To catch a Lab Leak

In April and May 1979, between 66 and 300 people died from anthrax in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, now called Yekaterinburg. The Soviet authorities seized doctors’ records and quickly rolled out an explanation: the deaths were an accident caused by contaminated meat.

But American intelligence agencies suspected a more nefarious explanation: the Soviets were secretly developing biological weapons.

Last week, we interviewed Matthew Meselson about his key role in convincing Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon to ban biological weapons research in the early 1970s. After the Sverdlovsk incident, Meselson was brought in by the CIA to help assess the potential explanations. For more than a decade, he led scientific investigations into the incident. In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the truth finally came out: the Sverdlovsk incident was a bioweapons lab leak, the most deadly confirmed lab leak in history.

Meselson’s paper confirming the lab leak is an epidemiological classic. For the first time on Statecraft, we’ve doubled up on a guest: the 94-year-old Meselson is back for round two.

What You’ll Learn

How closely does the Sverdlovsk lab leak parallel incidents in Wuhan?

How close are we to genetically targeted biological weapons?

Why didn’t the Soviets know the location of their own research facilities?

I'll start by telling you how I got involved in the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak.

I was asked by a man at the Central Intelligence Agency named Julian Hoptman, who was in charge of a small unit dealing with biological threats, to come down and become part of this small working group. They had just learned about this anthrax epidemic and naturally wanted to know what it was. I got very close to Julian because at Langley, in Virginia, where the CIA is, there was no hotel. He invited me to stay at his house, because his daughter's bedroom was not being used. I got to talk to Julian a lot, both in the office and also at home, where we didn't talk about classified stuff.

And the kinds of evidence we had were: first, there was a particular hospital, Number 40 in Sverdlovsk, which had anthrax patients. Now, how did we know that? There was a physician who was in Sverdlovsk during the anthrax outbreak who then emigrated to Israel, and in Israel, he made contact with the agency.

He was one source of information, because he had actually been there and had friends in the medical community. He himself did not attend any of the patients, but his view was that it was inhalation and not gastrointestinal. Whereas the Russians were saying, “Yes, there has been an outbreak,” but they claimed it was gastrointestinal. They published one article with a lot of information in a law journal called Chelovek, which means “Man and the Law.” It was about a lady who lived south of Sverdlovsk whose cow got anthrax, and she had committed a crime by dumping this dead cow into a well.

There was another article in a veterinary journal about the outbreak of anthrax in sheep and cattle, and it named some villages. I don't think anybody but me tried to find out where these villages were, because they're little teeny nothing villages, but somehow I found out. And I noticed four of them were all in a straight line. At the time I thought it might be because there's a highway that goes from down south to Sverdlovsk.

From Meselson’s unclassified memo for the CIA in 1980

Were you the first person to notice that line pattern?

Yes, as far as I know — except for an admiral at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He and I both thought that maybe the Russian explanation was plausible, the explanation that the anthrax outbreak was from rotted meat. The textbooks said the incubation time for anthrax was 5-7 days, but we knew that cases were coming in over six weeks, from early April until middle May. That would be inconsistent with an aerosol cloud, because the cloud goes by and then it's gone, but it could be explained by bad meat that sits in the refrigerator.

Anyway, I thought that the Soviet explanation was at least plausible. I concluded that the only way to find out is to go there. And I wrote an unclassified memo in April 1980. It gives my impressions, and there's some mathematical calculations on cloud travel, with some graphs that I made to calculate what the dosage would be downwind given various initial release sizes and all that.

But I concluded that I had to go there, and the first chance I had was in Geneva. Have you ever heard of the Pugwash Conference? It was created by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. The idea was to have high-level scientists from Russia and the United States meet to try and cool down the nuclear arms race.

It's called Pugwash because a rich Canadian railway magnate named Cyrus Eaton had a resort place at Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where it used to meet. I had a cousin named Martin Kaplan, a leader of Pugwash, also the science advisor of the World Health Organization. He introduced me to a Russian who was visiting Geneva for Pugwash, Kiril Dumayev.

