Rajesh Chouhan, a construction worker in the city of Bangalore, walked for ten consecutive days and 1,200 miles to reach his home village of Srinagar Babaganj in Bihar. Rajesh Chouhan was one of millions of migrants who, in the aftermath of COVID-19 and the government response to the pandemic, chose to return to their home villages. India in March of 2020 implemented one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world, closing nearly every worksite in the country, including the construction site Rajesh Chouhan worked upon. The threadbare Indian welfare state did not have The government had closed all between city transportation in an effort to stop COVID-19 from spreading city to city. As a result, Rajesh Chouhan and millions of other migrants, have faced hunger, thirst, and beatings by police to return home. To understand the desperate situation on Indian migrants, one must first understand the haphazard process of urbanization of India. In part one of today's podcast episode, I will discuss the problem of low urbanization in India, while in parts two and three I will focus on how an inability to build sufficient housing, and a welfare state that is not built to serve the needs of the migrant population.
At first glance, it might seem paradoxical to state that India suffers from a lack of urbanization. Between 1993 and 2018, India's urbanization rate increased from 26% to 34% and over 139 million people from rural areas have migrated to urban areas. However, urbanization in India has been slow when compared to other rapidly developing economies such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia. India's low urbanization is especially clear in comparison to China. China's urbanization advantage isn't just a function of higher levels of development, and faster rates of growth. Over the last 6 years, per capita incomes in India and China have grown by similar amounts, but the rate of increased urbanization in China during this same period is three times that of India. The disparity can be explained by the fact that productivity in urban China, driven by a booming export oriented manufacturing industry is 3.2 times that of rural China, while productivity in the service driven economies of urban India are only 1.6 times more productive than rural India. At the same time, due to a regulatory framework that makes building new housing inordinately difficult, the cost of prime real estate in Beijing and Shanghai are half of those of Mumbai and Delhi.
The low rate of urbanization and geographic mobility acts as a severe brake on economic growth in India. Wages in rural India are 45% lower than in urban India, while the differential in China is only 10%. The poorest states in India has a per capita income in the richest states are 6 times that the poorest, with the gap only getting wider and wider. Similarly, poverty in rural India is at 29.6% while it is at 9.2% in urban India. Over the last 6 years, levels of consumption have actually declined in rural India, while it has grown at over 15% in the bottom to deciles of urban India, the fastest out of any region in India. Rural India is suffering from ever shrinking plots of land, and burgeoning environmental crisis, while India's most dynamic industries are concentrated in major metropolitan areas. Urbanization must accelerate if India's poor are to take advantage rapid economic growth.
One of the most important obstacles to urbanization in India is the difficulty of building housing in India. First, most urban zoning bodies in India maintain excessively low Floor Space Indexes, regulations on how high building can be built. In most urban areas allowed FSI in the urban core is between 5 and 15, while around .5 in the suburbs with legally mandated levels higher. Given India's high levels of density, one would expect allowed FSI to be much high in India. However, the opposite is the case. For example, in Mumbai, until 2015, allowed FSI of only 1.33 in the urban core and 1 in the suburbs. Similarly, FSI in Delhi is limited to between 1.2 and 3.5 in Delhi and to between 1.5 and 2.5 in Kolkata. Compounding this problem, Indian states maintain some of the strictest rent control laws in the world in the 1950s. These laws made it all but impossible to evict renters, and forced landlords to raise rents at rates less than that of inflation. Unsurprisingly, landlords became much less willing to rent to tenants. Between 1961 and 2011, the share of rental housing in urban India declined from 54% to 31%, with the trend most pronounced in the regions of India with the strongest rent control laws. In 1961, Mumbai had roughly even amounts of rental and owner occupied housing. By 2011, 95% of new housing stock was owner occupied, and only 5% rental. My own grandfather rented a house. Even after moving to the United States, we kept the property as the landlord was neither able to raise the rent or evict us. Eventually, the landlord said that given postage cost more than the rent we paid, we no longer even had to pay rent. When a developer wanted to build a taller building more people, he had to pay both the landlord and us to let him tear down a house we neither lived in or paid rent for.
Finally, purchasing agricultural land in India is a legal nightmare. One must first navigate a bureaucratic thicket filled with officials collecting bribes at every location to change land use from agricultural to non agricultural use. Moreover, land registers in India are woefully out of date. If a major developer wants to buy a piece of land, every individual plausible claim makes it. The developer must either wait for the courts to resolve the case, or to settle with each claimant individually. Indian courts suffer from a backlog of 31 million cases, and a quarter of land cases take more than a decade to resolve. The combination of low mandated Floor Space Indexes, rent control policies, and the difficulty of buying new land make building new housing in India artificially expensive, raising rents for India's urban to rural migrants. Due to extreme housing costs, the average resident of urban India has only 117 square feet to live in. In slums like Dharavi it is common for ten men to share a single room, and many laborers choose to live and sleep on construction costs to save on rent. It should hardly be surprising that such expensive costs deter many from moving to the city.
Finally, India's welfare system is poorly equipped to deal with rural to urban migration. India has long had systems of social insurance based upon caste affiliation. For poorer members of more prosperous castes, losing access to interest and collateral free loans, and assistance in case of emergency can cause many to choose not to move to distant urban areas where such networks become attenuated. At the same time, India's government sponsored formal sector exacerbates these problems. In India, it is the rural poor who vote more than anyone else, and poorly conceived redistricting means that rural votes count for more than their urban counterparts. One of the landmark welfare schemes of the previous government of Manmohan Singh was NREGA, a government sponsored public works program that provided all rural residents with 100 days of paid work. The public works program reduced migration to urban areas by rural people who could not read or write by 32%. Similarly, India's Public Distribution System, a network of stores that offers food grains and other essentials at highly subsidized prices distributes on the basis of the registration of one's ration card. Migrants are locked out of the system, making the cost of food substantially higher for them. At the beginning of 2020, the government of Narendra Modi introduced plans to make ration cards portable. However, only pilot programs for "One Nation, One Ration Card" had been introduced when the COVID-19 crisis began.
India's rural to urban migrants on one hand must pay higher rents due to inadequate housing construction, while at the same time receiving substantially less in welfare benefits. The negative effects of these two impediments to urbanization became clear when the COVID-19 crisis started. At first, the government tried to force migrants to stay in urban areas. However, it quickly became clear that the state did not have the administrative capacity to stop all migration. Moreover, heartrending stories of migrants facing hunger and extreme deprivation made such a strategy politically untenable as well. Various state government started repatriating large numbers of migrants, in the process spreading COVID-19 to poor states with limited hospital and testing capacity. At the same time, rural areas have been hard hit by India's economic crisis. There are few jobs available to returning migrants, adding more strain to already impoverished communities. Dealing with the twin public health and economic challenge will prove to be a Herculean challenge for India. Selected Sources: Emerging Pattern of Urbanisation in India, RB Bhagat Poverty and inequality in India: a re-examination, Angus Deaton, Jean Dreze Reforms and Regional Inequality in India, Sabyaschi Kal, S. Sakthivel Falling Water Tables - Sustaining Agriculture The challenges of groundwater management in India, Malik R.P.S Mumbai FAFSI conundrum, Alain Bertaud Decline of rental housing in India: the case of Mumbai, Vaidehi Tandel, Shirish Patel, Sahil Gandhi, Abhay Pethe and Kabir Agarwal Land Markets and Regional Government Rent Seeking Behavior, Kai Kajitani Why is Mobility in India so Low? Social Insurance, Inequality, and Growth, Kaivan Munshi , M The Impact of NREGS on Urbanization in India, Shamika Ravi, Rahul Ahluwalia
www.wealthofnationspodcast.com https://media.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/s/content.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/India-Rural_Migrants.mp3

Welcome, dear readers, to my coronavirus roundup. I'm posting these every Friday in addition to Lost in the Sauce on Mondays (for non-coronavirus news).
Title refers to the sections "Minorities and low-income communities" and "Trump sits on funeral aid"
TLDR pinned at top of comments
Housekeeping:

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Intelligence warnings

More than a dozen issues of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) in January and February contained warnings about the novel coronavirus, its spread, and the suppression of information in China. During this period, Trump downplayed the virus and insisted it was under control.

U.S. officials emphasized that the PDB references to the virus included comprehensive articles on aspects of the global outbreak, but also smaller digest items meant to keep Trump and senior administration officials updated on the course of the contagion… One official said that by mid- to late January the coronavirus was being mentioned more frequently, either as one of the report’s core articles or in what is known as an “executive update,” and that it was almost certainly called to Trump’s attention orally.

Part of a pattern

The president did not take the warnings seriously, if he noticed them at all: Trump “routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week.”
According to then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017, Trump prefers “killer graphics” in his briefings and doesn’t want too many details so intelligence officials try to “get to the core of the issue quickly.” A year later, in 2018, the Washington Post reported that even the simplified briefings were too much of a hassle for Trump:

Trump has opted to rely on an oral briefing of select intelligence issues in the Oval Office rather than getting the full written document delivered to review separately each day...Reading the traditionally dense intelligence book is not Trump’s preferred “style of learning” ...After several months, Trump made clear he was not interested in reviewing a personal copy of the written intelligence report known as the PDB

Critically, years ago intelligence officials warned that “by not reading the daily briefing, the president could hamper his ability to respond to crises in the most effective manner.” Trump’s handling of the pandemic proves that his inability or refusal to pay attention to the intelligence briefings has harmed our country, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented with a faster response.

Trump blames Pelosi?

ABC News reporter Jon Karl asked Trump about the report, to which Trump responded by repeating a fake story about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Karl: “Were you warned about coronavirus back in January?”
Trump: “I think probably a lot more than the Democrats because a month later, Nancy Pelosi was saying, 'Let's dance in the streets of Chinatown.” (video)

Trump then lied about Dr. Fauci saying the virus “was no problem” in late February - Fauci did not say that - and pivoted to talking about the restrictions he placed on travel from China. Karl pressed him again on when he received warnings in his briefings and Trump said: “I would have to check, I want to look as to the exact dates of warnings.”
Trump has repeatedly lied about Pelosi’s February trip to Chinatown in San Francisco. Before any shelter-in-place orders were issued, tourism in the area had fallen dramatically amid public fears of a Chinese virus and prejudice against Asian Americans.

Pelosi while in Chinatown on Feb. 24: “I do think that because it started in China, there’s a concern that are the — is the Chinese government doing what it needed to do early enough, and now as we go forward. But that should not be carried over to Chinatown and San Francisco.”

She did not “dance in the streets” or propose a parade, as Trump has previously claimed. In hindsight, Chinatown was exceptionally well-prepared to handle the coronavirus: According to the New York Times, the community put in a place a plan of action on Feb. 1 “emphasizing frequent hand-cleaning, availability of sanitizers and education on basic hygiene principles, including frequent use of masks.” Trump, on the other hand, did not address the need for such measures until mid-March.

Man-made virus conspiracy

Last Friday, the Trump administration abruptly cut off funding for a project studying the transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans after conspiracy theories linked the work to a lab in Wuhan, China. An official with the National Institutes of Health claimed the project does not align with “agency priorities,” but the NIH’s strategic plan for studying the coronavirus includes the exact mission of the bat project: understanding the origin and transmission of the novel coronavirus.

Suddenly ending a grant early is an unusual move for the NIH, which typically takes such steps only when there is evidence of scientific misconduct or financial improprieties — neither of which it has alleged took place in this case.

The project is run by a U.S. based nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which invests in health research across the world. The nonprofit has been given millions of dollars in grants over the years, most recently in 2019.

Scientists have studied the genetic structure of the novel coronavirus and confirmed that it is naturally-occurring: "Two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2." There is also no evidence that a natural bat virus “escaped” a lab: “the level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change."

Rightwing media

Rightwing media in America seized on an April 11 story in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that implied a link between these grants and the spread of the pandemic. On April 17 the story entered the mainstream when a Newsmax reporter asked Trump about the grants, framing it as an Obama Administration decision. In reality, the NIH has awarded grants to EcoHealth since 2005, which distributed the money to fund research in Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore, as well as Wuhan.
On April 26, Rudy Giuliani appeared on a New York radio show to falsely suggest that the coronavirus was created as a biological weapon, blaming Dr. Fauci and Obama for the spread:

“China for the last 10 to 12 years has been carrying on these experiments, including in this Wuhan laboratory, with animals, and actually making this virus more dangerous,” Giuliani said on the show. “You could say that’s for scientific purposes, or you could say that’s for the purpose of weaponizing them.”

Trump buys in

Days after Giuliani’s interview, the New York Times reported (non-paywalled) that the Trump administration had tasked intelligence agencies to “hunt for evidence to support” the theory that the virus originated in the Wuhan laboratory.

Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.

Yesterday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence - currently run by Trump loyalist Richard Grenell - released a statement refuting the conspiracy touted by Trump allies: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified."

Current and former national security officials said they were surprised by the release, and suggested it could be a sign that the intelligence community feels it is being pulled into a political battle. The administration has been pressuring analysts, particularly at the CIA, to search for evidence that the virus came from a lab and that the World Health Organization helped China cover it up, according to a person briefed on the discussions.

