The North Korean soldiers fighting for Moscow in Russia’s Kursk region are assigned their own patches of land to assault. Unlike their Russian counterparts, they advance with almost no armored vehicles in support.

When they attack, they do not pause to regroup or retreat, as the Russians often do when they start taking heavy losses, Ukrainian soldiers and American officials say. Instead, they move under heavy fire across fields strewed with mines and will send in a wave of 40 or more troops.

If they seize a position, they do not try to secure it. They leave that to Russian reinforcements, while they drop back and prepare for another assault.

They have also developed singular tactics and habits. When combating a drone, the North Koreans send out one soldier as a lure so others can shoot it down. If they are gravely wounded, they have been instructed to detonate a grenade to avoid being captured alive, holding it under the neck with one hand on the pin as Ukrainian soldiers approach.

Sent to Russia to join with Moscow’s troops in Kursk, the North Koreans essentially operate as a separate fighting force, the Ukrainian soldiers and American officials said — distinct in language, training and military culture.

“It’s partly two different militaries that have never trained or operated together and partly, I think, Russian military culture, which is, shall we say, not highly respectful of the abilities and norms and operations of partner forces,” said Celeste A. Wallander, who until Inauguration Day was the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for international security affairs.

The North Koreans are largely special operations troops trained for surgical strike missions, she said, but the Russians have basically used them as foot soldiers.

Last fall, North Korea sent about 11,000 soldiers to aid Moscow’s forces in the Kursk region of southern Russia, where the Ukrainians captured territory with a surprise invasion last summer. Since their first combat engagement in early December, roughly one-third of the North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded, Ukrainian and American officials said.

Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, said this week that North Korean losses continued to climb, estimating that almost half those sent had been either injured or killed, but he warned that they were “highly motivated, well-trained” and “brave.”

Reinforcements are expected “within the next two months,” according to one senior U.S. defense official.

The New York Times spoke to a dozen Ukrainian soldiers and commanders who are engaged in direct combat with North Korean soldiers, as well as four U.S. defense officials and military analysts, to put together a portrait of how the North Koreans operate on the battlefield. The Times also viewed video of North Korean assaults provided by the Ukrainian military.

The American officials requested anonymity to speak frankly about battlefield details. Ukrainian soldiers and their commanders asked to be identified only by their first names in accordance with military protocol.

With 1.2 million troops, North Korea’s military ranks among the world’s largest standing armies, and its entry into the war was a profound escalation in a war now approaching its fourth year.

Even before it sent troops to Russia, North Korea was a major supporter of Russia’s war effort. It has sent Moscow millions of artillery shells — which now account for about half of the Russian munitions fired daily — and more than 100 short-range ballistic missiles, according to Western and Ukrainian intelligence officials.

The Kremlin has denied deploying North Korean soldiers to the battlefield and is taking steps to hide their involvement, officials said.

For instance, the North Koreans have been issued what one Pentagon official described as “pocket litter” — documents that register them as being from Russia’s Far East.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that one of the captured soldiers was found to have a military ID in the name of a resident of Tuva, southern Siberia. The fake identity used data from a real Russian citizen, Ukrainian intelligence officials said.

Ukrainian claims about attempts to hide North Korean participation could not be independently verified.

While North Korean soldiers provide additional manpower, the Russians have struggled to integrate them into the battlefield.

The difficulties have ranged from minor issues, like finding uniforms small enough to fit North Korean soldiers, to communication problems that have led at least twice to North Korean and Russian forces clashing directly because of mistaken identity, U.S. officials and Ukrainian soldiers said.

The Russians are taking steps to address the issues, Ukrainian soldiers said, but have yet to form a more cohesive fighting force.

“Now they’ve started composing groups that include a translator or someone who speaks Russian with a radio, but these groups are not very effective,” said Andrii, the Ukrainian commander.

Using video from a drone camera, Andrii described an assault soon after it happened earlier this month, offering a window into North Korean tactics.

Viewed through thermal imaging, the North Korean soldiers stood out as small dark specks on the snow-dusted fields. They walked some five miles — with many killed along the way — and were massing in a tree line for an assault on a Ukrainian trench a short distance away.

“There are about 50 of them here,” Andrii said.