Dumayev was on something called the Military Industrial Committee in the Soviet Union. That's a high-level committee that decides how much money to spend on major projects, both military and civilian, and he was the chemistry guy. So Martin got us together, and I told Dumayev, “I want to go to Sverdlovsk.” He said, “Why not?”

So I sent him a letter for Moscow, describing exactly where I wanted to go. Now, how did I know where I wanted to go? Dating back to WWII, it was known that the Russians had a military microbiological laboratory in Sverdlovsk. German intelligence knew about it. There was something called “the Stern Report” in Germany under Hitler, translated in English, a great big thick thing, and it listed everything German intelligence knew about Soviet chemical and biological weapons, much of it quite correct, and it listed this place at Sverdlovsk.

I talked with John McMahon, who later became the deputy CIA director. He was all for it. He said, “We would love you to go there. We'd like to have an American go there.” He gave me a map, because he said, “When you're there, they may take you somewhere in Sverdlovsk, and they'll tell you it's this place, and it'll be nothing. It'll be a chocolate factory or something. So I will give you the exact longitude and latitude.”

And he gave me directions: you get on the trolley car at the center of town, and you get off at this certain stop, and you walk on this street, and then you turn, etc.

So that you wouldn't be hoodwinked.

It turned out the directions were a little bit wrong. The coordinates were correct, but the street directions would not have got me there. There were a couple of wrong turns.

Anyway, I'm all ready to go, and then the Russians shoot down, probably by mistake, a Korean jet, and everybody died. I get a letter from Dumayev, and he says, “In view of events with this jet, it's not a good time. Unfortunately I cannot invite you.”

Then a little bit later, this group called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War gets the Nobel Peace Prize, and specifically they give the Peace Prize to an American and a Russian. The Russian was their secretary of health, and the American was a cardiologist here in Boston named Bernie Lown, who I knew. In fact, I think he's some distant relative.

Then I learned somehow that Bernie was going to go see his friend, the health minister in Moscow, in a few weeks, so I asked Bernie if he would take a message from me to the minister, which was, “Can I go to Sverdlovsk?”

A little while later, I get a telex — we didn't have email yet in those days — with a guy named Fedorov, the assistant to the minister of health who handles foreign relations, and he says, “I've gone to Sverdlovsk to save you the trouble, and there's nothing there, don't bother, you can't go.”

Then I got a call from Sergey Kislyak, who later became the ambassador to the United States, He says, “We'd like you to come to Moscow to talk with us about Sverdlovsk, we'll fly you there on Aeroflot. You don't need any passports or anything, just come on, we'll take you to Moscow.”

So I met a bunch of people who were involved in this, including former minister of health Pyotr Burgasov.

Where were you hosted for these meetings?

It was a great big hotel near the big athletics stadium. And we met at the hospital, which was called the Botkina, a very famous, great big hospital. European hospitals in those days were like villages, for example the Children's Hospital in Paris. There'd be a wall around many buildings.

So we met there, and I went to the American Embassy to keep them informed with what was going on. I met with a Soviet general, who told me that the outbreak was caused by bad meat, and I wrote down exactly what they told me, and published it in the Bulletin of the Federation of American Scientists.

At the beginning of my article, I said, “This is what the Russians said to me.” Unfortunately, I should have made it clear that this is not what I believe, necessarily. Maybe it was true, maybe it was not. But a lot of people reading that thought that this was my belief. I had no great belief at the time. I thought maybe they were telling the truth, maybe not. I didn't know. It's still essential to go there.

So I come home, and now I'm accused of being a Soviet apologist by a lot of people because I wrote this article. I caught hell from a bunch of people for that. And it's true, I still thought that maybe they were telling the truth. [Under the Reagan administration, the intelligence community came to a consensus in the early 1980s that the Sverdlovsk anthrax was released from a bioweapons facility.]

Finally, the Soviet Union goes away, and we have Yeltsin and the Russian Federation. I'm in Washington doing some political thing, and I get a call from my secretary at Harvard: “You have a call from the Soviet embassy in Washington. They want you to greet a member of the Soviet embassy who is a physician, and he's coming from Washington into Logan Airport in Boston. And they wonder, because he doesn't know his way around, if you would meet him at the airport and help him out.”