Later in the day, Fox News reporter John Roberts asked Trump about the statement, who responded by casting doubt on the director he handpicked for the job:

Roberts: The Director of National Intelligence today put out a statement saying they believe [the coronavirus] was naturally occurring, it was not manmade-
Trump: Who was that-who was that who said that?
R: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
T: But who in particular? Who was the man who made that statement?
R: It was a statement from the ODNI-
T: Oh, he would know that, huh? National Intelligence. So we’ll see-
R: That would be your Director of National Intelligence, Ric Grenell
T: No I know, I think it’s - I mean you’d have to tell me who specifically, who made the statement?
R: The statement was just put out under the offices of the ODNI.
T: Okay, we’ll see. I mean, I have to see the statement. I just haven’t seen it. (video)

Roberts then redirected the question, asking:

R: Have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?

T: Yes, I have. And I think that the WHO should be ashamed of themselves, because they’re like the PR agency for China... They shouldn’t be making excuses when people make horrible mistakes. Especially mistakes that are causing hundreds of people around the world to die. (video)

"And what gives you a high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?" Roberts asked again, later.
"I can't tell you that," Trump said. "I'm not allowed to tell you that." (video)

More fact-checking: WaPo "Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful."
Further reading: Reuters “Trump says China wants him to lose his re-election bid,” CNN “Trump administration draws up plans to punish China over coronavirus outbreak.”

White House testing plan

On Monday, Trump unveiled an 8-part plan to increase testing capacity across the country with the goal to reopen states. The presentation slide showed blue checkmarks indicating stage 1 “launch” and stage 2 “scale” are already complete, with only one step remaining to “support opening up again.” Conveniently for the administration, this final step is the responsibility of the governors, who must find a way to fulfill to vague mandates: "develop testing plans and rapid response programs" and "maximize the use of all available testing platforms and venues.”

"This document does nothing new and will accomplish nothing new," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement. "It doesn't set specific, numeric goals, offer a timeframe, identify ways to fix our broken supply chain, or offer any details whatsoever on expanding lab capacity or activating needed manufacturing capacity. Perhaps most pathetically, it attempts to shirk obviously federal responsibilities by assigning them solely to states instead."

The president said the federal government will be shipping states a once-per-month supply large enough to test 2% of the population. Experts say this is not nearly enough:

Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from New York University who has recommended that 50 percent of the population be tested each week, said testing 2 percent “is not enough to test everyone in health care even once, let alone to keep retesting them every day, which is what it would take to keep those who do get infected from going on shift and infecting their colleagues.”

At this pace, testing 2% of the population at a time, it would take almost four years to test the entire U.S. population once, assuming the supply chain problems that have plagued the federal government’s response thus far suddenly clear up.
Despite the White House’s plan, during a press briefing on Wednesday President Trump downplayed the importance of testing:

"You shouldn't be hearing about testing, but that's the last thing [the media] can complain about I guess ...We’ve done incredible with the testing... I don't know that all that [testing] is even necessary." (video)

Fact check: Trump has claimed on a regular basis (video) that the U.S. has “tested more than every country combined.” Even just taking the top five countries as far as cumulative number of tests, the U.S. has actually conducted about 20 million fewer tests than those five countries combined.
Additionally, what matters most is the per capita testing rate. The United States’ number of COVID-19 tests performed per 1,000 people is below the average of the 36 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to figures released Tuesday by the international body. The United States had conducted 16.4 tests per 1,000 people, compared to Iceland, top of the list, which had tested 135 people per 1,000.
More: Politico: As Trump Claims US Has Best Covid-19 Testing in the World, Capitol Physician Says He Lacks Capacity to Test All 100 Senators

Minorities and low-income communities

Meanwhile, there are still people in the nation dying after being denied a coronavirus test. A Detroit phlebotomist, Deborah Gatewood, reportedly died from coronavirus symptoms on April 17 after being denied a test four times. Her daughter told NBC News that Beaumont Hospital “said she wasn't severe enough and that they weren't going to test her...They told her to just go home and rest."
It is unclear why Gatewood was denied a test so many times, but hospitals across the country have complained of shortages of swabs, reagents and other supplies needed for testing kits, as well as delays in securing test results.
Gatewood’s story also exemplifies the disparities in testing and treatment between minorities and classes in America. From Charlotte, NC, to Illinois to Michigan, African Americans make up a disproportionately large amount of coronavirus cases compared to the demographics of the population. Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is just 26% black, yet African-Americans account for almost half of the coronavirus cases and 80% of the deaths,

Dr. Barbara Ferrer, LA County health director: People who live in wealthier communities in LA County have been tested more than people who are living in communities where there is less income. (video)

Disparities

Fisher Island, a private island off the coast of Miami, Florida, is the richest ZIP code in the US, home to 800 families and staffed by over 400 workers. While the majority of Americans cannot get tested and some are denied tests even if they present symptoms of COVID-19, residents of the private island have spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase thousands of rapid COVID-19 blood test kits that detect antibodies.

The purchase and availability of the testing are in sharp contrast to much of the rest of the state, where only about 1 percent of the population has been tested for the deadly virus that has caused a global pandemic… The tests, which are finger-prick blood tests, detect the presence of antibodies, an important aspect that could determine who has already had the disease and is likely immune… The tests haven’t been widely available in South Florida.

Trump sits on funeral aid

ProPublica reported yesterday that Trump has yet to release federal assistance specifically intended to help families cover burial costs for victims of the coronavirus.

Approximately 30 states and territories have requested the funding as the pandemic spreads across the country and struggling families ask for help burying their dead… In response to questions, FEMA stated that the decision on which programs to fund is in Trump’s hands.
...GoFundMe sites that have sprung up in the crisis show the shortfalls many families are facing. Family and friends of Devin Francis, a 44-year old radiology technician in Miami who was about to get married when he died of COVID-19 in early April, raised $4,300 of its $5,000 GoFundMe goal. Other posts cite burial costs for a father and son in New York who both died of the disease, and a chef in Chicago.

Seized supplies

VA masks

Each week we learn of more and more instances of the federal government intervening to seize supplies ordered by states and hospitals. Yet, in many cases, we still don’t know for certain where these supplies are ultimately going and why.
Last weekend, Executive in Charge of the Veterans Health Administration Richard Stone finally acknowledged the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) at the VA and revealed that FEMA blocked an order of 5 million masks from reaching VA facilities. “I had 5 million masks incoming that disappeared,” Stone said, adding that FEMA instead sent the masks to the Strategic National Stockpile.

VA’s four-week supply of equipment — on the shelves of 170 medical centers and in an emergency cache normally used for hurricane responses — was almost gone, and employees have held protests to say they were not safe… After an appeal from Secretary Robert Wilkie to top FEMA officials, the emergency management agency provided VA with 500,000 masks this week, FEMA said in a statement. It did not address questions about the agency’s diverted equipment orders.

Miami firefighters’ masks

Last Wednesday, the director of emergency management for Miami-Dade County (Florida)reported that a shipment of 1 million N95 face masks meant for local firefighters had been seized by FEMA. "We thought we were in pretty good shape with having that amount coming in, and they were — we were — usurped,” Director Frank Rollason said.
FEMA defended such confiscations, saying that bringing too much personal protective equipment into coronavirus hotspots can disrupt supply chains to other parts of the country. However, the White House repeatedly told state and local authorities to obtain supplies wherever they could.
At the time of writing this post, Miami-Dade county surpassed 12,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, the highest in the state.

San Francisco’s challenges

Last Friday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed held a press conference in which she described the difficulties the city has faced obtaining PPE:

“We’ve had issues of our orders being relocated by our suppliers in China,” she said. “For example, we had isolation gowns on their way to San Francisco and they were diverted to France. We’ve had situations when things we’ve ordered that have gone through Customs were confiscated by FEMA to be diverted to other locations. We know everyone is dealing with a serious challenge. Through Customs, we’ve had situations where those items have been taken and put out on the market for the highest bidder, putting cities against cities and states against states.”

Maryland guarding its tests

Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan was forced to turn to South Korea to obtain coronavirus test kits in early April, using his wife - a Korean immigrant - as a key lifeline for his state. Speaking about the ordeal yesterday, Hogan described the operation like a top-secret mission, hiding the planeload from the feds out of fear FEMA would confiscate the test kits.

"This was an enormously valuable payload. It was like Fort Knox to us, because it was going to save the lives of thousands of our citizens.”

Like Fort Knox, the supplies are currently at "an undisclosed location” under the protection of the Maryland National Guard and state police. "The administration made it clear over and over again they want the states to take the lead, and we have to go out and do it ourselves, and that's exactly what we did," Hogan said.

Mismanagement of contracts

In 2015, the Obama administration inked a contract with medical manufacturer O&M Halyard called for the creation of a “one-of-a-kind, high-speed machine” that could produce at least 1.5 million N95 masks per day. In September 2018, the company delivered detailed plans for the machine to the Trump administration… but Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not proceed with making the machine.

“The Halyard contract was part of an explicit strategy to ensure we could surge mask production in the next crisis,” said Nicole Lurie, who was the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response under Barack Obama. “Now we’re dealing with the consequences of not having that capability.”

HHS officials have said that there was no funding to build the machine, but the department that solicited the design had a budget of nearly $1.5 billion for 2020, according to an HHS report.

Contracts to Trump allies

In early March, Mike Bowen, the executive vice president of the medical mask manufacturer Prestige Ameritech, found the perfect way to drum up some federal business: He went on Steve Bannon's podcast, which is highly popular at the White House… A month later, at the explicit request of the White House, Prestige Ameritech had a $9.5 million contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Bannon told NBC News that his team put Bowen in touch with White House advisor Peter Navarro, who apparently facilitated the deal.

In the only other agreement with a similar notation that NBC News could find in the 11 years or so of online disclosure of federal contracts, one that was first reported by ProPublica, the Trump White House was named in March as the authority seeking a $96 million deal with the Canadian company AirBoss of America. As ProPublica reported, the deal calls for the delivery of 100,000 respirators and filters to New York and other locations by July 31, and it isn't clear why the White House was eager to award the no-bid contract to the company.

All it takes is a tweet

An electrical engineer in Silicon Valley (with 75 followers) responded to Trump’s tweet about ventilators at the end of March with his own tweet claiming he could “supply ICU ventilators.” Apparently this was all it took for the White House coronavirus to recommend the individual to New York state officials, who quickly paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million for 1,450 ventilators - at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.
Now, a month later, not a single ventilator has arrived and the contract was terminated. New York state is trying to recover all of the money it paid the man, Yaron Oren-Pines. “The guy was recommended to us by the White House coronavirus task force because they were doing business with him as well,” said the New York state official.

Stepping up

A profile of the efforts of an ex-Google software developer to obtain medical supplies for American healthcare workers demonstrates “that this is not an impossible task and that the Trump administration has failed miserably in this mission.”
Ning Mosberger-Tang, of Boulder, Colorado, founded “Step Up in Crisis” to raise money and purchase PPE from China, despite having no previous experience in procuring medical equipment.

In late April, the first shipment of PPE obtained by Step Up in Crisis—50,000 of the surgical masks and the shoe covers—reached a warehouse in Los Angeles. The rest of the supplies are scheduled to arrive in different shipments through the first three weeks of May… Step Up in Crisis is looking to sell the PPE at its cost to hospitals that can afford to buy the supplies, but it also intends to donate some equipment to facilities that are financially strapped.
...Mosberger-Tang, an American citizen, points out that the current anti-China talk from Donald Trump and his political allies does not help on this front: “I wish the US government could be smarter in dealing with China. They know this manufacturing is in China. There is no point to calling this the ‘Chinese virus’ and irritate the Chinese government and end up not getting the equipment you need.”

FEMA stepping back

Other than seizing supplies, what is FEMA up to? The Trump administration is reportedly planning to end the role of FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center in managing the federal response to the coronavirus crisis. Its responsibilities will be handed over to unnamed persons at HHS.
House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney responded:

President Trump seems to be declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ while hundreds of Americans are dying every day, communities across the country are facing critical shortages of test kits and life-saving medical equipment, and millions of Americans are out of work and need assistance. The Administration has not briefed Congress on this move and has not identified a clear, unified command structure for the continued federal response.”

Hydroxychloroquine update

Federal prosecutors are investigating a New York doctor who appeared on Fox News frequently to promote the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. The doctor, Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko, has been in touch with the White House
Zelenko came to the feds’ attention when - get this - Jerome Corsi (an associate of Roger Stone) accidentally sent an email intended for Zelenko to another “Z” name in his address book — federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Mueller’s team.

Zelinsky is tasked now with investigating coronavirus-related crimes in the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office, as part of a directive from U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr to prioritize such cases. The department already has charged a medley of fraudsters for peddling fake cures

Vaccine expert Dr. Rick Bright is preparing to submit a whistleblower complaint documenting Trump’s push of an unproven anti-malarial drug. “It is expected that Bright’s complaint, when revealed, will shed new light on the political pressure exerted by the Trump administration on health officials to back up the president’s sweeping praise of the drugs as a key weapon against Covid-19.”