Some were wounded, the video showed, but they did not retreat. They waited for reinforcements and then attacked. Assault groups were made up of five to eight soldiers.

The North Koreans take many casualties, Andrii said, but keep sending new units.

“It’s just forward, forward,” he said. “It’s motivation, orders and strict discipline.”

The ”shock brigade” tactic of soldiers advancing with little concern for the mayhem that awaits them is heavily featured in North Korean military training and propaganda. Adopted from the Korean War days, the strategy has caused many casualties in a war fought over open and flat lands with drones, according to South Korean intelligence officials. But they said the North would consider those losses a necessary cost of becoming more skilled in modern warfare.

“It feels like they specifically came here to die, and they know it themselves,” said Oleksii, a platoon commander.

Ukrainian intelligence officials said two North Korean soldiers captured on Jan. 9 were also providing insights into the deployments in Kursk. And Ukrainian Special Operations Forces have released excerpts from a number of diaries and communications collected from the bodies of North Korean soldiers, which American officials said appeared authentic.

In one diary, a North Korean soldier wrote that he was motivated to join Russia’s fight to redeem himself from an unspecified transgression.

“I wear the uniform of the revolution to protect the Supreme Commander,” he wrote. “I betrayed the Party that trusted me and committed ungrateful acts against the Supreme Commander. The sins I have committed are unforgivable, but my homeland has given me a path to redemption, a new start in life.”

He also included practical details, like how to shoot down a drone.

“Simultaneously, the one baiting the drone keeps a distance of 7 meters, while those shooting stay 10-12 meters away. If the bait stands still, the drone will also stop moving. At this moment, the shooter eliminates the drone.”

The North Korean tactics have forced the Ukrainians to adapt.

For instance, drone pilots said they generally did not target individual North Koreans, hunting for groups instead.

And given the density of North Korean assaults, the standard procedure of placing anti-personnel mines about 15 meters apart does not work well. Now, soldiers said, they are trying to leave no more than five meters between mines.

Interestingly, Ukrainian soldiers said, the North Koreans try to remove their dead and wounded from the battlefield, which is different from the Russians.

Andrii shared drone video of the process, with some dead and wounded soldiers being dragged out — pulled by their arms or loaded on sleds — as others moved into the position.

The North Korean forces deployed to Ukraine included around 500 officers and at least three generals, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.

The generals are posted at Russian command and control headquarters, U.S. defense officials said, and that is where the objectives are decided.

The commanders decide when they need artillery and how long to wait before ground forces maneuver, a senior U.S. defense official said. They synchronize with the troops in the field, so that the troops are not talking to their Russian counterparts, to try to reduce miscommunication.

Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Kursk said the North Korean tactics were costly but effective.

“The Koreans are starting to push the front lines, targeting less defended areas and wearing out our troops that way,” said Oleksii, the platoon commander.

Fighting one of the world’s largest armies was hard enough, he said, but fighting two was “on the edge” of what was possible.

Capturing prisoners has proved challenging because North Koreans have been trained not to be taken alive, soldiers said, and Russian drone operators were always watching.

“If Russians see Koreans being captured, they use drones to finish them off — killing both the Koreans and our soldiers,” Oleksii said, adding that some in his brigade were recently killed this way.

Ukrainian soldiers said the North Koreans should not be underestimated.

“They are being tested, really tested,” said Andrii, the drone commander. They did not have combat experience, he said, but “now they are here, gaining it, and they are becoming very strong.”

Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from Ukraine and Choe Sang-Hun contributed from Seoul.

Prince Harry cast himself as the “last person” who could hold Britain’s tabloids to account for years of predatory conduct during the phone hacking scandal. On Wednesday, he settled for a partial victory in his lonely campaign.

Harry settled a long-running lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers over unlawful information gathering, winning a multimillion dollar payout and, perhaps more significantly, an admission of “unlawful” conduct by private investigators hired by The Sun, the company’s flagship tabloid.

But the settlement averted what could have been weeks of damaging testimony about phone hacking and other unlawful practices News Group used to ferret out personal information about Harry and other prominent figures more than a decade ago. Harry, who did not appear in court on Wednesday, was scheduled to take the stand next month.