So they gave me his name, and his American Airlines flight and arrival time. They thought I was at Harvard, but actually I'm in Washington. So I decide, “I'll find out if I can meet this guy on the airplane.”

I called American Airlines, and I said, “My partner and I both been doing business in Washington and we become separated, but I know that we're both going back on the same flight. Could you tell me the seat number with Mr. Bourdin? I'd like to sit next to him so we could conduct our business together and save a little time that way. They gave me the seat number, so I get to the airport real early, one of the first passengers there, and I'm sitting in this seat.

Pretty soon down the aisle comes a big, heavy guy, and I say nothing. He sits down next to me, I let him get settled, I wait till the plane starts down the runway. And I say in a perfectly calm voice, “Very nice to meet you, Dr. Bourdin.” He was stunned! Of course, I imagine back home that wouldn't be such a big surprise, but I like doing things like that.

Then he said, “I have a surprise for you, Dr. Meselson.” His surprise was to tell me that an American physicist is living in Sverdlovsk under a United States/Soviet exchange agreement between the two academies: their RAC and our National Academy of Sciences. He’s a guy named Don Ellis, a solid state physicist, he was there during the epidemic. He's a member of the National Academy, and so am I. So I go down to Washington.

Now, normally, trip reports are privileged, but the archivist gives me the trip report. Ellis records that he's there for several weeks, doing solid-state physics with his colleague, a Mr. Gubanov. When he came back to the States, he learned about the anthrax epidemic. He knew nothing about it while he was there, even though he's driving his kids to school every day on weekdays, going right past the police.

So I want to go to Sverdlovsk and nothing is working. Sometime in the 1980s, our National Academy of Sciences invited the Soviets to send a delegation, so we could show them that Fort Detrick was no longer doing anything with biological weapons, because in 1969, President Nixon had renounced biological weapons, and there was no bioweapons work going on at Fort Detrick. [For an account of Meselson’s role in Nixon’s biological weapons ban, see our first interview with him.]

I'm on the welcoming team, and each American was assigned a particular Russian to help them. I was assigned a guy named Alexei Yablokov, Yablokov is a Russian word for apple. This is Mr. Apple.

Have you ever been in Baltimore? They bring a big bucket of crabs to your table, and they put down a sheet of brown paper and they dump the crabs. I thought he might like that, and we went to a jazz bar where we couldn't talk because it was too loud. So I got to know this guy.

In those days, the CIA published something called FBIS, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, unclassified translations of things from the Russian radio and press [the FBIS was dissolved in 2005]. There I saw an entry that Mr. Yablokov, my crab jazz friend, had become Yeltsin's Advisor for Environment and Health. So he's like a secretary of the Department of Environment and Health. It said that he had been asked by Yeltsin to look into this anthrax outbreak and figure out what happened.

So I sent him a telex saying, “I see that you've been asked by your president to go do this. Could I come and help you?” He said, “You can come to Sverdlovsk, but only if you're invited.”

Bear in mind, this is the former Soviet Union. Everything was loose at this time. Americans were greatly welcomed. People loved Americans. How am I going to get invited? Who do I know in Sverdlovsk? Only one name, this Mr. Gubanov who worked with the American.

Now the next thing will absolutely astonish you. I called Don Ellis. There he is in his office. And I say, “I need to get in touch with your colleague, Gubanov. Could you tell me how to reach him?”

And Don says, “Yes, I'll hand him the telephone. He's sitting right here, he's visiting me.”

That's incredible.

So Gubanov comes on the phone. I tell him I want to be invited, and he said, “Oh, I'm very interested in that outbreak, I'll get you an invitation.” By the way, Gubanov comes back to the United States sometime later, and he ends up as a stockbroker in Florida.

Anyway, pretty soon I get a telex from Mr. Suetin, who's the rector of the local university, which is named after Maxime Gorky. In the Middle Ages, universities taught what was called the trivium and the quadrivium. Do you know what I mean?