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Xi Jinping has sent the Minister of Foreign Affairs onto a small world tour, with the intention of making new great strides in Chinese diplomatic relations. The foreign minister's stops will include Nepal, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a final brief visit to Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela.

Nepal

The Nepalese and Chinese government have held friendly ties for a long time, with ties between the Chinese Communist Party and Nepalese Communist Parties beung especially friendly. As always, we maintain our policy of non-interference in Nepal's domestic affairs, and we would like to reach out to increase yhe positive ties between our two nations.

Infrastructure

We would like to fund the expansion of various infrastructure between China and Nepal, including both high speed rail and highways. First and foremost, we would like to fund the expansion of our high speed rail by connecting the city of Kathmandu to the Chinese high speed rail network, with the linkage to extend from Kathmandu to the Chinese city of Lhasa, as well as various other Chinese cities in the provunce of Tibet. Secondly, we would like to create various new highway connections with Nepal. In particular, we would like to fund and build a linkage between Chinese highway G219 to various cities and towns in Northeast Nepal, culminating with its connections to Nepalese Highway H18.
Additionally, a relatively large portion of Nepal still struggles to have stable and reliable access to electricity. We would like to invest $5 billion dollars over the next few years, for Chinese solar and wind poeer companies to assist in establishing a green electrical infrastructure in Nepal.

Joint Mt Everest Cleanup

With the increasing popularity of Mt. Everest as a tourist site over the last decade, there is a notable amount of pollution on the mountain left behind by climbers. We would like to form a joint initiative where highly trained and well equipped Chinese and Nepalese climbers will scale the mountain in large cleanup missions, aiming to clear up as much pollution as possible.

Angola

Angola has one of the most prosperous cities in all of Africa, and benefits greatly from its existing oil industry, but due yo the current price of oil, its economic growth has slowed to a crawl. We would like to lend a helping hand to the Angolan government, with an arrangement to buy 600,000 barrels per day of Angolan oil per day, locked at a price of $30 dollars a barrel - $8 higher than the market price, for the next 10 years, which should provide a significant boost to the Angolan oil sector in the years to come. In addition to this, we are also willing to extend a new $50 billion dollar credit line to Angola, at an interest rate of 0.4%.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, is one of the worst cases of unfulfilled potential due to a variety of problems, including a lack of funds and instability. The Chinese government would like to extend a helping hand, in exchange for access to the DRCs coastline. We would be interested in building a PLA Navy logistics base, similar to the one in Djibouti, but larger in size to be able to support a larger deployment of ships. In exchange, we would like to offer the government the following:
*A deployment of 1,200 PLA Special Forces advisors to assist government forces in training new forces, and taming the troublesome eastern regions of the country.
*$250 million in aid for the conservation of wildlife in the country.
*A $15 billion dollar credit line at 0.4% interest.
We are eager to hear back from the government about establishing a new era of cooperation.

Venezuela

Venezuela is a key ally in the region of Latin America, but its economic struggles and dependence on the oil industry continue to plague the economy. Furthermore, while in recent years the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has faded from world view, many necessities such as medicine, and even food in the worst of times. With this in mind, the Chinese government would like to extend a helping hand to the Venezuelan government.

Oil

With oil currently hovering between $20 and $22 dollars per barrel, this carries a significant negative affect on the Venezuelan government. We would like to negotiate a deal in which the Chinese government will provide Venezuela a substantial credit line, in exchange for a long term lock on Venezuelan oil prices, to be bought directly by the Chinese government, not its oil companies.
Having fallen from its peak of nearly 3.2 million barrels of oil a day, and still containing the world's richest oil reserves, Venezuela's oil inustry has become a hollow shell of its former self, dropping to approximately 645,700 barrels a day by 2020, and around 450,000 today The bulk of that output came from the Orinoco Belt which produced 332,700 barrels daily barrels, but is left with just a single oil rig, a symbol of the massive toll left on the Venezuelan oil industry. We would like to lock in a deal to purchase all of Venezuela's daily oil production, in exchange for Venezuela not selling anymore oil to India, which imports large quantity of Venezuelan oil. We would to import all of Venezuela's oil production at a price of $28 dollars a barrel, and to lock this price in for the next 10 years, as a way to subsidize the Venezuelan oil industry. On top of this, we would like to offer a new low interest (0.5%) credit line of $50 billion USD to revitalize its economy, and to revive the stagnant Orinoco oil fields with new infrastructure projets and refineries fundes by this credit line. Finally, we would like to offer to modernize refit the Puerto Miranda, the largest crudoil export port in South America, to facilitate this deal, at no cost to the government of Venezuela, with an overall investment of $1.2 billion dollars.

Basic Necessities

China has some of the largest agricultural and pharmaceutical companies in the world, and we believe that their expertise could greatly benefit Venezuela. We are willing to subsidize the Venezuelan purchase of Chinese manure for up to 30% of its cost, and donate a large supply of modern seeds of various crop types to assist Venezuela in increasing its local food production.
As for the Pharmaceutical sector, Shanghai Pharmaceuticals Holding Co., Ltd. would like to establish a joint venture, in which Shanghai locally produces a wide supply of critical meducines for the Venezuelan people, with a large manyfacturing site to be built in Caracas. These medications will include various areas such as digestion, immune system, cardiovascular, anti-infection, nervous system, and oncology, as well as musculoskeletal system, and metabolism, filling a critical void in the Venezuelan healthcare system. This would be funded by an initial investment of $500 million USD into creatung the manufacturing and distribution center in Caracas.

What We Want

The PLA Navy has grown massively in recent years, however we still lack a substantial overseas presence that could facilitate operations in various areas of the globe. In exchange for the extensive amount of aid provided above, we would like to construct a PLA Naval Base somewhere on the coast of Venezuela, preferably near the Port of Maracaibo, which would operate as a joint Venezuelan-Chinese naval base.
The base would be about 3 square kilometres in size and staffed by approximately 2000 personnel, with two 500 meter runways, an air traffic control tower, and eight large scale piers about 300 meters in length. In addition to this, we would like to build a Chinese staffed a PLA hospital right outside the base, and make it accessible both to Chinese personnel and Venezuelans.

Trinidad and Tobago

Oil

The Chinese economy, while constantly modernizing and looking for green energy solutions faces one simple problem, it is one of the world's most oil hungry economies and thus we are constantly seeking ways to meet these needs.
In 2018, the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery and related assets were brought offline due to a loss of competitiveness (through technology and falling prices), with an estimated $25 billion dollars of infrastructure investment needed to keep Petrotrin active and competitive, which led to the company being shut down and split, a major blow to Trinidads national pride. With this in mind, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) would like to make a major investment into Trinidad, and its struggling oil industry.
After the shutdown of Petrotrin, the Guaracara Refining Company was formed as a holding company for the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery and related assets to be offered for sale, but few offers emerged and the refinery is yet to be sold. CNPC would like to offer a total investment of $15 billion USD to purchase all the assets held by the Guaracars Refining Company (most of the former Petrotrin assets), with a further $30 billion USD to be invested into modernizing the infrastructure of the oil refineries, and being used to compensate Trinidad for existing debts related to the company. The refineries will then be brought online after a year of modernization, and local employees to be brought back.

Fostering Closer Relations

The Chinese government would like to formally invite the government of Trinidad and Tobago to the belt and road initiative, starting with a large offer. We would like to assume all of Trinidad and Tobago's national debt (about $12 Billion USD at this point), and pay it off completely, freeing the government of all its debt obligations. We would then like to offer a credit line of 0% interest, of up to $15 billion USD in debt (while we don't recommend using it all at once, this is the maximum funds we are making available to the country), with an additional belt and road investment of $5 billion dollar grant that would be split between expanding Trinidads extensive transport infrastructure, and the development of new green energy sources on the island.

Defense

The Trinidad Defense Force, while small, is a relatively competent one, however it lacks modern equipment, with an again fleet of ships and aircraft. We would like to make a donation of two HX-21 aircraft, and four Z-18 Naval helicopters to replace the current aging fleet of the Trinidad and Tobago Air Guard, which will facilitate more effective search and rescue operations in the region.

Trade Agreement and Visas

With all of the above in mind, we would like to open up talks about securing a free trade agreemsnt between our two nations, so that commodities such as petroleum and steel can flow freely between our nations and bring down operations costs. Currently, Trinidad and Tobago have large tariffs on imports, and we would like to schedule talks on a free trade deal for next year.
We also would like to establish an agreement with the Trinidad and Tobago government to allow visa free travel between our two nations.

Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque | Bandar Seri Begawan

by Utkarsh Acharya July 25, 2020
One of the richest country Brunei, located on the north coast of the island of Borneo surrounded by the South China Sea near Malaysia. Brunei is a small country, but it is one of the beautiful country of Asia. With a low crime rate this place is safe for the tourist. Its offer you the most beautiful Mosque, beaches and bio-diverse rain forest in the Asia.
With massive oil and natural gas wealth, Brunei is one of the top 10 richest country of Asia. Omar Ali Saifuddien MosqueOmar Ali Saifuddien Mosque is the Islamic architecture mosque located in the capital city, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. It's about 10 km away from Brunei International Airport. It was built in an artificial lagoon on the banks of the Brunei River at Kampong Aye. Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque is named after Omar Ali Saifuddien III, the 28th Sultan of Brunei. Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III has faith in Islamic religion, who initiated to construct a Mosque for the Islamic people of Brunei, which serves as a symbol of the Islamic faith in Brunei. It was started constructing on 1954, and completed its construction in 1958. It took 4 years to complete its construction work.
Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque is made from the white Italian marble. Some other material used for the building this Mosque includes, Shanghai's famous granite, an expensive and beautiful crystal chandeliers from England, the carpets from Saudi Arabia, and the mosque's most perceptible feature, the main dome is covered in pure gold which cost of around 5 million USD at that time. The mosque stands 52 m i.e. 171 ft high, the main minaret makes it the tallest in the Brunei. The interior of the mosque is for prayer only, with features such as stained glass windows, arches, semi-domes and marble columns. The Mosques used for communal prayer on Fridays are known as Jami.
The mosque is surrounded by an artificial lake that also acts as a reflective pool as well as trees and charming flower gardens. Taman Mahkota Jubli Emas also commonly known as Eco-Corridor Park, located near to the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. Its hardly 5 min walk from the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque. The park was open first time for the public in 2017. This riverfront park is about 30 acres, featured 6 metre wide promenade for pedestrian and cyclists, as well as a garden and green spaces for recreational activities.
To know more about this place Click here.. https://gsglowingstar.blogspot.com/2020/07/omar-ali-saifuddien-mosque-bandar-seri.html

The Mayoral Elections are scheduled for later this year, one of the main concessions given by the recent Tianmen Protests. The CCP has been preparing for these elections, while it will be a free election without voter suppression or harrasment of opposing political leadership. However, the Government has put several bureaucratic hurdles in their way, requiring them to prove support via petition of 200,000 people from their city/town/village along with a phone number or email to prove it and to register their political party. As such, several candidates despite being popular in their village or town were unable to register for the election due to the population of the towns straight up not being large enough for their petitions to succeed. Which, leaves several areas where the CCP has a monopoly with only their candidates able to run, in the cities like Shanghai however that is where actual competition occurs.
However, the one benefit of being the richest party and having a monopoly on the media, is that you can choose not to cover your opposition and also spread election ads far better than the opposition online and on state-owned Television and radio. As part of this, the government will begin spreading election ads for CCP candidates and pro-CCP candidates months ahead of the elections.
Hong Kong protests are expected to have an impact during the elections but a minor one due to the media blackout in Hong Kong and the fact it's being sealed off from the rest of China.
It's also expected the opposition candidates will end up splitting their vote, as they will be prevented from forming a joint-ticket, as the CCP will be forwarding one candidate in each town/city or a pro-CCP one, due to better unity on our part, organization as well as the fact we have a coalition with the pro-ccp candidates parties.