It marked the end of an era of high-profile legal cases that grew out of the hacking scandal, one of the darkest periods in the history of the British news media. And it gave Harry long-sought acknowledgment for the relentless intrusion of the tabloids into the life of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.

News Group Newspapers offered a “full and unequivocal apology” for hacking Harry’s cellphone and intruding into his personal life and that of Diana, “in particular during his younger years.”

“We acknowledge and apologize for the distress caused to the duke, and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family, and have agreed to pay him substantial damages,” the company said in a contrite, five-paragraph statement, referring to Harry by his formal title, the Duke of Sussex.

The settlement, announced a day after the trial was set to begin in a London High Court, spared Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, from heavy financial risk, regardless of how he fared in court.

Under English law, aimed at resolving disputes out of court where possible, Harry would have been required to pay the legal costs of both sides unless the court awarded him an amount equal to what News Group offered him in the settlement.

While neither side disclosed the amount of the financial settlement, it was worth at least 10 million pounds ($12.3 million), according to two people with knowledge of the negotiation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the parties had agreed not to disclose the number.

An 11th-hour settlement to avert a trial

The last minute deal underscored the unforgiving economics for private individuals taking on deep-pocketed corporations in Britain. Mr. Murdoch’s companies have used lucrative payoffs to avert trials in 1,300 cases stemming from the phone hacking scandal. Harry’s elder brother, Prince William, settled for a “huge sum of money” in 2020, according to a filing by Harry in his own case.

In April, the actor Hugh Grant said that he had felt forced to settle his hacking case against News Group Newspapers because “even if every allegation is proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching 10 million pounds in costs. I’m afraid I am shying at that fence.”

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News paid $787.5 million in April 2023 to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the cable network’s promotion of false claims about Dominion’s voting machines in the 2020 election.

News Group Newspapers said Wednesday that after a decade of hacking-related lawsuits, the settlement “draws a line under the past and brings an end to this litigation.” It noted that the judge in the case, Timothy Fancourt, observed that these cases were the last with a good chance of getting to trial.

News Group also apologized and paid damages to Harry’s fellow plaintiff, Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, for what it described as “the unwarranted intrusion” into his private life by The News of The World between 2009 and 2011, during his time in government. The company admitted he had been “placed under surveillance” in 2009 by the tabloid.

Mr. Murdoch shut down The News of the World in 2011 after it emerged that the paper had illegally hacked the voice mail of a murdered schoolgirl. Until now, though, the company had never acknowledged wrongdoing by anyone at The Sun. News Group emphasized that the admission of unlawful conduct referred to private investigators hired by the paper between 1996 and 2011, not to its journalists.

Still, the acknowledgment is significant because Rebekah Brooks, the current chief executive of News U.K., was the editor of The Sun from 2003 to 2009 and had described it to a parliamentary hearing on phone hacking as a “very clean ship.” Ms. Brooks has denied all wrongdoing and was cleared of criminal charges in a hacking case in 2014.

“For the first time in this long running litigation, and despite repeated previous denials, the flagship Murdoch title, The Sun, has had to make an unprecedented admission,” said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in other hacking cases. “It hired private investigators to carry out unlawful activities in relation to Prince Harry.”

Unanswered questions

The statement did not directly refer to Will Lewis, a former senior executive at News U.K. who helped Mr. Murdoch deal with the fallout from the scandal and is now the publisher of the Washington Post. But one paragraph raised questions about his role.

In 2011, when the police were investigating the allegations of unlawful activity at News U.K., they confronted executives about why certain emails had been abruptly removed from its servers. Mr. Lewis told the police that the company removed them after receiving an unsubstantiated tip that Gordon Brown, a former prime minister, was plotting with allies, including Mr. Watson, to steal the emails of Ms. Brooks.

News Group admitted there were no grounds for that claim. “In 2011 News International received information that information was being passed covertly to Lord Watson from within News International. We now understand that this information was false, and Lord Watson was not in receipt of any such confidential information,” it said.

Mr. Watson said in an interview last year that the claim had been “deliberately concocted by News International in an attempt to justify the destruction and concealment of millions of relevant emails during a criminal investigation.”

A spokesman for Mr. Lewis cited a statement he gave to The Times last June, in which he said, “Any allegations of wrongdoing are untrue.”