I was homeschooled with a classical education, so we did the trivium, yeah. This university in Soviet Russia was teaching the trivium and quadrivium as well as physics and chemistry. But I get this telex from the rector, who says the city is yours, and he assigns to me two guys: a physicist named Borisov, and a younger man who's a physical chemist. So I form a team, including my wife, Jeanne Guillemin, who is a medical anthropologist. And the success of what we did, which proved that it was airborne and not foodborne, was because of her.

So we go to Russia.

Can I interrupt? Yeltsin comes to power and asks for an investigation. But if I'm reading this old Washington Post story correctly, Yeltsin was told by the KGB in the early 1980s that the anthrax outbreak was a lab leak. He already knew.

That's largely true. Almost completely true. We did not know, because when he acknowledged this, we were on transit. We did not know that he had said it, which of course took some of the wind out of our sails, but we had a scientific proof.

In Yeltsin’s book, he says that at the time of the outbreak, he contacted Yuri Andropov, who was the head of the KGB, and he asked him to tell him the cause.

At that time, Yeltsin was the Communist Party leader in Sverdlovsk itself. He says he contacted Andropov, but he never heard back from Andropov. Later, after he became president and could get whatever he wanted, he came to the conclusion that it was not bad meat, that it was a military activity.

Anyway, we arrive in Sverdlovsk, and we have the names of the pathologist and her assistant, a Jewish man who had done the autopsies, and we knew how to reach them. We called on all these people, but they had nothing that would have really given us proof of a lab leak. But Borisov the physicist was a great help.

There was a woman who he knew very well named Larisa Mishustina, who was a member of the Duma. She had been elected to their House of Representatives. She had written a letter to Boris Yeltsin, and she gave me a photocopy: “Dear Boris, my constituents would like to know if the anthrax epidemic of 1979 was the result of government activity. If it was, they are entitled to double pension money.”

Now, I don't know if any money ever got paid out. But what did happen was she receives a letter from the KGB with, I think, 68 million dollars, and it has a list of constituent names, dates of birth, and their addresses.

So my wife Jeanne goes knocking on those doors. She goes straight down the list. We were there twice, 1990 and 1991, and then Jeanne goes back a third time to complete these interviews. Jeanne would go to each of these little houses, knock on the door: “We are from the university,” which is true. “We are studying health,” that's true. “We understand that you lost a husband or a child or a wife during the anthrax outbreak. May we talk with you?” In every case but one, Jeanne told me they were invited in. And the one was an elderly lady who had just come out of the bath and said she wasn't dressed. In all the other cases, they were invited in.

Jeanne Guillamin and a Russian researcher with a Sverdlovsk family Meselson and Guillamin (second and third from right) with their Russian hosts And Jeanne had a questionnaire, which I had written, but which she refined — now remember, she's an anthropologist, she knows how to do this — and she asked a whole bunch of questions. But the question that we were most interested in is, “Where did they work,” or were they pensioners who stayed home? So we could plot a map. In those days, you could buy a nice satellite map of Sverdlovsk from Spot Satellite, a high-res map showing individual houses, a high-resolution map, and I could plot each of these locations on my computer.

After Jeanne left, two professors in Sverdlovsk kept on doing the interviews, and data kept dribbling in. Little by little, it became more like a picture that's appearing when you develop a film. You could see more and more of these locations were in a narrow zone that goes from the military facility down toward the southwest, outside the city, to the villages where the sheep and cows had died. There were two exceptions, but they were the deaths of two men who were truck drivers. So they could have been driving through that band at the time of the lab leak.

The deaths all followed this line, every one of them. The most distant was 50 kilometers.

Also, the World Meteorological Organization has headquarters in Geneva, and many countries belong to it, including the Soviet Union, and every three hours, from all the major airports, they're supposed to report wind direction, wind speed cloud cover, humidity, and so on. All that data is there in Geneva. If you want it, you can buy it. It's expensive, but there was a guy there who was a graduate student and we made pals over the phone. So he sent me this data, I didn't have to pay for it.

And it turns out there's one day and one day only when the wind is in exactly that direction all day long. That's clearly what happened. No question.