Britain is supposed to be a rich country we're told, one of the richest in the world. So why is our infrastructure so shit?
I've been living in China for the past year, a "developing" nation and the infrastructure and public transport here is light years better than Britain.
If I want to go to Shanghai from my city, I can hop on the high speed bullet train and travel the 160km in 45 minutes, and the cost of a ticket is less than a tenner.
A similar train journey in UK from Coventry to London takes 1 hour at £56 and 2 hours at £26.
Londoners rave about how great their underground is, but China has 35 fucking cities with a subway. And all of them are cheaper, better and more modern than London underground.
Every city has a fleet of busses that come every 5 minutes, these buses cost 23p to ride no matter how far you want to go.
UK is supposed to be a rich country, but every time I visit now I just don't see it. Where is the money? Cause it's not on the streets like it is in China, where a new public infrastructure project is being built every week.
Ofc our country is better at other things, our salaries are higher, we have much more democracy and much more freedom and we're socially more advanced. But why is our public transport and infrastructure so shit?
/End rant

ATTENTION, JUNE 2019: Work visas now appear to be centrally processed in Beijing rather than provincially, and criminal records in third countries might get your application rejected (!). It seems safe to say that the glory days of converting to a Z-Visa in Hong Kong are probably imminently over. Also, if you were not born in your country of citizenship and China doesn't like your birthplace, you may get rejected for that reason.
Summer is nearly here, school’s nearly out, and you know what that means: hiring season is in full swing.
Like Japan in the ‘80s and Korea in the ‘90s and early naughts, China is where bright young Anglosphone things go right now to make oodles of money. Salaries are higher than they are anywhere on earth except the Gulf states, and let’s be honest--who wants to make four thousand bucks a month in Saudi when you can’t buy any beer with it?
However, the process of getting to China is more complicated than it has ever been. The time to be interviewing with schools and getting docs together is now. This thread (possibly a series of threads) will discuss the kinds of jobs that are available, how to get them, and what to expect. But first:
Who is eligible to work in China?
Back in the good old days of the late 2000s, anybody (native English-speaker or not) could roll into the Middle Kingdom with a degree from the University of Photoshop, get a work visa in Hong Kong, and supplement their relatively meager salary with lucrative side gigs--all without anybody giving a fuck.
Those days are gone--and the available evidence suggests they ain’t coming back. To teach English in China, you must have the following items:
a) An Anglophone passport from the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. South Africans are a bit up in the air at the moment. If you’re South African and looking to teach in China, your best bet is to apply broadly, and only agree to a job if they will sponsor a Z-visa before you depart. If you do not have a passport from one of these countries, you are unfortunately not supposed to be eligible to teach English in China--but see below.
BIG EDIT. South Africa seems to belong to a weird grey area, also including much of the West Indies, where the school has to convince the local PSB that it counts as native English-speaking under the law. awanderingwill has met one Jamaican teaching legally under this loophole. If you are from an Anglophone country that isn't one of those six, make sure your contract says "English Teacher"--your contract defines what you do on the job in the eyes of the law, and you can be deported for doing things outside of that--find a third-party Chinese speaker to read the Chinese version of the contract to make sure it says "English Teacher"--and make very, very sure you have a Z-Visa in your passport before you so much as book a plane ticket.
ANOTHER EDIT:
From khed: "This is not true. A school I used to do HR for in rural Jilin province has legally hired English teachers from both the Philippines and Russia. Legit Z-visas. The Russian teacher went through the process last summer--degree from a Russian university. Various Filippinos with degrees from the Philippines have gone through the process in the past few months.
My understanding is that in shit-tier locations the list of nationalities is not as restrictive as elsewhere...According to some sources, it may be possible for qualified teachers from the Philippines and other countries to legally teach in a limited number of locations in China. Beware that unscrupulous recruiters may exploit this fact by promising visas that they cannot actually deliver."
BUT, from ronnydelta:
"I'm in a shit tier and there's 0 chance a non-native gets a legal Z visa here. It may depend on location but generally in 90% of cases it holds true. What might have been easy 2 years ago is now hard to do. We used to have Filipino and Russian teachers here also, 3 years ago but there was a purge. Now this city still has a lot but they are all illegal.
The local government has a website in which they issue a notification of resident permit or visa revocation and a lot of them are in regards to illegal, Russians, Cambodians and Filipinos working as teachers. They even have their passport number up on it."
NON-NATIVES: ONLY LOOK INTO WORKING IN CHINA IF YOU ARE VERY RISK-TOLERANT, HAVE A LANDING CUSHION AT HOME, AND WOULDN'T MIND GETTING TWO WEEKS IN A JAIL CELL AND A COUNTRYWIDE TEN-YEAR BAN. Just because it's possible for some non-natives to work legally doesn't mean you can find a way to pull it off--and the loopholes are getting tighter every year.
b) The original diploma from a completed bachelor’s degree done at an accredited Anglophone university. This might mean you start your job six to eight months after a spring graduation, depending on how long your diploma takes to be issued. Unfortunately, a note of completion from your university isn’t sufficient.
c) Either a 120-hour TEFL certificate or two years’ experience working as an English teacher. There is at least one municipality we know of that only accepts the latter, but almost everywhere else will take the certificates. This is the weakest link in the chain and it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s tightened up in a few years--but for now, a 120-hour TEFL certificate is just fine.
What is a 120-hour TEFL certificate, you ask? Why, it’s a TEFL certificate that says “120 hours” on it. You can buy them on Groupon for about thirty or forty bucks, complete some multiple-choice quizzes in an afternoon, and finish the course up in a weekend and have something just as good as a CELTA for visa purposes. There is no accrediting body for TEFL certifications, and China does not distinguish between providers. Remember, information you get from TEFL providers should be treated as a sales pitch; they want to sell you their services, so they may try to convince you that their certificate is better to others in some way. In the end, though, it's just a piece of paper used to secure a Chinese visa.
If you have two years’ experience, this can be proven with a letter from your former boss written on company letterhead attesting to your experience. This does not need to be authenticated, but it does need to be signed by your boss. You can get the visa with either the letter or the certificate, so if getting the certificate is a pain in the neck then you may want to just bite the bullet and get the certificate. Make sure you know where the certificate was issued for authentication purposes, and try and get one issued in the jurisdiction of your consulate.
BIG BIG EDIT: There is now apparently a SAFEA-approved course that is half online and half in China. Complete the online portion and receive a China-issued (thus, no need for authentication) certificate you can use to apply for the Z-Visa, then do the in-class portion over a week in the Guo before your job starts. The cost is 3000 yuan, or a bit under $500. Link. A big thanks to pdx_beyond for this one.
d) A clean background check from home, dated from no more than six months before you apply for the visa. Americans: sometimes this means an FBI check, sometimes state-level. Check with your recruiter.
Nota bene: if you are currently working abroad, you are almost certainly going to have to apply from home for the visa. It is sometimes possible to apply from abroad with a background check from abroad, but you shouldn’t count on it. Don’t assume you could just do everything by visa agency either, too, because you may need to come into the embassy/consulate at home to get fingerprinted. It's probably better to just go home for summer vacation then try to figure out the logistics abroad.
Before asking any more questions about these four items, please read this thread on Chinese visas to see if it is answered there. It’s a confusing process and some questions do not always have black-and-white answers. Play it by ear, but don’t be a sucker--there are plenty of recruiters who will happily get you over on a tourist visa. We will talk about them more in a bit.
Where can I work in China?
Basically any city over a million people will have some jobs available. Xinjiang, Tibet and some other majority-minority regions (like western Sichuan) are completely off-limits--no foreigners allowed.
The question is, where do you want to work in China? A city of two million people is nothing special by Chinese standards, and will not be comparable to a Western city of similar size like Pittsburgh, Adelaide or Lisbon. China-watchers talk about city “tiers”, from 1 (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou) to 6 (some random municipal capital in Guizhou). A slightly modified list of tiers for TEFL would look about like this (nota bene: approximate, definitely not cut-and-dried. Cities given are examples and are not exhaustive):
Tier 0: Beijing and Shanghai. The leviathans. Highest cost of living; high salaries, but not in full proportion to CoL. Lots of foreigners, so competition for the good jobs. You can get basically any Western luxury or dish you’d like here, so long as you’re willing to pay for it.
Expect living expenses after housing to be about 9-11K yuan a month if you’re neither particularly frugal nor particularly spendthrift.
Tier 1: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Kunming, Chengdu, Suzhou/Changzhou/Hangzhou. Metropoles (>10 million people) with a fair number of foreigners and lots of money flowing around, but not as much competition. Salaries tend to be fairly high (a bit lower out west in Chengdu and Chongqing). Most Western luxuries are available, if you want to go out for good pizza. Kunming is here competition-wise because of its near-flawless climate and low air pollution.
Living expenses: 7-10K.
Tier 2: Xiamen, Dongguan, Foshan, Fuzhou, Harbin, Shenyang, Qingdao, Wuhan, Changsha, Dalian, Xi’an, Ningbo. Major cities (>5 million), usually provincial capitals on the coast or so. There will be a reasonably-large foreigner community, but it starts to contract/get smaller at this point. Salaries are still good and the cost of living is low, but Western luxuries will start to get scarcer.
Living expenses: 6-8K...maybe lower. Vaeal reports s/he spends 3K in an average month, and you can certainly pull that off if you rarely go to nice restaurants or bars. For budgeting/debt-servicing purchases, assume 6-8K. The worst-case scenario is that you'll spend less than you thought and have extra cash.
Tier 3: Hefei, Zhengzhou, Taiyuan, Hohhot, Guiyang. These are usually large-ish (>3 mill) cities in rich provinces or large cities/capitals of poor provinces. Salaries can be good if you find the right job, but there won’t that be many foreigners and many of the ones you do find will be weird. (There are weird foreigners everywhere in China, but Tier 0-2 also have a fair number of semi-normal people). You will have a hard time finding Western luxuries, though there will at least be a Carrefour. Pollution is often quite bad (Taiyuan, Hefei). On the other hand precisely because there aren’t that many foreigners you may find all sorts of doors opened if you know your way around and speak some Mandarin.
Living expenses: 5-8K.
Tier 4: Leshan, Weihai, Mianyang, Changde… These cities are well over a couple million people, but they’re usually factory towns and not all that wealthy. Expect a small number of often quite strange foreigners to talk to, nowhere to get a good pizza, and not too much to do if you don't speak Chinese--except drink, the favored pastime of many weird foreigners.
Living expenses: 5-8K.
Tier 5 and below (aka Tier 88): Bengbu, Mengzhou, Suzhou-in-Anhui, Loudi. Basically, just don’t--unless you have an extremely competitive offer (unlikely), experience with dealing with isolation and something else to occupy your time. Definitely don’t if it’s your first time in China.
Living expenses: I dunno, how much do you drink? (You can always economize with the thirty-kuai five-liter jugs of baijiu at the corner shop, if you don't mind going blind).
Notice that a lot of the lower-tier cities are in the Chinese Midwest, in provinces like Shanxi, Anhui and Henan that are just west of the coastal provinces. This isn’t coincidental, as these areas are significantly poorer and suffer brain drain to the much richer east coast.
If it’s your first time in China, you should probably pick a Tier 1 or a Tier 2. Tier 3 for the adventurous or those with a semester or two of Mandarin under their belts. Don’t do Tier 4 or Tier 5 for a first job.
What kinds of jobs are there in China?
You need to have a job in hand before you can apply for a work visa, so make sure you pick a good one. The good news is that there are far more jobs then there are foreigners. They all pay pretty well by world TEFL standards, but there is a lot of salary variation.
Most jobs fall into one of six categories: training centers, kindergartens, public schools, private schools, universities, and real international schools. There are also summer camps, which are a special and somewhat risky case.
Below, all salary figures are after tax, per month, in yuan. You can usually also negotiate housing included, or a housing allowance that will cover all or most of rent.
Training Centers. Yep, everybody’s favorite Happy Giraffe. Every Chinese city above about a million people has a few of these, and they’re always looking for more teachers. Unlike in many countries, these tend to cater more to kids then adults--though there are training centers that focus on adults as well (like Meten).
Salary: Salary will range from about 13K for first-timers in poorer areas to 18-20K for those with experience in richer areas.
Hours a week: About 20-25 teaching hours in the classroom (“teaching hour” is often shorter than a clock hour). This is often combined with mandatory office time for lesson prep or just lounging around, up to 40 hours a week. Many centers open in the afternoon around 1.
Schedule: Expect to work longer hours on weekends and get two weekdays (often Monday and Tuesday) off.
Who’s qualified? Anybody who can get the visa is qualified for most training centers. They’re not too picky.
Age range: Often small kids; that’s where the money is. If you’re experienced and interviewing in a major city, you may be able to negotiate respite from kindergartners. Some training centers specialize in adults, and these are usually more competitive to get jobs at.
Pros: Decent money; materials usually provided (check on this); sometimes Chinese classes (of varying quality). Lots of “handholding” (at the major centers, at least).
Cons: Profit motive can make your bosses cutthroat or even imbecilically short-sighted. You will be working when the rest of the world has time off (evenings and weekends), which can be hard on your social life. You don't get long, luxurious winter and summer holidays like with universities and schools.
Public Schools. Public primary, middle and high schools in major cities. There are a lot of these jobs, but they can be hard to find. Expect a salary cut offset by lower hours.
Salary: May be as low as 8k or as high as 12-13K...sometimes 15 or 16K in richer cities. I don’t think I’ve ever seen higher than that. Housing is often included but may be on campus with attendent curfew (!)--you might want to ask for a housing allowance instead, if they’ll offer one.
Hours a week: 20 teaching hours is normal. Luckily, you usually don’t have many office hours; if your first class isn’t until noon, you can sleep in, and if your last class ends at 11:30 you can go downtown for lunch. This is not universal, so check.
Schedule: 9-5, Monday to Friday.
Who’s qualified? Outside of the very biggest and richest cities, usually anybody. You may not be able to get a job at the best school in the city, but you can usually find one at a school in the city.
Age range: Sometimes primary school, sometimes middle school, sometimes high school; look for a school that suits your preferences.
Pros: Low hours, usually lowish pressure. Generally have paid winter holidays. Good jumping off point for private schools (and higher salaries).
Cons: Lower salary in comparison to training centers and private schools. Curriculum is often not provided, so bring your own materials and lessons. You might have very large classes (40+ students) and you’ll probably only see each one every week or other week. On-campus housing can be a gilded cage if you like late nights or bringing home attractive locals (or other teachers). 10-month contracts are the norm.
Private Schools. Private primary, middle and high schools in major cities, catering mostly to rich parents. Many will call themselves “international schools,” or “bilingual/foreign language schools,” but don’t be fooled--the students are all Chinese. These schools are often for-profit in practice if not on paper (not that they’ll tell you that) and are often at least theoretically in the business of preparing Chinese students to go to university abroad. Expect an easy job and often a highish salary, but a lot of office hours/deskwarming.
Salary: I worked at one for 11K a month plus housing, which was at least 2K less than I was worth. You can probably do better: 13-16K for relative noobies, up to the 25-26K point for licensed foreign subject teachers (!). Housing should be included, though it may be an on-campus gilded cage as with public schools. (I got lucky; my predecessor behaved so badly all foreign teachers were permanently banned from the on-campus housing).
Hours a week: 17-25 teaching hours (sometimes as low as 40 minutes). Sound easy? You’ll also have to be on campus from 9 to 5--they’ll sometimes let you leave for lunch, but find out about this. You may even have a day scheduled with no classes whatsoever every week--learn to program or work on your Chinese, because it’s not going to be a day off.
Schedule: 9-5, Monday to Friday. Admin may dangle a few hundred kuai in front of your face in return for attending Saturday morning marketing/admissions sessions; often worth taking if you’re not otherwise occupied.
Who’s qualified? For Tier 0 (Beijing/Shanghai): bona fide foreign teachers with licenses and experience. For Tier 1 and 2: regular ESL twerps with a year or so of experience. Below that, you should be able to find one that’ll take a fresh grad (sometimes with a pay cut).
Age range: Sometimes primary, usually middle and high school.
Pros: Respectable salary, low in-class hours. Administration often too incompetent to keep real tabs on you. Often paid winters, 12-month and 2-year contracts are becoming more common (meaning paid summers). Looks good on a résumé. You may also be able to talk your way into teaching another subject like math or history if you can persuade admin to let you do it (do you have a math minor, for example?)
Cons: Lots of deskwarming. You usually won’t be provided with materials. Your class schedule will often change randomly at short notice. On-campus housing can be annoying. Classes usually aren’t as large as at public schools, but you will usually only see each one once a week (and they’ll be of extremely varied skill level, which limits your effectiveness), and students are often quite weak or have undiagnosed learning disabilities or behavioral problems. If you can ignore these obstacles and be the charismatic, preppy face of English teaching, the administration will usually like you. Some schools only offer paid summers with contract renewals.
Private kindergartens. A lucrative business in China--aspiring upper-middle-class parents will pay good money to send their kids to Future Harvard International Kindergarten (the former workplace of an acquaintance of ours; he said most of the teachers drank on the job). Expect good money and lowish class hours with moderate deskwarming--perfect, if you’re the type to teach small kids.
Salary: Lower bound of 16K a month, upper of about 21K or so, plus housing, depending on city and experience. Housing will obviously be off-campus.
Hours a week: Could be fairly low. Kindergarten classes tend to be very short due to the students’ low attention spans; you might be teaching 20-30 half-hour periods a week. You’ll often have some deskwarming, but usually not the full 9-5. Other schools hire “homeroom teachers” -- you may lead a few lessons in the day, and other times monitor group work/activities.
Schedule: Morning and early afternoons, Monday to Friday. You might be able to get bonuses for weekend marketing events.
Who’s qualified? They’ll take basically anybody. The real question is, can you handle the chaos and enforced silliness? Many people can’t. If you can, you have a valuable skill set.
Age range: 3-6. Some of the nuttier ones will try classes with 1-2 year olds.
Pros: Good money, lowish hours, materials provided. Good starting job (if you have zero experience). Lots of opportunities.
Cons: Definitely not for everybody.
Universities. Many university students have to take English, and universities want native speakers to teach them. It is not as hard to get these jobs as you’d think, unless you’re gunning for Tsinghua or some other crazy elite institution, but you will usually want some experience first unless you’re going to a smaller city. Expect low hours but correspondingly low pay.
Salary: Depending on the institution and city, it might be as low as 6K, though these days 8K is the usual floor. More than 11-12K is pushing it for most people (remember, you’re paid out of the public purse). Housing is usually included, but it’s often on campus with a strict visitor policy--see if you can get a housing allowance. (Edit: I saw an ad on Dave's offering 16K (presumably after tax) plus housing. However, it's in a crappy industrial city in Henan, so there you go.)
Hours a week: Low--sometimes as few as 10 hours a week--and usually no office hours. The catch is that you will need to prepare all your materials.
Schedule: Weekdays.
Who’s qualified? Newly minted grads getting university gigs is usually restricted to smaller cities. Once you have about a year of experience under your belt, though, your options open up significantly.
Age range: 18+.
Pros: High autonomy and low hours. In the past, it was standard to fill your free time with lucrative side gigs to pad the low salary; this is much riskier these days, so don’t, or at least accept the risk that you may be jailed and deported at any time without warning. Students are often serious, depending on their major, and even those who don’t care as much are usually non-disruptive owing to the fact that they’re adults.
Cons: While you won’t be at risk of starving on a university salary, your ability to save or pay off debt will be limited. On-campus housing might be a gilded cage, you will have to do all your materials from scratch, and classes are often very large--and you don’t get a TA.
A regrettably necessary warning: do not think that you can get away with sleeping with your university students. Find another university across town and prowl at the bars there, if you really must.
International Schools. The shining Potemkin village on the hill of ESL, international school world is the most professional and best-paying sector of the lot. You’ll usually be teaching a mix of expats’ kids and very rich locals. The salaries are good, but the standards are high and competition is relatively fierce. Almost all of them want a master’s and/or a teaching license along with some serious experience.
If you’re a newly minted grad, skip this section: it’s not for you. But if you’re interested in working your way up here, read on.
Salary: High. 20-30K after tax plus housing, and more for subject teachers. Plus a round-trip flight home for Christmas and sometimes a couple of other allowances. Generally paid summers.
Hours a week: 20-25 teaching hours. Plus office hours in which you’ll be prepping with good materials, because you’re a pro who knows how to do that like the back of your hand.
Schedule: 9-5 M-F, plus whatever other events. Because, you know, you’re a professional.
Who’s qualified? If you’re reading this, you ain’t. An Anglosphere teaching license, plus two to three years experience teaching at a school at home, is usually the bare minimum. A master’s can’t hurt, but a license is worth more than a master’s. In Shanghai/Beijing schools often want 3-5 years+ of experience.
Age range: I dunno, what age group are you licensed to teach?
Pros: Good money. Professional development. A Western-style apartment. Bring your spouse over and get your kids educated for free. All that jazz.
Cons: Sometimes surprisingly poorly-managed, according to what I’ve seen of the reviews on internationalschoolreviews.com.
Summer camps. You can’t get a visa for these; they’re side work for a week or two in the summer. Almost never raided by the cops looking for illegal teaching, as far as I know--they’re too ephemeral--but be prepared to live with the consequences if you are raided. Expect about 5K kuai for a week of work; if you’re teaching at a school or university these can help tide your summer savings over and give you something to do if you’re bored out of your tree in your little apartment. Most recruiters have a bunch of summer gigs up their sleeve and will be happy to connect you to one. Even if it turns out to be hell, it’s only for a week or two.
Other gigs: They exist, I presume, but probably 98% of all English-teaching jobs in China fit into one of the above seven categories.
How do I find a job in China?
So you’ve decided where you’d like to teach, and what kind of job you’d like to get. Unfortunately, for a first job, it’s difficult to email the school directly. Because the visa process is so complicated, you’ll probably need to go through a recruiter. (The exception is the really big chain training centers like English First and Wall Street English--those do their recruiting in-house).
Recruiters post on the major ESL job boards. For training center and kindergarten jobs, try Dave’s ESL Café. For university jobs, public school jobs and private school jobs, try EChinaCities or EChinaCareers. Recruiters usually have lots of jobs but focus on a single city or area (so a recruiter might focus on Chengdu or Fujian and have no jobs available in Harbin--but they will often know somebody who does). There are also WeChat job groups; find a city’s expat WeChat group on Google, ask around in it for the jobs group, and advertise yourself. Be prepared to cut through a lot of dreck. (Don’t look for job groups on Facebook; the Chinese can’t use it.)
Recruiters in China usually range from shrewd to outright duplicitous. Read this guide before plunging in. The main takeaway is:

