te, was seeking a similar phone call with the president-elect.

The contrast was telling.

Taiwan appears to be preparing for a more delicate, possibly testy, relationship with Mr. Trump upon his return to the White House. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump had suggested that Taiwan should pay the United States for helping defend the island from China, and complained that Taiwan had stolen America’s business in semiconductors.

“There is more anxiety this time” in Taiwan about Mr. Trump taking office, Chen Ming-chi, a former senior adviser on Taiwan’s National Security Council, said in an interview.

By “declaring that we are not going to seek a congratulatory phone call, that means we are more realistic,” said Professor Chen, who teaches at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University. Mr. Lai issued a congratulatory statement about Mr. Trump’s victory.

Tensions between Beijing and Taipei are high, with frequent Chinese military drills stoking fears of an accidental conflict. A call with Mr. Trump could prompt a forceful reaction from China, which claims the island as its territory and resents whenever Taiwan acts like, or is treated as, a sovereign nation.

For instance, that 2016 call between Mr. Trump and Tsai Ing-wen, who was then Taiwan’s president, drew condemnation from China. The United States had avoided leader-level contacts with Taiwan after it severed ties in 1979 to switch to recognition of China.

The call was only the first of several notable steps by Mr. Trump that bolstered U.S. support for Taiwan.

His administration later increased weapons sales to Taiwan and sent senior officials to visit, in defiance of Beijing’s complaints. Such moves gained Mr. Trump wide popularity in Taiwan even as much of the world soured on American leadership under him.

Now, Taiwan is also on the receiving end of Mr. Trump’s bluntly transactional diplomacy. And the lack of formal relations means Taiwan’s president, Mr. Lai, won’t get to make his case in a face-to-face meeting with the new U.S. leader.

Mr. Trump’s complaints about Taiwan’s military spending and semiconductor industry are adding to the pressure on Taiwan to buy more American weapons and increase investment in building chip plants in the United States.

“You know, Taiwan, they stole our chip business, OK?” he said on a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a popular podcast. “They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?”

Professor Chen, the former security adviser, said Taiwan would have to adjust its approach to securing the support of the United States and its allies.

“In the past few years, we built our value on two things: democracy and chips,” he said. “But democracy is not a focus of the coming Trump administration, and the chips have turned from our advantage to a bit of a problem, because Trump says we are stealing jobs.”

Taiwan’s trade may also suffer if President-elect Trump acts on vows to steeply increase tariffs on goods imported into the United States. And some in Taiwan worry that Mr. Trump may lose sight of the island’s concerns as he focuses on his relationship — part pugilistic, part admiring — with China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping.

Despite Taiwan’s lack of formal diplomatic relationship with Washington, it relies on U.S. support to counter China’s growing power and military pressure. The partnership deepened under President Trump in his first term and then under President Biden, while U.S. rivalry with China intensified.

Taiwanese officials have long sought to work closely with both Republicans and Democrats, and are sure to try to build bridges with Mr. Trump’s nominees for his next administration.

Taiwan has already been raising its military spending, partly under pressure from Washington. This year’s proposed budget would increase Taiwan’s outlays on defense to about 2.6 percent of the island’s total economic output. But Mr. Trump has said that Taiwan should raise military spending to 10 percent of its gross domestic product.

Sharply increasing military spending could be politically difficult for Taiwan’s president, Mr. Lai. His party does not have a majority in the legislature, and Mr. Lai also wants to spend more on domestic priorities, such as green energy.

Mr. Trump has signaled doubt as to how quickly and effectively the United States could help defend against a Chinese invasion. “Taiwan’s a tough situation,” Mr. Trump told The Washington Post. “Don’t forget, it’s 9,000 miles away” from the United States, he said.

Such comments are “a certain way to say, listen, you have to increase your defense budget. That means you buy more American weapons,” said Miles Yu, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was a China policy adviser to Mike Pompeo, a secretary of state in the Trump administration.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, and the island’s other leading chip makers may face demands from the Trump administration to locate more production in the United States. (Industry experts have said that Mr. Trump’s accusation against Taiwan’s semiconductor makers is groundless, noting that the Taiwan companies merely provide manufacturing services to American chip giants.)

Last week, some Taiwanese officials played down the potential harm of the tariff plans, noting that Mr. Trump has threatened even higher tariffs on goods from China, which could open up opportunities for Taiwanese businesses.