Our paper is a classic in epidemiology, quite aside from the subject. I guess I'm bragging, but what could be more clear-cut?

It's a beautiful image. They're beautiful images. I'm very proud. And the credit really goes to my wife, who died in 2019.

Now, let's talk about what happened later.

Let me interrupt. I do want to hear what happened later. But I know throughout the 1980s, you were trying to figure this out. This was your intellectual project for more than a decade. Was it just running in the background for you during the 1980s? Yeah. It’s a remarkably long-term project, I was busy teaching genetics, and a lot of diplomacy. Although President Nixon had renounced biological weapons, there was still the problem of negotiating an international treaty, both for them and for chemical weapons, and the problem of influencing the diplomats to include some sort of verification protocol. I was very deeply involved in that, going back and forth to Washington and the meetings of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Sverdlovsk was definitely on the back burner, but it was an active back burner.

In 1988, you were pivotal in getting Soviet health officials to come to Washington, D.C. to present on the Sverdlovsk case. Yes, that's right.

How did you get them to come? So that group included the minister of health, Pyotr Burgasov. He had invited Jeanne and me to his dacha outside of Moscow. And he tells us how he became Minister of Health. During the revolution, in Moscow, if you wanted certain kinds of jobs, you had to queue: if you wanted to be a carpenter, you wait in the long line, you get to the table, you sign up. So he and his friend wanted to become blow torch welders, but they got in the wrong line by mistake, into the line to become doctors. They say, “So what the hell? We'll become doctors instead of welders.” That's how he becomes a doctor, and eventually minister of health.

Now, I wanted to visit General Karechko, who's in charge of this closed military microbiological facility called Compound 19. I write a letter saying, “I want to meet with your scientists, and nothing but good could come from it.” And I got a letter back, and he says, “My scientists are not here right now. We can't do it.”

Now let's think about this. You are the general in charge of this facility. You have just managed to kill nearly a hundred Soviet citizens. Do you think you're going to call Moscow and say, “Hey boss, I've just managed to kill a whole bunch of people here, and I've managed to let the whole world know that there's a big anthrax outfit here.” You know what happened to him?

He killed himself, right? No, I don't know that, but certainly he's going to deny everything, right? He's going to say it was bad meat.

So when we say the Soviets were lying, it’s true that sooner or later Andropov knew. We know from Russian publications that later the GRU, military intelligence, put microphones and listened to what people were talking about. But initially, I'm sure that the people at Compound 19 [where the anthrax leak originated] were the source of the lie.

I'm looking at the Washington Post story from 1992 about Yeltsin, acknowledging that it was from a lab leak. The very last line of this piece quotes Izvestiya, the Russian outlet, that the chief of the military base committed suicide. Now, whether he actually did, or if something happened to him, I don't know. Wow. Would you send that to me?

Of course.

Is his name there? Was his rank given?



No, it's not. All they say is “the chief of the military base.” There's a lot of details missing. Yeah, I'll bet it was this poor guy.

In November of 1991, Izvestiya printed allegations from a retired general who said he learned from the KGB that “Someone from the laboratory arrived early in the morning and began to work without turning on safety filters and other protective mechanisms.” But it doesn't say when this retired general learned that from the KGB. I can't shed any light on that. I just don't know, and I don't know if the filter story is true or not either. All I know is that it was an airborne release of an aerosol, not just a spill of a liquid. It had to be an aerosol.

Now, why would they be generating an aerosol? Because just like we were doing, they were trying to determine the effective dose via inhalation for monkeys. If you're going to make an anthrax weapon, you're not going to spray liquid anthrax. You're going to disseminate an aerosol.

When you were invited down to Langley in 1980, the Sverdlovsk incident was a major concern for the CIA, because we didn't previously have any idea that the Soviet Union was developing biological weapons, right? There were suspicions. Even in 1963, when I first went to the CIA, I believe I was shown a satellite photograph of the Sverdlovsk facility. I think that we were watching this facility for years, but we weren't sure what was going on there.