Ensure you know what sort of job you want and have your recruiter find it for you. Veto jobs that aren’t up to your standards, but be flexible. No job’s perfect.
Ensure you talk one-on-one to another foreign teacher at any job you think you might want to take. This helps ensure you don’t end up at Triangle Shirtwaist English Center.
Ensure that everything that was agreed on is in the contract.
For the love of God, do not get on a plane to China unless there’s a Z-Visa in your passport. Even if they tell you they’ll send you to Hong Kong to convert a tourist visa to a Z-Visa. Even if they say they have an in with the local PSB. Even if they say nobody cares. Don’t do it. Don’t trust (but don’t be completely paranoid). Verify anyways. There are plenty of recruiters, so feel free to talk to multiple.

Feel free to contact our very own TeachInSuzhou, an American whom we know and trust not to fuck you over. He is a partner in a Suzhou-based registered recruitment agency that is known to vet positions very carefully.
What do I need to do to start the job?
Found a job you want? Congratulations! You have a two-month journey through paperwork ahead of you. This thread, written in February of 2018, is mostly still good--the process has not changed significantly. Read it, understand it, and in particular understand that things can change depending on where you are going and what your situation is (some provinces will take a state-level background check [for Americans], others want FBI; some consulates/embassies need you to come in to be fingerprinted, some don’t…)
Know for certain how you need to get your documents processed before you start. Getting one wrong could knock the process back months. Do not take the linked thread as gospel; contact a visa agency or the consulate. Even the recruiter may be confused.
Good luck! If you have questions, feel free to ask in this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/useSkullmapping
Max Universe

Vegan
Home
Create
1. Home Garden
2. Study
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  2. https://vimeo.com/425248887
Learning by Doing = Ultra Clean All Dimension 100%
1. Remote Control Robot for Recycle = AI learn from People. later knows what to do in this Place = 10
2. 2020 World Economic Forum on Plastic Waste + COVID Mask 😷 more than Jellyfish + Green Recovery https://www.linkedin.com/posts/world-economic-forum_covid-19-plastic-pollution-and-the-green-activity-6676468768304066560-c2VO
3. Stanford Professorin Okamura‘s recycled hardened plastic snake Robot 🤖️🐍is fire 🔥proof, needle 💉proof, pumped 🎈to lift heavy object, go through tiny holes 🪐+ self is Antenna📶 talk to Satellite🛸 https://youtu.be/oRjFFgAZQnk Need to create a Whole New Industry = WALL·E for Ocean MicroPlastic+Earth+Nuclear☢️Disaster Rescure+GeoWeapon+BIO Weapon Clean Up. This is the Cheapest + Best Way against Coronavirus🦠0% Data protected. 0 Leak to Communist China
  1. Water
  2. Air
  3. Gene
  4. Nuclear
  5. All Thoughts
  6. Carbon = EarthDNA NASA exDeputy Administratorin Dava Newman. https://youtu.be/__NSUrHsSJM 2033 ice melt Each City Property 1 Trillion USD. Talking in front of Richest Person in Europe = EBAN + European Investment Bank + European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 2033 ice 🧊 All melt. London, New York, Boston, Bay Area, Shanghai, HongKong, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangladesh, Pacific Countries like Fiji Vanuatu, Indian Ocean Countries Maldives Mauritius, All will be under Water. Each City each year Real Estate 🏡 Value = 1 Trillion USD 💰 Her Husband International Space Station Habitation Module + USA South Pole Station Chief Designer https://earthdna.org/ StarWalk 2 app wil be perfect in Future. You can not only view the terraforming of the earth🌎, but also various actions to save the earth. Can add a similar comparison to Moon🌕 + Mars. Reflect our action on a universe scale. Their time travel feature can maximize children's understanding. All people enlightened and follow their lives since influences in Childhood. What you will do is phenomenon.
  7. AI harness recycle remanufactute space junk 🚮♻️🖨️+ space mining ⛏💧💰🖨️♻️ to new Spaceship 🛸. 2kg=9280USD Space Junk Recycle + Made Straight in Space = Manufacturing in Orbit @ NASA FDL + All Companies Made in Space=100+Times better Quality than Made on Earth Space Junk are already best Material from Spaceship Perfect Material for Direct re-Manufacturing in Orbit 1 Bottle of Water send to Moon = 500,000USD half a Million Companies are rushing into this Trillion Dollar Industry https://youtu.be/LIpZXkd2hAc
4. 0 False Information = Constant update Big Bang/Collapse/Crunch
Feel = Be in the Moment
1. Touch
2. Smell
  1. Vegan NOT meat. less Kill. DO something Meaningful for Universe
Higher Dimension
Cloud Atlas Projector
1. 0 Paper On Floor
2. 0 Delay
3. All Idea Holo like + 0 Distortion 0 False Positive https://youtu.be/k3cJjZiZ-cw
Blade Runner Holo Joi
1. Unlimted AI Clean Buddha Style Lover https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeF9GF96N91KhaY9X1ktSsJhVm81JcOQI

This post will explore the attitudes of Chinese people toward Hong Kong and its current political situation (not the CCP whose attitudes and motives are more or less known).
I have seen on this subreddit, and especially Reddit more generally, an astounding lack of knowledge about Chinese history and therefore an inability to analyse the current situation thoroughly. So we start with a history lesson.