Speaking outside the courthouse after the settlement was announced, Mr. Watson said he would hand the police a dossier of evidence of wrongdoing. “I once said that the big beasts of the tabloid jungle have no predators,” he said. “I was wrong. They have Prince Harry. His bravery and astonishing courage have brought accountability to a part of the media that thought it was untouchable.”

It remains to be seen whether the police will act. In a statement, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: “There are no active police investigations into allegations of phone hacking or related matters. We await any correspondence from the parties involved, which we will respond to in due course.”

Still, the settlement means that Harry will not testify about his treatment at the hands of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids — something he did to dramatic effect in 2023, in a similar case against Mirror Group Newspapers, which he won. Nor will his lawyers present what they claim was widespread and deeply rooted misconduct at Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids.

In addition to intercepting voice mail messages and purging emails, Harry’s lawyers planned to argue that senior News Group editors encouraged journalists to misrepresent themselves to get access to intimate details about Harry, a practice known as “blagging.”

For Harry, resolving the case could remove a source of friction between him and his father and brother. Last year, he told ITV News that disagreements over how to deal with the tabloids had deepened the rift with his family, which was also rooted in the family’s treatment of his wife, Meghan.

Harry sharply criticized Charles and William for a “secret agreement,” under which the family agreed to hold off on, or settle, legal claims against the publisher to avoid having to testify about potentially embarrassing details from their intercepted voice mail messages. While Harry brought charges, he has now agreed to a similar accommodation.

In a summary of their planned argument, lawyers for Harry cited a text message he wrote to William in 2019, in which he said that he was “fed up with Pa’s office continually blocking it for us, plus I’ve recently found out the extent of their behaviour and subsequent cover-ups which needs to be exposed.”

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where William has his offices, declined to comment on the settlement. A spokesman for Harry said he would not comment beyond the statement read by his lawyer, David Sherborne.

Jo Becker contributed reporting from Los Angeles

President Trump’s executive order designating Mexican cartels and other criminal organizations as foreign terrorists could force some American companies to forgo doing business in Mexico rather than risk U.S. sanctions, according to former government officials and analysts — an outcome that could have a major effect on both countries given their deep economic interdependence.

The executive order, which Mr. Trump signed on Monday, is intended to apply maximum pressure on Mexico to rein in its dangerous drug trade. The designation, more generally, also gives his administration more power to impose economic penalties and travel restrictions, and potentially even to take military action in foreign countries.

Yet, disentangling cartel operations from U.S. interests in Mexico could be immensely complicated. Mexico is the United States’ largest trade partner of goods, and many American companies have manufacturing operations there.

Even more complicated, these criminal networks have extended their operations far beyond drug trafficking and human smuggling. They are now embedded in a wide swath of the legal economy, from avocado farming to the country’s billion-dollar tourism industry, making it hard to be absolutely sure that American companies are isolated from cartel activities.

“This has come up in previous administrations across the political spectrum and from members of Congress who have wanted to do it,” said Samantha Sultoon, a senior adviser on sanctions policy and threat finance in the Trump and Biden administrations.

The 613 men had traveled from their native Niger to neighboring Libya, where many of them planned to reach Europe over the Mediterranean Sea, a journey thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa endeavor to make every year.

But late last month, the men were deported by Libyan authorities in one of the country’s largest expulsions in years. The mass deportation is part of a common pattern: North African governments, funded by the European Union to tackle migration, using brutal tactics to block sub-Saharan Africa migrants from heading to Europe.

The 613 men reached Niger’s closest town to the Libyan border on Jan. 3, disheveled and hungry, some barefoot and sick after months of detention and days of travel across the Sahara. Two of the men died shortly after arriving in Niger.

“I lived through hell,” said Salmana Issoufou, one of the men. Mr. Issoufou, 18, said he had been beaten by Libyan prison guards with wires and weapons throughout his eight-month detention.

As anti-migrant sentiment rises across Europe, from France to Germany to Hungary, the citizens of sub-Saharan Africa trying to reach the continent are being pushed back by North African governments in proportions unseen in years. The E.U. has signed bilateral agreements with Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania, that include financial support to curb migrant flows.

The strategy appears to be working: illegal border crossings dropped sharply in 2024, according to recent data from the European Union’s border agency, Frontex.