“For Taiwan, there are actually more pros than cons,” Liu Chin-ching, the minister in charge of Taiwan’s National Development Council, told lawmakers on Tuesday. Mr. Trump’s tariff proposals could drive more orders from China to Taiwan, and encourage Taiwanese manufacturers to leave China, he said.

“The United States will impose technology restrictions to defend its own interests,” Mr. Liu said, “but Taiwan will basically go along with these restrictions, and we believe that we will have opportunities to benefit from them.”

Taiwan will also closely watch Mr. Trump’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Taiwan’s government has supported American aid to Ukraine, presenting it as proof of united resistance to authoritarian threats, whether from Moscow or possibly Beijing.

But Mr. Trump has said that he wants to quickly end that war. An abrupt reduction in help for Ukraine may shake Taiwanese confidence, several experts said.

“Taiwan’s leaders will view Trump’s handling of Ukraine as an early warning for whether and how Trump would stand up to Chinese pressure on Taiwan in the event of crisis,” said Ryan Hass, a former director for China at the National Security Council under President Barack Obama.

Beijing, for its part, appears poised to exploit any signs of discord between Washington and Taipei, pressing its message that Taiwanese people cannot rely on the United States — and should accept unification with China.

“Whether the United States wants to ‘protect Taiwan’ or ‘harm Taiwan,’ I believe that most Taiwanese compatriots have made their own rational judgments,” said Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman in Beijing for the Chinese government office that deals with Taiwan.

Taiwanese people, Ms. Zhu added, “clearly know that the United States always pursues ‘America First’ and Taiwan may change from a ‘pawn’ to a ‘sacrificed piece’ at any time.”

He met with the father-in-law of Donald J. Trump’s daughter Tiffany. He wrote a letter to Mr. Trump condemning the assassination attempt against him. And he quickly congratulated Mr. Trump on his presidential victory.

These overtures by Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, are part of a broad strategy to rehabilitate his once adversarial relationship with Mr. Trump as Palestinians reckon with an incoming president who expressed near unreserved backing for Israel in his first term.

Even Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that ignited the Gaza war and a bitter rival of the Palestinian Authority, has adopted a more cautious tone toward Mr. Trump. Some Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured a devastating Israeli bombardment, expressed hope that Mr. Trump could end the war, while others said they were skeptical.

As president, Mr. Trump advanced policies that infuriated the Palestinian Authority, which has limited autonomy over parts of the West Bank under Israeli occupation. He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, cut off aid to the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees, presented a peace plan that favored Israel and helped hammer out agreements between Israel and Arab states that sidestepped Palestinian ambitions to achieve independence.

Incensed, Mr. Abbas barred senior Palestinian officials from contact with people in the Trump administration.

But Mr. Trump has publicly called for the war in Gaza to stop. Mr. Abbas appears to be reversing course, hoping to influence the president-elect’s views on the conflict and cease-fire talks.

Mr. Abbas — and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — were among the first to congratulate Mr. Trump on his election victory. In his letter, Mr. Abbas said that Palestinian officials “look forward to engaging with you to work toward peace, security, and prosperity for our region,” according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.

On Friday, Mr. Abbas spoke to Mr. Trump by phone, and the two discussed the possibility of meeting in the near future, according to Ziad Abu Amr, a close confidant of Mr. Abbas and a senior Palestinian official.

But Mr. Abbas’s efforts to reach out to Mr. Trump started well before the election. Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman who has served as an unofficial emissary of the Trump campaign to Arab American voters, helped Mr. Abbas communicate with Mr. Trump in recent months, as has Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian American backer of Mr. Trump, according to people involved in the effort.

Mr. Abbas met Mr. Boulos on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September in New York. While Palestinian officials described the meeting as a part of an outreach effort to Mr. Trump, Mr. Boulos told the The Times it was “purely personal” and said that he didn’t inform Mr. Trump about the meeting before or after.

Mr. Abu Amr, who attended the meeting, said Mr. Boulos conveyed Mr. Trump’s desire to end wars around the world, including in the Gaza Strip.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, did not respond to questions about the meeting. But when asked about Mr. Boulos’s role in October, she said the campaign was grateful for his “very effective outreach” to Arab Americans.

In addition, Mr. Boulos and Mr. Bahbah said they helped facilitate the delivery of a letter from Mr. Abbas to Mr. Trump in July condemning an assassination attempt against him, which Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social. In the letter, Mr. Abbas wished Mr. Trump “strength and safety” and said assassination attempts were “despicable acts.” Mr. Trump replied that Mr. Abbas’s letter was “so nice” and declared “everything will be good.”