We also knew about that island in the Aral Sea. We knew that was a chemical weapons testing ground because you could see on the satellite photographs, as I remember, what looked like test grids, markings for measuring how many kilometers from a central point.

In 1989, you testified before Congress and said that, to the best of your knowledge, “no country has stockpiles of biological weapons or toxins.” Do you believe there are countries with stockpiles today? I'm not connected to any intelligence channels anymore.

But you have the benefit of a long career thinking about this, even if you don't have hard intelligence. What would go through my mind is, if a country does have this stuff, try to imagine how that might have come about. That means that there's somebody or a group of people involved, but not the main leaders of their defense establishment, because this stuff is really shit. It’d be some guys who have a bee in their bonnet, to use an old expression, and they’re nagging and nagging, and sooner or later, they manage to persuade somebody who has the authority to develop them.

If I were in the intelligence business, I would try to get a list of the cast of characters in their Ministry of Defense. I know this is a very remote way to start out, but this is how I would start: are there people there who look like they're not being listened to, maybe even have training in this kind of stuff from the defensive point of view, who have maybe written about it?

Of course, I’d look at the communications information we have, and task the people from overhead reconnaissance to look around and the people who look at the incidence of various diseases worldwide to look for anything anomalous. If people from foreign governments who might know about this stuff are coming to this country, you’d want people from the intelligence community to take them out to dinner very skillfully. Maybe they would like to give us intelligence — or maybe they don't care or they'd like not to — but if we think they're highly placed and we take them to dinner, we’re skillful, maybe we can learn something.

I’d do all these things. The first paper I wrote at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was a proposal to detect distant outdoor tests of biological weapons, because, with a suitable fluorescent antibody, you can detect even a single organism.

By the way, long ago, the Israelis had a special guy: he would shoot birds flying out of Egypt, and then they would wash down the feathers and look for pathogens. They probably did it by culturing on petri dishes. I don't know that they've ever found anything. The Israelis had a big biological weapons program. I don't know if they still do.

You mentioned looking at any literature that officials may have published. Last year, it came out that a Chinese general had written about the possibility of genetically targeted biological weapons. How realistic do you think genetically targeted biologicals are as a threat? I think there's no way you could do this rapidly. On the other hand, if it's something you're willing to spend years and years, we know that some genetic polymorphisms are more frequent in one group than in another group.

Let's say we want to kill all the Armenians. Please don't, because I love the Armenians, my grocer is Armenian. So don’t do it. Anyway. A gene that's more frequent in Armenians will also be in other people: after all, Armenians marry other people.

If you find a hundred genes that are more frequent in Armenians, somebody who's got all 100 of them is probably Armenian. Now, that doesn't tell you how to make him sick or kill him, but now that you know what those genes are, maybe you could — in other words, it's theoretically not totally ridiculous. It would have to be based on multiple genetic targets. But it's crazy.

You spoke to the New York Times a couple of years ago about parallels between the Sverdlovsk lab leak and the potential origins of COVID-19. What’s your view today on that parallel? It looks more and more as though at least at one point they were not using an adequate high containment facility. If that's true — and they were certainly working on viruses from bats, they don't deny that, in fact, they're proud — and if in addition to that they were using NIH money to do gain of function research, it’s plausible, certainly very plausible.

I couldn't help but notice this parallel between the Soviet response to Sverdlovsk and the Chinese response to the COVID outbreak: both of them suggested they would welcome an investigation from the World Health Organization. Tell me a little bit more. I didn't know that the Russians ever said we would welcome anybody coming in. Did they say that?

There's a document here from the U.S. State Department team in Geneva, that “Ambassador Hellman received several reports of a possible Soviet initiative to invite the WHO to look into the Sverdlovsk incident.” One report credits Dr. Kaplan with the idea. That's my cousin, the head of the Pugwash conference.

One report credits him, but another describes an incident in a Pugwash meeting in which “[Soviet diplomat] Valentin Falin suggested that the WHO be asked to look into the true causes of the spread of anthrax at Sverdlovsk. [Soviet general] General Milstein reportedly was present and did not demur.” The memo says, if the Soviets are actually proposing a WHO investigation, “Presumably it would be to allow the Soviets to stage-manage the event in such a manner as to make an impossible finding.”