But rights groups say the methods being used to keep sub-Saharan migrants from traveling to Europe include well-documented human rights violations, such as so-called desert dumps. Migrants have been abandoned in the Sahara without food or water, or kept in North African prisons where they face torture, sexual violence and starvation.

Since Tunisia struck a deal with the European Union in 2023, it has dumped more than 12,000 people, including children and pregnant women, into deserted areas of Libya, according to the United Nations. Last year, the E.U. signed a similar deal with Mauritania.

In Libya, the European Union has financed the country’s coast guard, which has been accused of firing live ammunition during interceptions at sea and of handing migrants over to violent militias.

An investigation by a consortium of news outlets last year showed that vehicles and intelligence provided by E.U. countries have been used by North African security forces to arrest migrants or transport them to desert areas.

The 613 men who were sent back to Niger this month were detained in Libya since at least last fall, according to regional officials in Niger, who escorted them from the border to Dirkou, a Nigerien town about 260 miles south of Libya.

Two men died in Dirkou, according to Abba Tchéké, a social worker who assisted the men there and who works for Alarm Phone Sahara, a nonprofit that rescues stranded migrants in the desert.

The men reached Agadez, the largest city in Niger’s north and a major transit hub for migrants, last week. They were exhausted and dehydrated, and some had skin lesions and broken limbs. Half a dozen men who were deported all said in interviews with The New York Times that they had been mistreated by the Libyan authorities.

Adamou Harouna, 36, said prison guards had burned plastic on him while he was being held.

The mass deportation from Libya echoes similar movements from Algeria, which shares a 580-mile-long border with Niger and last year deported more than 31,000 people, the highest figure in years, according to Alarm Phone Sahara.

The Algerian authorities drop migrants at the border with Niger, forcing them to walk for hours in the desert before reaching the closest town. The migrants also face beatings and physical violence in Algerian prisons. (The European Union doesn’t have a migration agreement with Algeria.)

While expulsions from Libya to Niger have thus far been lower than from Algeria, the recent mass deportation has raised concerns about a potential increase. Last year, hundreds of African citizens were forcibly returned from Libya to Chad, Egypt, Sudan and Tunisia, according to the United Nations.

In Africa, deported migrants are returned to their home countries by the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. In Niger, the organization transports people abandoned in border areas back to Agadez and later to their home countries on planes that depart several times a week.

For the Nigerien men, the organization arranged buses. Mr. Issoufou, 18, said he would remain in Niger. Mr. Harouna said he plans to travel back to Libya as soon as possible.

Ibrahim Manzo Diallo contributed reporting from Niamey, Niger, Saikou Jammeh from Dakar, Senegal, and Jenny Gross from London.

As far as first salvos go, President Donald J. Trump’s threat of a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods in retaliation for China’s role in America’s fentanyl crisis could be interpreted in Beijing as encouraging.

Not only is it lower than the 60 percent duties Mr. Trump had said he would impose on key Chinese goods during his campaign, it also reaffirmed signals that the president was in the mood to negotiate with China. In his first two days in office Mr. Trump has also floated the idea of tying tariffs to the fate of TikTok. He has said he expects to be invited to China for a visit.

Mr. Trump’s apparent willingness to make deals with China could give Beijing much-needed time and space to tackle its most pressing needs. That includes trying to turn around a stagnant economy and ease tensions with trading partners over China’s record trade surplus of nearly $1 trillion. Beijing has also been working to repair ties with American allies like Japan to try to weaken the security alliances forged by the Biden administration to constrain China.

Making headway on those fronts will help China strengthen its position in what has been a punishing superpower rivalry with the United States. Beijing ultimately wants the Trump administration to reset relations. It has argued that the United States should remove restrictions on Chinese imports of U.S. technology, stop supporting Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, and accept China as a peer power.

Beijing may be calculating that it can placate Mr. Trump, perhaps with a TikTok sale, a crackdown on fentanyl precursor producers, or a refresh of the trade deal Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, signed in 2020, analysts said.