“We want to maintain a good working relationship because no one can ignore the role the U.S. can play in resolving the conflict,” Mr. Abu Amr said.

Even under the Biden administration, Mr. Abbas has confronted a host of challenges, including international demands for overhauls to the Palestinian Authority that could help it play a role in the Gaza Strip. And with no end in sight so far to the war, Mr. Netanyahu’s government — the most right wing in Israel’s history — has frequently taken hostile positions against the Authority.

The Biden administration has called for a Palestinian state, which Mr. Netanyahu has rejected.

At the September meeting with Mr. Boulos, Mr. Abbas said he was ready to make peace with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution and expressed willingness to host international observers in a future Palestinian state to ensure Israel’s security, Mr. Bahbah said.

The Palestinian leader also said that there would be “no fighting, no incursions, and no attacks whatsoever” from a future Palestinian state, Mr. Bahbah said. Mr. Abu Amr confirmed Mr. Bahbah’s comments. Mr. Abbas, for his part, has long vowed opposition to violence and has suggested that an American-led NATO force could patrol a future Palestinian state.

Despite Mr. Abbas’s charm offensive, Mr. Trump’s history of supporting Israel was not lost on Palestinian officials.

“When we hear Trump say he wants peace, we take that to heart, but peace has to be based on Palestinian independence and self-determination,” said Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission to Britain, who had the same role in Washington at the beginning of the last Trump administration. If Mr. Trump tries to “push us around, we can still shout ‘no.’”

While efforts to court Mr. Trump could backfire, the Palestinian leadership lacks options other than trying to engage with the president-elect and Arab and European allies who can reinforce its positions with him, analysts said.

“Do they have another choice? Objectively, I don’t believe they do,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, the director of the Horizon Center, a Palestinian political research group. “Should they turn to international agencies? That hasn’t worked and it won’t work.”

“They only have one option,” he said.

For its part, Hamas, which has been outspoken in its criticism of the Biden administration, appeared to carefully calibrate its reaction to Mr. Trump’s victory. “Our stance on the new American administration will depend on its positions and practical policy toward the Palestinian people and its legitimate rights,” it said on Wednesday.

Palestinians in Gaza have borne the brunt of Israel’s onslaught, and some said they hoped Mr. Trump could end the war in Gaza.

“I hope Trump steps in as a savior to bring some order to the turmoil caused by ongoing conflicts involving Iran with its proxies and Israel,” said Muhanned al-Farra, who once owned a car parts shop and is now sheltering in Khan Younis with his family. “I hope his election will bring positive change to this war-torn city.”

Others were more pessimistic.

“The U.S. has always sided with the occupying state of Israel,” said Muhanned Shaath, a youth and community activist in Gaza City, “so I doubt much will change, especially if Trump keeps pushing his old plans.”

Bilal Shbair contributed reporting.

An Israeli strike on a village north of Beirut killed at least 23 people and wounded six others on Sunday morning, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

It said that rescue workers were still searching the rubble after the strike in Almat, in the Jbeil district on the Lebanese coast, and that three children were among the dead.

Photographs from the scene showed a bulldozer on a steep hillside scooping piles of debris from at least one building that appeared to have been destroyed, while emergency workers also picked through the wreckage. The twisted remains of several vehicles also stood nearby.

There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military about the strike in the Jbeil district, which is around 18 miles northeast of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

The Israeli military has been widening its campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, across Lebanon in recent weeks.

The operations against Hezbollah were initially focused on southern Lebanon, with the stated aim of crippling the group’s ability to fire rockets across the border into Israel. But they have expanded to include cities and towns across Lebanon, including places far from that border — like the Jbeil district.

Another target of the widening campaign has been the Bekaa Valley in northeastern Lebanon, which is home to the historic city of Baalbek. Israeli strikes killed 20 people in Baalbek and the towns around it on Saturday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Baalbek, in northeastern Lebanon, has been hit repeatedly in recent weeks. Dozens of people have been killed and most of the city’s population has fled.

The Israeli military said it had struck “Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure sites” near the port city of Tyre and near Baalbek on Saturday.

Lebanon’s health ministry cited five separate deadly incidents in Baalbek and the surrounding area on Saturday, including one in which 11 people were killed. In a statement on Saturday night, it added that 14 people were wounded. The ministry gave few details of the attacks and did not say whether the casualties were civilians or Hezbollah fighters.

Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks have persisted even as Israel’s campaign has intensified. The group fired 70 projectiles — likely missiles or drones — across the frontier on Saturday and 10 on Sunday, according to Israel’s military. Many were intercepted by Israel’s air defenses or fell in open areas, it said.

The fighting has driven around one fifth of Lebanon’s population of around 5.3 million from their homes, according to the Lebanese government.

Russia said its air defenses had shot down waves of Ukrainian drones over Moscow’s suburbs on Sunday morning, responding to what it called a “massive” attack that wounded at least one person and temporarily halted flights at three regional airports.

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said on Telegram that 32 drones had been shot down over the suburbs of Domodedovo, Ramenskoye and Kolomna in the largest such attack on the capital since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Defense Ministry said 34 drones were shot down above Moscow in the attack.

The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, described the attack as “massive” and said that a 52-year-old woman was hospitalized with “burns to her face, neck and hands.”

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Israel’s military struck a house in northern Gaza where displaced families were sheltering on Sunday, killing at least 34 people, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense, the main emergency service in the territory.

Dr. Mohammed Al Moghayer, a spokesman for the group, said that 14 children were among the dead after the strike in the city of Jabaliya on Sunday morning. People were still trapped under the rubble, he added, warning that the death toll was likely to rise.

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that the house, which was “crowded with residents and displaced people” was destroyed. It said that a “large number” of wounded people were taken to the nearby Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.

In response to questions about the strike on Sunday, Israel’s military said it had struck “a terrorist infrastructure site” in Jabaliya where militants who posed a threat to troops had been operating and that it had taken “numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.” The military, which said that the details of the incident were under review, did not provide evidence for its claims.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, said that his hospital was receiving “distressing calls about people trapped under the rubble” on Sunday but was unable to provide help. Kamal Adwan is one of the last semi-functional hospitals in northern Gaza, but has been damaged by Israeli attacks and a raid over the last weeks.

Jabaliya has come under repeated attack as the Israeli military has stepped up an offensive in areas of northern Gaza over the past month, saying it was trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence there. Israel’s military has issued widespread evacuation orders for parts of northern Gaza and Israeli troops, tanks and armed drones have bombarded the area almost daily.

The United Nations, aid groups and the Gazan health authorities have warned that the Israeli offensive in the northern part of the enclave was causing widespread devastation and had killed hundreds of civilians.

A separate strike on a residential building in Gaza City killed five Palestinians on Sunday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said in a statement, adding that the search was ongoing for people trapped under the rubble.

But the emergency service added that its teams were “forcibly disabled” from working in all areas of northern Gaza because of the “ongoing targeting and Israeli aggression,” leaving thousands there “without humanitarian and medical care.”

Han Dongfang was just another dot in a sea of agitated university students during the mass protests in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago when he suddenly jumped onto a monument to speak.

“Democracy is about who decides our salaries,” Mr. Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. “Workers should be able to take part in the decision.”

It was one of the first times during the protests that anyone had mentioned workers. And it marked the beginning of Mr. Han’s three-decade fight for their rights in China, a struggle that was almost brought to an immediate halt.

On June 4, 1989, just weeks after Mr. Han began his speeches, the People’s Liberation Army fired on pro-democracy protesters in the square, putting a bloody end to the democracy movement and free speech in China.

The crushing response also disbanded the labor union he had helped to create during the protests — the first and only independent union since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. After Mr. Han was placed on a “most wanted” list, he turned himself in to face prison, where he served 22 months.

Today, Mr. Han is one of China’s last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Stripped of his Chinese passport and kicked out of mainland China in 1993, he does his work from Hong Kong.

“I prefer to be open rather than to hide,” he said from the windowless meeting room in the office of China Labor Bulletin, a nongovernmental organization that Mr. Han started in 1994.

His faith in the power of transparency has kept Mr. Han in Hong Kong, even though nearly all other China-focused civil society organizations have left since 2020, when Beijing imposed a national security law and dismantled the protections that gave the city its semiautonomous status.

Where his peers have essentially surrendered in the face of the crackdown, Mr. Han has pushed ahead, telling colleagues to operate as though everything they do and say is being monitored by the authorities.

“I’m sure that the Chinese state security turned this organization’s records upside down and inside out 50 times,” Mr. Han said. “And Hong Kong’s national security police, too.”

After high school, the Beijing-born Mr. Han in 1980 joined the military, where he remembers being disillusioned by the fact that officers were fed chicken, while soldiers like him got bread so dry “it could kill someone.”