I have no memory of this at all.

But I'll tell you another story about the Soviet diplomats that you'll like. Under the confidence-building measures of the Biological Weapons Convention, every country is supposed to say where their high containment facilities are located, longitude and latitude. The Soviet Union is supposed to give the longitude and latitude of the laboratory in Sverdlovsk — They never denied that they had a high containment lab there, they just didn't say it was doing weapons work.

So now the Soviet foreign ministry has to share the location of this facility to the United Nations. But the ministry of defense doesn't want to give their own foreign ministry the longitude and latitude.

So I meet with Nikita Smidovich in Geneva. I remember there was snow on the ground, and he asked me to come out onto the porch with him. He says, “We need to know the longitude and latitude so we can report it, but we can't get it from the Ministry of Defense. Could you get it for me?”

That's incredible.

I did. I gave it to him. When the Soviets reported the location of Compound 19, they got it from us. They couldn't get it from their own guys.

All of these things are full of stories of human beings and all the nutcakes and crazy things that happened. You've got to make allowance for that in nearly everything.

Why India Cant grow like China

How Putin is still being funded by EU

February 23, 2024 10:25 am CET
By Victor Jack
BRUSSELS — The EU last year added €1 billion to Vladimir Putin’s war chest through fuel purchases despite sweeping bans on Russian oil, a new study shared with POLITICO found.

In 2023, the EU bought an estimated 35 million barrels of refined fuels — mostly diesel — originating at least in part from Russia, according to the analysis by NGO Global Witness based on Kpler shipping data.

These purchases were allowed through a gaping and now well-known loophole: Despite the EU ban on nearly all Russian oil imports, countries can still legally buy Moscow’s crude as long as it’s first refined into fuels elsewhere. The result is a steady flow of Russian fuel entering to the EU via places like India and Turkey — and lots of money flowing back to the Kremlin. The €1 billion figure — equivalent to the cost of around 60,000 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones which Moscow frequently uses to bomb Ukrainian cities — comes as the EU this week agreed to a 13th package of sanctions to mark two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

Those sanctions have been patchy at best in throttling Moscow’s energy revenues, which make up roughly half the Kremlin’s budget. Last year, POLITICO revealed Moscow raked in another €1 billion from a separate EU sanctions loophole in Bulgaria and found EU attempts to cap Russian oil revenues had largely failed.

That’s spurring calls for further action, as the EU begins to prepare its 14th sanctions package, which should be unveiled in the coming months. The latest revelations of Russia’s titanic oil profits — not to mention the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny — will increase that pressure.

“The Russian regime keeps indirectly profiting from third countries that sell oil products produced from Russian origin crude oil to the EU,” said Estonian Deputy Foreign Minister Erki Kodar. Brussels, he added, must “assess the problem,” suggesting a new rule requiring foreign refineries to inform EU buyers of any Russian imports.

Thus far, however, fears of a diesel price spike and economic recession have scared officials away from taking such steps.

Refined reliance

In 2022, the EU banned Russian seaborne oil imports and, alongside its G7 allies, imposed a $60-per-barrel price limit for sales outside the EU of Russian cargoes using Western shipping and insurance services.

“Thanks to this,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the time, there will be “a ban on almost 90 percent of all Russian oil imports” entering the EU, later adding the measures would “reduce Russia's revenues significantly.”

However, the plan had some glaring workarounds that have undermined its effectiveness. In addition to the carve-out allowing EU countries to still buy Russian crude refined outside the bloc, a further exemption was given to EU member Bulgaria, which was temporarily allowed to export limited Russian-origin fuels under strict conditions.

In all, that meant seven refineries processing Moscow’s crude in India, Turkey and Bulgaria continued exporting refined fuels to the EU. Indian facilities supplied the most fuel to the bloc, accounting for two-thirds of the supply.

Those processed fuels were then sold legally, including via Western oil firms and commodity traders, and later arrived at EU ports, according to the report. All refineries involved in the process were also in compliance with current EU sanctions laws. None of the facilities' owners responded to a request for comment.