“From an economic perspective, it’d be in Washington’s and Beijing’s interests to come up with some kind of a pseudo grand bargain that met both sides’ immediate political needs without sacrificing too much,” said Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

It is unclear where Mr. Trump, who considers unpredictability to be his signature weapon, stands on any of these issues. The U.S. president has surrounded himself with advisers with contrasting views on China. His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said as recently as last week at his Senate confirmation hearing that China was the “biggest threat” to American prosperity. But one of Mr. Trump’s billionaire advisers, Elon Musk, the tycoon who owns Tesla, has vast business interests in China and has taken Beijing’s side on international disputes (such as Taiwan).

Mr. Trump’s first days back have quickly highlighted the early differences between the Biden and Trump administrations when it comes to dealing with China. Where the previous administration favored sanctions and alliances to shape the global environment around China, the Trump White House appears intent to use tariffs as part of a carrot and stick strategy to achieve its domestic “America First” goals.

China is thought to welcome the new approach, at least for now, as long as it leaves room for China to try to fend off a full-blown trade war. Its economy is already facing a deepening malaise, brought on by a property crisis, mounting government debt and weak consumer spending.

China’s economic challenges mean its bargaining position is weaker than it had been in the first Trump administration. But Beijing also has more tools now to fight back.

China has demonstrated in recent months that it is willing to use new measures to retaliate, including by restricting American access to important minerals, investigating U.S. companies like PVH for boycotting Xinjiang cotton and sanctioning Skydio, a U.S. drone maker supplying Ukraine’s military.

“China’s ready to go either way. They’re ready for a battle or for bargaining,” said Mr. Kennedy, who tried to gauge the mood in China during his two-week stay there after the U.S. presidential election.

The first big test for where U.S.-China relations go under a second Trump term could center on the future of the Chinese social media app, TikTok, in America.

On Monday, Mr. Trump signed an executive order delaying a ban of the platform. Then he suggested Beijing should approve a deal to split ownership of the app with an American buyer, or he would impose tariffs as high as 100 percent.

“If Trump can strike a deal that addresses national security concerns while keeping the app alive, he’ll be hailed as a hero by young voters,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research organization in Washington. If ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, “won’t bend, he can blame Beijing, framing them as the barrier to progress.”

A compromise on TikTok might be acceptable to China. The app is not what China considers strategic, leading-edge technology, like the A.I. chips and supercomputing capabilities that Mr. Xi covets to make his country more powerful and self-sufficient. China opposed the sale of TikTok in 2023, but has lately appeared to soften its stance, saying through a foreign ministry spokeswoman that any acquisition of a business should adhere to “market principles” and “Chinese laws and regulations.”

China has also sought to remind Mr. Trump of China’s geopolitical sway. On Tuesday, Mr. Xi held a video call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a leader with whom he has bonded, as two autocrats battling Western pressure. Mr. Xi said they should “deepen strategic coordination, firmly support each other, and defend their legitimate interests.”

The call underscored Beijing’s influence over Russia at a time when Mr. Trump has expressed a desire to bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine. Separately, it signaled an enduring solidarity between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin despite the presence of Han Zheng, China’s vice president, at Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

“Xi wants to have all his bases covered,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “He wants to show Trump that China still has Russia in its corner.”

For now, Mr. Xi has sought to strike a positive note with Mr. Trump, expressing hope for a “good start” to the countries’ relations under the new administration during a call with Mr. Trump on Friday.

But he also drew a hard line on China’s concerns, urging Mr. Trump to handle the status of Taiwan with prudence. In 2016, Mr. Trump took a call from Tsai Ing-wen, who was then Taiwan’s president, drawing China’s condemnation.

Already, though, some of Mr. Trump’s decisions are playing into China’s broader global ambition of reshaping the global order to give Beijing a bigger say. Mr. Trump’s moves to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement, a U.N. climate pact, and his willingness to alienate partners like Mexico and Canada with 25 percent tariffs, arguably serve China’s longer-term interests.

Still, Chinese analysts said Beijing was proceeding with immense caution. They feel China was burned at the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, when he turned on the charm, inviting Mr. Xi to Mar-a-Lago where they dined on cake. A year later, the relationship began its steady dive to the worst level since diplomatic relations were normalized in the 1970s.

Mr. Trump “wants to try to solve problems in a nonconfrontational way at first, but he will definitely bargain for more, so we must also be mentally prepared,” said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.