Really quick history lesson

So the year is 1842. For the past several decades/centuries, the British had been concerned about the trade deficit with Qing China (hadn't bothered reading Wealth of Nations apparently). In order to "correct" this trade imbalance the British state decides to smuggle opium into the country. Something like ~10% of all Chinese men become addicted to opium. This is a catastrophe for the Qing state and so they decide to destroy all the opium the British have stored (without compensating them for it). The British government decides to punish Qing China for not allowing them to sell opium. They win due to superior firepower & military doctrine.
The terms of surrender include ceding Hong Kong.
If this war seems ridiculous, that's because it is: many British MPs at the time balked at punishing another state for not wanting an opium epidemic.
At any rate, this leads to the Century of Humiliation where China is successively sliced up into spheres of influence by everyone and their mothers (even Italy somehow got in on the action!), massive rebellions happen (massive civilian deaths to go with it), and Japan learns that the only way forward is imperialism.
2x more people die in China during this period of turmoil than all casualties in the European "War to End All Wars"
Fast forward many years to the Republican Chinese state in 1937, what you might consider the precursor to Taiwan. Japan has a newfound imperial appetite and a craving for Chinese. As it sweeps through Northern China, Chiang Kai-Shek commits all his forces and desperately holds at Shanghai waiting for international aid. He hears only crickets as China's trained officer corps is completely eradicated and Shanghai is taken.
Liberal institutions (the League of Nations) and their architects, the Western powers, abandoned China. ~20million+ Chinese die in this war.
From here you know the rest since this is /neolib: WW2 is won, the Communist Party takes power but fails completely because communism is fucking dumb lol. A fuckton more people die (like 50m).

Mainland Chinese sentiment

I hope this small history lesson may help you understand why there might be a slight mistrust of "the West" for many Chinese. Every bit is true, but I have editorialized it in a way that a very nationalist Chinese person may view it. So let me analyse the current situation through the historical lens I have presented:

Anti-West sentiment: CCTV saying that the protests are due to Western powers agitating HKers is obviously wrong. Why do they bother? We choose to believe what we believe in - and Chinese history has made it awfully easy for any nationalist to believe the West is out to get them.
Anti-Colonial sentiment: Hong Kong was the first to fall and is, in a sense, an embodiment of the Century of Humiliation. Hong Kong cannot "fall" again. It is an integral part of China and any whiff of separatism must be stamped out (fyi, very very few protesters have called for independence in this instance). Furthermore, seeing HK protesters waving the UK or US flag is sure to infuriate Chinese person who knows their history.
Anti-HKer sentiment: Many (not all!) HKers feel superior to mainlanders due to some sort of colonial mindset. This superiority complex is immediately apparent to any Mandarin speaking mainlander who visits. I imagine the mainland response is something like "we suffered through all of this, managed to pull ourselves back together, build our shining skyscraper cities, and you have the gall to feel superior to us because you were colonized?" Mainland sentiment toward HKers has trended negative even before the protests.

Even if you are not a nationalist, the combination of these 3 factors has meant that Mainland support for HK is fairly low. The most support I have personally seen is sympathy for HK's sluggish economic progress and extreme housing costs. Although of course it is hard to tell where true sympathies lie due to censors.

Hong Kongers that don't support the protests

When I asked my HKer relatives about it, they showed no support and just said "those kids are just making eveything 乱“. 乱 usually means messy/dirty, but in this case it carries kind of a connotation of "social disorder" (?). Given the history of the Century of Humiliation + Early CCP rule, it is not surprising why many might not want social unrest. Things are still going alright, and they have seen how low China can go, so why take a stand now? The whole era is still very much a cultural scar. Interestingly, many also regard this as part of the modern social contract between the CCP and the people (i.e. you can rule as long as GDP growth is good).
Some anecdotes of anti-protest HKers. Mentions no independent poll conducted regarded attitudes yet.
On the other hand, literally every young HKer I've spoken to (i.e. younger than 25ish) has supported the protests. Complete conjecture: they grew up in liberalism and therefore care about it more. But they are less cautious because they didn't live through Cultural Revolution, etc. like my relatively old relatives.

Overseas Chinese

This is where you are of course most likely to find support for the protests. Taiwan is strongly in favour, and I imagine most immigrants to the West are as well (I have nothing to back this up though). Interestingly, not everyone is. Why do people that enjoy economic and political liberty not support those that want it? For the recent immigrants, maybe we can chalk that up to their upbringing. For those that have been around for a long time? This is just my opinion based on my experience, but I get the sense that many overseas Chinese support the rise of China, and thereby are willing to look the other way on the CCP itself and its adventures in HK and Xinjiang.
What does the rise of China mean for us?
For a Malaysian Chinese, whose country's constitution discriminates against them and whose country kicked Singapore out for being too Chinese, a wealthy & powerful China means they can "unabashedly exhibit their Chinese ethnicity and culture". I imagine this is a huge QoL improvement for them, since Malaysian Chinese have kept the most traditions out of any of us.
read section "Norms shaped by ethnic ties: Malaysian Chinese community"
For us in West, perhaps it's a racism thing. The first immigration restrictions in US & Canada were designed to keep Chinese people out. Despite having arguably the richest culinary tradition, Chinese food is regarded as cheap, oily, and chock full of MSG. There has been a long projection of inferiority, but China's rise has slowly reversed that. People know what dim sum is and hell, sometimes I see someone on TV that vaguely looks like me.
If you are an Overseas Chinese, you have only seen positives from this rendition of China (prestige) and none of the negatives (limits on freedom, Great Firewall, and borderline genocide).

Conclusion

I wrote this because I don't think many people really understand China (I don't think I do either). I think this will be a terrible century if China and America don't eventually get to understand each other. We all know that many Chinese don't support Hong Kong, but it is even more important to figure out why. Only then can you be able to change attitudes. Hopefully this is a good starting point for discussion. I am not an expert; please feel free to correct me or ask for sources where appropriate.
Bias disclosure: 2nd gen Chinese immigrant to Canada. Appreciate Chinese history and the country itself. Dislike communism immensely.