He then took a relatively well-paid job as an engineer for the state railways, where he was working in April 1989 as students started protesting in Tiananmen Square near where he lived. Mr. Han joined them.

It was done mostly out of curiosity, he said. But as he listened to the students quote thinkers he had never read, and as he tried to relate their visions of democracy to his own life, he realized that workers could have a say outside of the Communist Party’s system.

“It was a completely new idea that directly contradicted many years of propaganda about the working class being the leading class,” he said.

Mr. Han took a leading role in an unofficial union that had begun to organize in the square called the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation.

After the Tiananmen massacre, the union was quickly declared illegal, and nothing like it has been allowed again. Ever since, Mr. Han, who is understated but not easily deterred, has been propelled by one goal: empowering workers to take collective action.

“That’s my character,” he said. “If you’re born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn.”

His fervor led The New York Times to call him “the Chinese government’s worst nightmare: a man who is less afraid of it than it is of him.” At the time of that article, in 1992, he was still able to live in mainland China. He was expelled the following year, resettling in Hong Kong.

Under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, groups like his have been shut down and other labor activists jailed. But Mr. Han has stayed active — and optimistic. He continues to believe it is possible to advance Chinese workers’ rights through unions.

On paper, China has one of the strictest sets of labor protections in the world. Every worker has the right to join or start a trade union. In practice, every union must be associated with what is effectively a state-sponsored union: the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a government body that typically works with companies when setting up unions. The employees have little power.

Mr. Han has tried to work within this stifling system, focusing on convincing branches of the All-China Federation to negotiate on behalf of workers instead of siding with management.

He has also tried to gain an assist from an unlikely source: Mr. Xi.

Worried about social unrest amid an economic slowdown, China’s leader has called for the official labor union to do more to help low-paid workers.

“You can say that I’m helping Xi Jinping to hold officials accountable,” Mr. Han said with a faint smile.

In the China Labor Bulletin office, bookshelves and tables are piled with books and brochures about Chinese labor law. Mr. Han and his team of a dozen employees meet once a week to talk about strikes and protests that surface on Chinese social media. They also use state media stories, police reports and images with clues like street signs to try to identify the names and locations of companies where the labor unrest is occurring.

Once they have identified a company whose workers need help, Mr. Han will call local union officials to try to get them to take action.

Mr. Han, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of China’s labor laws, will remind the officials of their duty to make sure workers’ needs are being represented.

The conversation can be heated because officials with the All-China Federation tend to look the other way when worker violations occur. Often, they are complicit when company bosses do things like bring in private security to beat striking workers.

“When we call, we say, ‘The law says this,’” said Mr. Han. “In some cases they would say, ‘If you really follow the law, all the factories in China should be closed.’”

His approach has achieved some successes, and over the years, China Labor Bulletin has been involved in some of the biggest labor disputes in China.

Last year, when a 20-year-old employee of an electronics factory was found dead in his dorm room after working for 33 days with little rest, the local authorities made a “humanitarian” payment to the family.

Mr. Han contacted the local official union and the factory and warned them that the company, which had foreign customers, could be held responsible under a German law requiring companies to identify and fix human rights abuses in their supply chains. Eventually, the worker’s family was paid an additional amount that was double the first payment.

To describe Mr. Han as willful would be an understatement.

During his almost two years in jail, prison wardens tortured him and placed him in a ward with tuberculosis patients even though he was healthy. He called it “hell” and “unbearable,” but also “an achievement.”

When Beijing released him because he had contracted tuberculosis and was near death, he traveled to the United States for treatment. He lost a lung. When he recovered, the Chinese authorities told him to stay away; instead he tried to sneak back in, more than once.

On his last attempt in 1993, he made it to Guangzhou, a city 80 miles from Hong Kong, then still a British colony. Eventually, the police dragged him back to Hong Kong.

He responded to the ordeal by setting up China Labor Bulletin.

Despite the past successes he can point to, Mr. Han said he feels powerless to help the victims of Beijing’s current clampdown on China’s decades-long property boom: the construction workers, painters, landscapers and others who have not been paid as companies went bankrupt.

Many workers are suffering, and some are protesting and speaking out, but there is little he can do. “We don’t see any hope because the root of the finance is dry,” he said, “there is no more water coming out.”

“The scale is beyond anyone’s imagination,” Mr. Han said. “It’s huge.”