Inquisitr—Mystery Deepens Over Why Kremlin Bank CEO’s Plane Remains In Florida, 50 Miles From Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago
(1/5/2020) “Almost 24 hours after landing at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) in Florida early on Saturday morning, as The Inquisitr reported, a private jet frequently used by the CEO of Russia’s largest state-owned-bank remained on the ground there—about 50 miles south of Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach where Donald Trump is vacationing until Sunday afternoon.
Whether Sberbank CEO German Gref† was aboard the plane when it arrived on a 12-hour, 23-minute nonstop flight from Moscow remains unconfirmed. Russian media has reported that the plane, a Gulfstream G650 operated by Jet Air Group with the tail number RA-10204, is used frequently and perhaps exclusively by Gref.
(UPDATE: According to flight records posted by the site FlightAware, the Sberbank jet departed Fort Lauderdale at 12:23 a.m. EST on Sunday morning, just 21 hours and 34 minutes after it arrived from Moscow—where it landed on the return trip at 6:17 p.m. local time, or 10:17 a.m. EST, a nine-hour, 53 minute flight.)
Flight records posted to Twitter show that the plane made the same nonstop flight from Moscow to Fort Lauderdale last year, on the same dates. On January 4, 2019, the plane landed in Fort Lauderdale at 2:49 a.m., according to the records. In 2020, the plane arrived at the same airport on the same date, landing at 2:31 a.m.
Last year, however, Trump did not spend his holiday break at his Mar-a-Lago Club, remaining in the White House during what was then an ongoing government shutdown. On January 4,Trump was indeed present at Mar-a-Lago but left the estate at 9:55 a.m.—six hours and 24 minutes after the Sberbank jet touched down—to visit Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. He remained at the golf club until 3:12 p.m., according to a public schedule posted by FactBase.
Sberbank has been under United States economic sanctions since 2014, over its involvement in Russia’s annexation of the territory of Crimea from Ukraine. In November 2013, however, Gref himself co-hosted a party honoring Trump in Moscow, during Trump’s visit there for the Miss Universe beauty pageant, according to a report by The Daily Beast. Trump was then the owner of the pageant.
Following Trump’s return to the United States following the 2013 event, he received a mysterious ‘gift’ from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The gift was reportedly ‘a black lacquered box’, but the contents of the box have never been publicly revealed.
Like the contents of the ‘gift’ from Putin to Trump, the purpose of the Sberbank private jet’s trip to Florida from Moscow is also a mystery, even as the plan sits on the tarmac at Fort Lauderdale airport as of 1:30 a.m. EST on Sunday.
According to the online flight records from 2019, the Gulfstream private jet departed from Fort Lauderdale 30 hours and 11 minutes after landing there, making another nonstop flight back to Sheremetyevo Alexander S. Pushkin International Airport (SVO) in Moscow.” http://web.archive.org/web/20200106153745/https://www.inquisitr.com/5821555/kremlin-bank-ceo-jet-florida-donald-trump
†Herman (German) Gref:
[“Sberbank, headed by Herman Gref, the other co-chair of Putin’s A.I. board, is also among the banks providing biometric services that feed into the Digital Profile System.” – Claims Journal (2019)]
•Vedomosti (Russia)—Sberbank Invested in Facial Recognition Technology (11/17/2017) “Sberbank Recognizes a Customer by Sight: The Bank intends to provide biometric access to any of its services.” http://vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2017/11/17/742077-raspoznavaniya-lits (http://archive.is/sbLOR) [Translated]
•Bloomberg—The Day Trump Came to Moscow: Oligarchs, Miss Universe and Nobu (12/21/2016) “Meeting with top group of Russian financiers, industrialists; They discussed a possible Trump Tower and inspected sites The last time Donald Trump made an appearance in Moscow was November 2013 for the Miss Universe contest he famously owned. It was a glittering event filled with carefully choreographed photographs and parties. Then another, more private, invitation arrived: Come to Nobu to meet more than a dozen of Russia’s top businessmen, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s biggest bank. Gref, who was President Vladimir Putin’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007, organized the meeting together with Aras Agalarov, the founder of Crocus Group, one of the country’s largest real-estate companies, which was hosting the beauty pageant at one of its concert halls.” http://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-21/the-day-trump-came-to-moscow-oligarchs-miss-universe-and-nobu (http://archive.is/7X1bc)
•NBC News—Putin Rival Ties Kushner Meeting to Kremlin Bankers (10/17/2017) “A prominent exiled Russian oligarch said in an exclusive interview with NBC News that he is nearly certain Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to collaborate with the Trump campaign, and that he believes a top Russian banker was not ‘acting on his own behalf’ when he held a controversial meeting with Jared Kushner last December. The pointed remarks come from a longtime Putin rival, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil executive who was Russia's richest man before he was imprisoned and exiled by the Kremlin. ’I am almost convinced that Putin's people have tried to influence the U.S. election in some way’, Khodorkovsky told MSNBC’s Ari Melber in his first U.S. television interview since Trump took office. [...] His former head of human resources, Sergey Gorkov, now runs a Kremlin bank and met with Kushner in December last year. The U.S. has accused Gorkov's bank of providing cover for Russian spies. Khodorkovsky says Gorkov was a ‘fine employee’ who ‘carries out orders’, suggesting the banker would not have been acting alone in meeting with a senior figure of the incoming Trump administration. ‘I have no doubt that he wouldn’t do anything on his own behalf’, Khodorkovsky said. Khodorkovsky also said he believes Gorkov's orders come from either Andrey Kostin or Herman [German] Gref, who both run Kremlin-backed banks that were sanctioned by the Obama administration.” http://web.archive.org/web/20190706131958/https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/putin-rival-ties-kushner-meeting-kremlin-bankers-n811631 [“Hermann Gräf, better known as Herman Gref*, is a Russian politician and businessman. He was the Minister of Economics and Trade of Russia from May 2000 to September 2007. He is the CEO and chairman of the executive board of Sberbank, the largest Russian bank.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Gref]
•Fast Company—Russia’s Largest Bank Just Launched a State-Of-The-Art Coding School to Ease Dependence on Western Tech; Sberbank, which is currently under U.S. sanctions and whose CEO [Gref] has ties to Trump, launched School 21 in Moscow last week. (11/30/2018) “The biggest bank in Russia, which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014, just launched a state-of-the-art coding school in Moscow that aims to train thousands of world-class software engineers in the arts of cybersecurity, gaming, and the latest AI technology for years to come. School 21, which operates under the umbrella of Ecole 42, a global pioneer in IT education backed by French billionaire Xavier Niel, is wholly owned by Sberbank. It is free, open to aspiring coders from 18 to 30 years old, and has 21 levels of proficiency. The school is highly competitive—its inaugural program has a class of 500 students out of more than 85,000 applicants, and the plan is to scale up to 2,500 a year in the long term, according to Business FM radio station. Sberbank told Fast Company that it plans to run two more application cycles next year, one in the winter and one in the spring, and that it might open a second office in St. Petersburg. The school’s launch is raising concerns about Russia training thousands of highly skilled cyber specialists at a time when the United States is expanding its sanctions against Russian entities, including Sberbank-xbacked properties, and amid heightened tensions in Europe last week over a naval skirmish between Russian and Ukraine in the Kerch Strait. It also comes against the backdrop of the Russian government’s disinformation efforts in elections around the globe, which the Kremlin has vehemently denied. In addition, Sberbank has been in the spotlight due to the history of high-level connections between the bank’s leadership, the Russian government and Donald Trump’s associates before he became U.S. president. It was bank chairman Herman Gref who set up Trump’s meeting with Russian businessmen during the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 in Moscow, an event which Sberbank co-sponsored, while Trump was exploring building a Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump’s hotel plans are making headlines again this week due to the plea deal that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen negotiated with the Mueller probe–Cohen admitted that he lied when he previously claimed that the deal fell through in January 2016, now conceding that talks for a Trump Tower in Moscow continued up until June 2016.’ Russia’s largest bank just launched a state-of-the-art coding school to ease dependence on Western tech; Sberbank, which is currently under U.S. sanctions and whose CEO has ties to Trump, launched School 21 in Moscow last week.” http://web.archive.org/web/20181201002817/https://www.fastcompany.com/90274333/russias-largest-bank-just-launched-a-coding-school-to-ease-dependence-on-western-tech
•Claims Journal—Vladimir Putin Wants Everyone to Love the Way He Watches Them (10/22/2019) “Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel. Now the entire system is about to be equipped with what City Hall is billing as some of the most advanced facial-recognition software outside of China, claiming it will be more accurate and easier to search than London’s older, bigger network. The upgrade will dramatically expand a pilot program that led to the capture of as many as 10 wanted criminals a month either at major public events or inside the city’s warren of 269 metro stations. Moscow’s embrace of the technology, which the West is increasingly curtailing in response to public pressure, is being challenged in courts on political and legal grounds by opponents of President Vladimir Putin. But the monitoring tool is just one of several Russia is deploying, including mandatory recordings of all cellular calls. Many of the initiatives are based on recent advances in artificial intelligence, a science Putin sees as the ticket to global domination for whichever nation masters it first. Putin and lieutenants led by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin say measures such as geolocating every active in the country, creating ‘digital profiles’ of each adult and collating online complaints against authorities are all necessary to ensure public safety and improve services. They’re betting most voters will accept further privacy curbs like the facial-recognition rollout in exchange for safer streets and greater convenience in their daily lives. ‘We’re conducting experiments in schools, clinics, hospitals and in transport to introduce this technology, which, of course, will facilitate the work of a huge number of people and make these industries more efficient’, Sobyanin told Putin at a meeting on artificial intelligence earlier this year. While so-called authoritarian tech, from automatic people trackers to online censorship bots, has triggered a worldwide debate about the proper balance between governing and surveilling, Moscow has so far made a better case for Big Brother than most cities. Russia’s capital ranks No. 1 among 40 metropolises in the latest UN survey of ‘e-government effectiveness in the delivery of public services’. London, by comparison, is fourth, Shanghai 11th and New York 14th. [...] Sberbank, headed by Herman Gref, the other co-chair of Putin’s A.I. board, is also among the banks providing biometric services that feed into the Digital Profile System. The support of Gref is vital to the success of the program because Sberbank serves as a payment agent for most household bills in addition to safeguarding almost half of the country’s savings. Gref is fond of repeating the mantra ‘big data is the new oil’, but privacy experts say the concentration of so much personal information in a single database will make Russia an ideal target for identity thieves, not unlike Equifax Inc. The U.S. consumer-scorer was breached in 2017, exposing the credit histories of more than 145 million people. (Sberbank itself was the victim of a data leak affecting as many as 60 million clients, Kommersant reported this month. The bank said the incident impacted just 5,000 holders of its credit cards.) Potentially more worrisome in a country routinely accused of harassing the political opposition is that the new database could be a precursor of the kind of ‘social credit’ system China is developing. It’s a name-and-shame way to keep tabs on the behavior of the population by issuing grades, with demerits applied for things like smoking or circulating whatever’s deemed fake news. In 2016, the company launched the FindFace website and application. With the help of it, it was possible to find a person’s profile in VKontakte in a few seconds. The launch of the ‘innovation dating service’, as the company initially positioned it, provoked a series of scandals—users deanonimized not only fellow travelers in the subway, but porn actresses and rally participants, the technology was used even by the Bellingcat investigation team. And then they told about the application in the ‘Wait for me’ program on Channel One, and NtechLab, as Kabakov said, began to receive ‘five offers of cooperation per day’. Now the founders explain that FindFace was just a showcase that helped pitch technology. For example, with help from FindFace German [Herman] Gref† deanonimized his secretary within one second after being introduced to the algorithm, according to someone familiar with the head of Sberbank. But in 2018 both the site and the FindFace application were unexpectedly closed. This had to be done because of possible complaints, including from VKontakte, says one of the interlocutors of The Bell. Spending time and money on the courts did not make sense; the founders of NtechLab already understood that they would not make money on recognizing pretty girls.” http://web.archive.org/web/20191024034256/https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/international/2019/10/22/293704.htm
•The Moscow Times—Russia To Grant Police Access to Bank Customers’ Biometric Data (12/19/2017) “Russia’s police and intelligence services will gain access to bank customers’ biometric data without their consent under new legislation making its way through the State Duma. Russia’s Communications Ministry and the Central Bank are overseeing a pilot project that will use personal biometric data to remotely verify bank account applications by late 2018. The Rostelecom state telecoms provider will operate the project, despite widespread concerns over state surveillance, data storage and privacy rights. A state deputy co-authoring the bill was cited as saying that ‘law enforcement officers will not have unlimited access to the system’ and that data would only be provided after official requests, the Vedomosti business daily reported Tuesday. According to the draft bill, Rostelecom would be required to share bank customers’ biometric data without their consent with Russia’s Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB). The data collected will include facial images and voice recordings, and may be expanded to iris recognition, palm and fingerprint scanning, according to Rostelecom. ‘If a person is law abiding then they will have no reason to worry’, Elman Mekhtiev, the vice-president of the Russian Association of Banks, was cited as saying by Vedomosti.” http://web.archive.org/web/20191121205917/https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/19/russia-to-grant-police-access-to-bank-customers-biometric-data-a59987
•The Moscow Times—Moscow Arrests 42 Suspects Using New Facial Recognition Technology in Metro Stations (5/24/2018) “A pilot project implementing facial recognition technology in Moscow has reportedly led to the arrests of 42 suspects in a month. Moscow has ramped up video surveillance ahead of the FIFA World Cup that kicks off in three weeks, including with facial recognition capabilities at metro stations capable of identifying 20 faces per second. Around 50,000 photographs of wanted suspects have been uploaded into the Moscow metro system, the state-owned Sberbank vice president Stanislav Kuznetsov told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency Thursday. ‘As a result, 42 repeat offenders were detained at four metro stations in a month,’ Kuznetsov was quoted as saying. He said Sberbank CEO German Gref plans to discuss expanding the facial-recognition system beyond four metro stations with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin at the annual economic forum underway in St. Petersburg. Sberbank acquired a stake in the VisionLabs facial recognition company last fall to create a ‘unique biometric identifier’ involving face, voice and retina identification.” http://themoscowtimes.com/news/moscow-arrests-42-suspects-using-new-facial-recognition-technology-in-metro-stations-61567 (http://archive.is/qU8WU)
•The Bell (Russia)—The Russian Elite is Jostling to Solve Putin’s “2024 Problem” (7/20/2019) “This week we look at how a senior official wants President Vladimir Putin stay in power after his current term ends in 2024. We also explain why protests over the exclusion of independent candidates from local elections is a sign of a system under strain, and how Moscow is set to roll-out one of the world’s biggest face recognition systems. The Russian elite is jostling to solve Putin’s ‘2024 problem’ The speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, this week publicly offered a solution to Putin’s ‘2024 problem’—what to do about the constitutional limit on two consecutive presidential terms. Volodin, who was previously oversaw domestic politics in the Kremlin, published an article (Rus) in the State Duma’s official magazine laying out his idea for changing the constitution to give parliament more authority. [...] Why the world should care: The Russian elite is increasingly obsessed with the ‘2024 problem’, and jostling within the elite is already well underway. At present, a variation of Volodin’s plan seems the most likely outcome. [...] Protests over Moscow’s local elections highlight cracks in the system: If the Kremlin wants to keep Putin in power beyond 2024, it will have to improve the functioning of its political management machine. Anger this week over local elections in the capital revealed how the system is faltering: the authorities’ ineptitude turned the vote—in which no one was interested—into a trigger for repeated demonstrations† in downtown Moscow. [...] Why the world should care: The Kremlin’s political management machine is coping less well with each passing election, and their failure in Moscow significant—in a crisis, the country’s fate will be decided in the capital. This is a bad sign ahead of the 2021 Duma elections, and a blow to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, whose name appears in discussions of presidential candidates in 2024. Moscow is set to install a state-of-the-art face recognition system: While paranoid internet users across the world call for a boycott of FaceApp, the Russian app that generates an image of an elderly you, Moscow City Hall is building the world’s largest face recognition system. Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, will take part in development and has already collected the biometrical data of tens of millions of Russians. - Moscow City Hall announced a tender this year for 105,000 video cameras with face recognition software. As of now, only 1,500 have been installed, but the police have already used them to identify and arrest about 100 criminals. According to The Bell’s calculations, the new system will cost no less than $50 million, a price tag that the city can easily afford. - There are three main bidders: Ntechlab, which was founded by people close to the Presidential Administration and two companies in which Sberbank is a shareholder: Speech Technology Center and VisionLabs. - Market sources say that Moscow’s face recognition system, once rolled out, will only be comparable in size with systems already in place in China. - Sberbank looks well placed to provide the raw data to make the system work. Since last year, the bank has been collecting biometric data from its clients (93 million people), and in December, CEO German [Herman] Gref said they already have data from ‘millions of people’. Why the World Should Care: Concentrating resources could mean Russia becomes the world’s number two player in face recognition systems. Remember this when you visit Moscow, walk the city’s streets and see the mounted cameras on every building.” http://web.archive.org/web/20190801101206/http://thebell.io/en/the-russian-elite-is-jostling-to-solve-putin-s-2024-problem
[“A more advanced operation could use the full suite of services utilized by companies to track political attitudes on social media across all congressional districts, analyze who is most likely to vote and where, and then launch, almost instantly, a customized campaign at a highly localized level to discourage voting in the most vulnerable districts. Such a campaign, due to its highly personalized structure, would likely have significant impact on voting behavior.” – Brookings Institution (2008)]
•Brookings Institution—Weapons of the Weak: Russia and AI-driven Asymmetric Warfare (2018) “‘Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.’ – Russian President Vladimir Putin, 2017 Speaking to Russian students on the first day of the school year in September 2017, Putin squarely positioned Russia in the technological arms race for artificial intelligence (AI). Putin’s comment signaled that, like China and the United States, Russia sees itself engaged in direct geopolitical competition with the world’s great powers, and AI is the currency that Russia is betting on. [...] Currently, Moscow is pursuing investments in at least two directions: select conventional military and defense technologies where the Kremlin believes it can still hold comparative advantage over the West and high-impact, low-cost asymmetric warfare to correct the imbalance between Russia and the West in the conventional domain. The former—Russia’s development and use of AI-driven military technologies and weapons—has received significant attention. AI has the potential to hyperpower Russia’s use of disinformation... And unlike in the conventional military space, the United States and Europe are ill-equipped to respond to AI-driven asymmetric warfare in the information space. The latter—the implications of AI for asymmetric political warfare—remains unexplored. Yet, such nonconventional tools—cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, political influence, and illicit finance—have become a central tenet of Russia’s strategy toward the West and one with which Russia has been able to project power and influence beyond its immediate neighborhood. In particular, AI has the potential to hyperpower Russia’s use of disinformation—the intentional spread of false and misleading information for the purpose of influencing politics and societies. And unlike in the conventional military space, the United States and Europe are ill-equipped to respond to AI-driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) in the information space. Russian Information Warfare at Home and Abroad: Putin came to power in 2000, and since then, information control and manipulation has become a key element of the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign policy. At home, this has meant repression of independent media and civil society, state control of traditional and digital media, and deepening government surveillance. For example, Russia’s surveillance system, SORM (System of Operative-Search Measures) allows the FSB (Federal Security Service) and other government agencies to monitor and remotely access ISP servers and communications without the ISPs’ knowledge. In 2016, a new package of laws, the so-called Yarovaya amendments, required telecom providers, social media platforms, and messaging services to store user data for three years and allow the FSB access to users’ metadata and encrypted communications. While there is little known information on how Russian intelligence agencies are using these data, their very collection suggests that the Kremlin is experimenting with AI-driven analysis to identify potential political dissenters. The government is also experimenting with facial recognition technologies in conjunction with CCTV. Moscow alone has approximately 170,000 cameras, at least 5,000 of which have been outfitted with facial expression recognition technology from NTechLabs. Still, Moscow’s capacity to control and surveil the digital domain at home remains limited, as exemplified by the battle between the messaging app Telegram and the Russian government in early 2018. Telegram, one of the few homegrown Russian tech companies, refused to hand over its encryption keys to the FSB in early 2018. What followed was a haphazard government attempt to ban Telegram by blocking tens of millions of IP addresses, which led to massive disruptions in unrelated services, such as cloud providers, online games, and mobile banking apps. Unlike Beijing, which has effectively sought to censor and control the internet as new technologies have developed, Moscow has not been able to implement similar controls preemptively. The result is that even a relatively small company like Telegram is able to outmaneuver and embarrass the Russian state. Despite such setbacks, however, Moscow seems set to continue on a path toward ‘digital authoritarianism’—using its increasingly unfettered access to citizens’ personal data to build better microtargeting capabilities that enhance social control, censor behavior and speech, and curtail counter-regime activities. Under Putin, Cold War-era ‘active measures’—overt or covert influence operations aimed at influencing public opinion and politics abroad—have been revived and adapted to the digital age. Externally, Russian information warfare (informatsionaya voyna) has become part and parcel of Russian strategic thinking in foreign policy. Moscow has long seen the West as involved in an information war against it—a notion enshrined in Russia’s 2015 national security strategy, which sees the United States and its allies as seeking to contain Russia by exerting ‘informational pressure…’ in an ‘intensifying confrontation in the global information arena.’ Under Putin, Cold War-era ‘active measures’—overt or covert influence operations aimed at influencing public opinion and politics abroad—have been revived and adapted to the digital age. Information warfare (or information manipulation) has emerged as a core component of a broader influence strategy. At the same time, the line between conventional (or traditional) and nonconventional (or asymmetric) warfare has blurred in Russian military thinking. ‘The erosion of the distinction between war and peace, and the emergence of a grey zone’ has been one of the most striking developments in the Russian approach to warfare, according to Chatham House’s Keir Giles. Warfare, from this perspective, exists on a spectrum in which ‘political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures’ are used to lay the groundwork for last resort military operations. The importance of information warfare on the spectrum of war has increased considerably in 21st century warfare, according to contemporary Russian military thought. Maskirovka, the Soviet/Russian term for the art of deception and concealment in both military and nonmilitary operations, is a key concept that figures prominently into Russian strategic thinking. The theory is broader than the narrow definition of military deception. In the conventional military domain, it includes the deployment of decoys, camouflage, and misleading information to deceive the enemy on the battlefield. The use of ‘little green men,’ or unmarked soldiers and mercenaries, in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is one example of maskirovka in military practice. So is the use of fake weapons and heavy machinery: one Russian company is producing an army of inflatable missiles, tanks, and jets that appear real in satellite imagery. Maskirovka, as a theory and operational practice, also applies to nonmilitary asymmetric operations. Modern Russian disinformation and cyber attacks against the West rely on obfuscation and deception in line with the guiding principles of maskirovka. During the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, for example, Russian citizens working in a troll factory in St. Petersburg, known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), set up fake social media accounts pretending to be real Americans. These personas then spread conspiracy theories, disinformation, and divisive content meant to amplify societal polarization by pitting opposing groups against each other. The IRA troll factory itself, while operating with the knowledge and support of the Kremlin and the Russian intelligence services, was founded and managed by proxy: a Russian oligarch known as ‘Putin’s chef,’ Yevgeny Prigozhin. Concord, a catering company controlled by Prigozhin, was the main funder and manager of the IRA, and it went to great lengths to conceal the company’s involvement, including the setting up a web of fourteen bank accounts to transfer funding to the IRA. Such obfuscation tactics were designed to conceal the true source and goals of the influence operations in the United Stated while allowing the Kremlin to retain plausible deniability if the operations were uncovered—nonconventional maskirovka in practice. On the whole, Russia’s limited financial resources, the shift in strategic thinking toward information warfare, and the continued prevalence of maskirovka as a guiding principle of engagement, strongly suggest that in the near term, Moscow will ramp up the development of AI-enabled information warfare. Russia will not be the driver or innovator of these new technologies due its financial and human capital constraints. But, as it has already done in its attacks against the West, it will continue to co-opt existing commercially available technologies to serve as weapons of asymmetric warfare. AI-driven Asymmetric Warfare: The Kremlin’s greatest innovation in its information operations against the West has not been technical. Rather, Moscow’s savviness has been to recognize that: (1) ready-made commercial tools and digital platforms can be easily weaponized; and (2) digital information warfare is cost-effective and high-impact, making it the perfect weapon of a technologically and economically weak power. AI-driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) capabilities could provide Russia with additional comparative advantage. Digital information warfare is cost-effective and high-impact, making it the perfect weapon of a technologically and economically weak power. U.S. government and independent investigations into Russia’s influence campaign against the United States during the 2016 elections reveal the low cost of that effort. Based on publicly available information, we know that the Russian effort included: the purchase of ads on Facebook (estimated cost $100,000)27 and Google (approximate cost $4,700), set up of approximately 36,000 automated bot accounts on Twitter, operation of the IRA troll farm (estimated cost $240,000 over the course of two years), an intelligence gathering trip carried out by two Russian agents posing as tourists in 2014 (estimated cost $50,000), production of misleading or divisive content (pictures, memes, etc.), plus additional costs related to the cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. In sum, the total known cost of the most high-profile influence operation against the United States is likely around one million dollars. The relatively low level of investment produced high returns. On Facebook alone, Russian linked content from the IRA reached 125 million Americans. This is because the Russian strategy relied on ready-made tools designed for commercial online marketing and advertising: the Kremlin simply used the same online advertising tools that companies would use to sell and promote its products and adapted them to spread disinformation. Since the U.S. operation, these tools and others have evolved and present new opportunities for far more damaging but increasingly low-cost and difficult-to-attribute ADAW operations. Three threat vectors in particular require immediate attention. First, advances in deep learning are making synthetic media content quick, cheap, and easy to produce. AI-enabled audio and video manipulation, so-called ‘deep fakes,’ is already available through easy-to-use apps such as Face2Face, which allows for one person’s expressions to be mapped onto another face in a target video. Video to Video Synthesis can synthesize realistic video based a baseline of inputs. Other tools can synthesize realistic photographs of AI-rendered faces, reproduce videos and audio of any world leader, and synthesize street scenes to appear in a different season. Using these tools, China recently unveiled an AI made news anchor. As the barriers of entry for accessing such tools continue to decrease, their appeal to low-resource actors will increase. Whereas most Russian disinformation content has been static (e.g., false news stories, memes, graphically designed ads), advances in learning AI will turn disinformation dynamic (e.g. video, audio). Because audio and video can easily be shared on smart phones and do not require literacy, dynamic disinformation content will be able to reach a broader audience in more countries. For example, in India, false videos shared through Whatsapp incited riots and murders. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Whatsapp (owned by Facebook) is an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform, which means that content shared via the platform is basically unmonitored and untraceable. The ‘democratization of disinformation’ will make it difficult for governments to counter AI-driven disinformation. Advances in machine learning are producing algorithms that ‘continuously learn how to more effectively replicate the appearance of reality,’ which means that ‘deep fakes cannot easily be detected by other algorithms.’ Russia, China, and others could harness these new publicly available technologies to undermine Western soft power or public diplomacy efforts around the world. Debunking or attributing such content will require far more resources than the cost of production, and it will be difficult if not impossible to do so in real time. Second, advances in affective computing and natural language processing will make it easier to manipulate human emotions and extract sensitive information without ever hacking an email account. In 2017, Chinese researchers created an ‘emotional chatting machine’ based on data users shared on Weibo, the Chinese social media site. As AI gains access to more personal data, it will become increasingly customized and personalized to appeal to and manipulate specific users. Coupled with advances in natural learning processing, such as voice recognition, this means that affective systems will be able to mimic, respond to, and predict human emotions expressed through text, voice, or facial expressions. Some evidence suggests that humans are quite willing to form personal relationships, share deeply personal information, and interact for long periods of time with AI designed to form relationships. These systems could be used to gather information from high value targets—such as intelligence officers or political figures—by exploiting their vices and patterns of behavior. Advances in affective computing and natural language processing will make it easier to manipulate human emotions and extract sensitive information without ever hacking an email account. Third, deep fakes and emotionally manipulative content will be able to reach the intended audience with a high degree of precision due to advances in content distribution networks. ‘Precision propaganda’ is the set of interconnected tools that comprise an ‘ecosystem of services that enable highly targeted political communications that reach millions of people with customized messages.’ The full scope of this ecosystem, which includes data collection, advertising platforms, and search engine optimization, aims to parse out audiences in granular detail and identify new receptive audiences will be ‘supercharged’ by advances in AI. The content that users see online is the end product of an underlying multi-billion dollar industry that involves thousands of companies that work together to assess individuals’ preferences, attitudes, and tastes to ensure maximum efficiency, profitability, and real-time responsiveness of content delivery. Russian operations (as far as we know), relied on the most basic of these tools. But, as Ghosh and Scott suggest, a more advanced operation could use the full suite of services utilized by companies to track political attitudes on social media across all congressional districts, analyze who is most likely to vote and where, and then launch, almost instantly, a customized campaign at a highly localized level to discourage voting in the most vulnerable districts. Such a campaign, due to its highly personalized structure, would likely have significant impact on voting behavior. Once the precision of this distribution ecosystem is paired with emotionally manipulative deep fake content delivered by online entities that appear to be human, the line between fact and fiction will cease to exist. And Hannah Arendt’s prediction of a world in which there is no truth and no trust may still come to pass.“ http://www.brookings.edu/research/weapons-of-the-weak-russia-and-ai-driven-asymmetric-warfare (http://archive.is/mMlyN)

Top 10 richest cities in China[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn

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Jesuit trained Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, praised mass murderer Mao Zedong after his death (1976)

No Migrants In My Backyard: How Bad Urban Planning Created a Humanitarian Disaster in India

Coronavirus response: Trump denies funeral aid as minority communities suffer without tests & treatment

Intelligence warnings

Part of a pattern

Trump blames Pelosi?

Man-made virus conspiracy

Rightwing media

Trump buys in

White House testing plan

Minorities and low-income communities

Disparities

Trump sits on funeral aid

Seized supplies

VA masks

Miami firefighters’ masks

San Francisco’s challenges

Maryland guarding its tests

Mismanagement of contracts

Contracts to Trump allies

All it takes is a tweet

Stepping up

FEMA stepping back

Hydroxychloroquine update

Further reading

No Migrants In My Backyard: How Bad Urban Planning Created a Humanitarian Disaster in India

No Migrants In My Backyard: How Bad Urban Planning Created a Humanitarian Disaster in India

[DIPLOMACY] A Small World Tour

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Nepal

Infrastructure

Joint Mt Everest Cleanup

Angola

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Venezuela

Oil

Basic Necessities

What We Want

Trinidad and Tobago

Oil

Fostering Closer Relations

Defense

Trade Agreement and Visas

Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque | Bandar Seri Begawan

Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque | Bandar Seri Begawan

[Event] Buildup to the Chinese Nation-Wide Mayoral Elections

Britain has no excuse for having infrastructure worse than a developing country

CHINA MEGATHREAD: SUMMER 2019 EDITION

Arab Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories – All Roads Lead To Jerusalem

Panorama ESO Photo, best Use for Kids = 0 Misinformation + Only Better Creative Up to Date every single Quantum = EarthDNA

Effortpost on Chinese Attitudes towards Hong Kong

Really quick history lesson

Mainland Chinese sentiment

Hong Kongers that don't support the protests

Overseas Chinese

Conclusion

“About 24 hours after arriving from Moscow, a private jet regularly used by the head [German Gref “co-chair of Putin’s A.I. board”†] of Russia's largest state-run bank remained at an airport just a short drive from where Donald Trump is vacationing.” – Inquisitr (2020)

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