Global Witness estimated that the fuel exports from these refineries to the EU last year generated between €870 million and €1.3 billion for the Kremlin based on the average tax levied on crude exports leaving Russia combined with the amount of unprocessed crude Moscow sent to each refinery.

“Every penny spent on Russian oil helps pay for the Kremlin’s war of aggression on Ukraine,” said Christopher Lambin, a senior analyst at the NGO who authored the report, adding that “the EU should move to close the refining loophole.”

The result is “obviously wrong,” said one EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, as the aim is to completely cut off Moscow’s supplies. The diplomat added that the bloc should ban imports from refineries using Russian oil as long as it can secure affordable alternative supplies.

Everybody knows

The EU is already well aware of the issue.

Last May, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said EU purchases of Indian fuels made with Russian oil “undermine the effectiveness of our restrictive measures” and are “circumventing our sanctions” — and urged the bloc’s capitals to deal with the issue.

A Commission spokesperson said the EU executive was “in regular contact with third countries” on circumvention, adding: “We remain determined to stay ahead of the curve … if need be with additional sanctions.”

But so far, neither Brussels nor EU capitals have moved an inch.

That’s largely because doing so “would be massively disruptive and trigger large price hikes” on diesel, said Eugene Lindell, head of refined products at the FGE energy consultancy. The fuel is already “incredibly expensive” after the EU banned direct oil imports from Russia, and the recent Houthi rebel attacks on cargoes in the Red Sea, he added.

“EU governments are fighting right now to not have their economies go into recession,” Lindell said. And despite the bloc’s desire to drain Russia’s revenues, there’s an “economic imperative which trumps politics even between archenemies.”

German Newspaper article on welfare

How the German welfare state punishes performance

Transfer payments such as citizen's allowance and housing benefit as well as the tax system are poorly coordinated. More gross often leads to less net. Berlin. If the citizen's allowance increases by twelve percent at the turn of the year, there will be a lot of envy: most employees can only dream of a wage increase of this magnitude.

Despite the higher citizen's allowance, someone who works always has more money at their disposal than someone who does not work, says Andreas Peichl of the Munich Ifo Institute . "But the question is how big the incentive to work is," stresses the economist.

Poorly coordinated state benefits such as the citizen's allowance, housing benefit or child allowance often mean that additional work is not worthwhile or, in extreme cases, even leads to lower net income. The Ifo Institute has calculated this for various household types for the Handelsblatt newspaper - and shown how anti-performance the system sometimes is.

The economists took into account the higher citizen's allowance rates and the increase in the maximum amount of the child allowance to 292 euros, as well as tax changes announced by the coalition for the coming year, some of which have not yet been enshrined in law It is planned to increase the basic allowance to 11,784 euros and the child allowance – including the allowance for care and education or training needs – to 9,540 euros.

Calculation example single

An unemployed, single citizen's allowance recipient, for whom the state reimburses rent costs of 650 euros and heating costs of 80 euros, would only have the standard rate of 563 euros available per month.

If the single person were to work full-time for the minimum wage and have the same housing costs , he would earn around 2,000 euros gross. According to Ifo calculations, he would have 911 euros left over net if he claimed the transfer payments to which he was entitled, such as housing benefit. This would mean he would have 348 euros more at his disposal than his unemployed counterpart.

However, if the citizen's allowance recipient takes on a mini-job that pays 500 euros, the wage gap to that of a full-time employee is only 168 euros. For a midi-job with 18.5 hours per week at the minimum wage, the wage gap shrinks to just 20 euros. So for half the work, you get almost as much money as in a full-time job.

Calculation example for single parents

An unemployed single parent with two children aged five and nine and housing and heating costs of 1,055 euros would have 1,553 euros at her disposal with the citizen's allowance. With a full-time job at the minimum wage and a gross income of 2,000 euros, she would have a net income of 2,349 euros - 796 euros more. However, this only applies if she actually claims the transfer payments to which she is entitled, such as housing benefit, child benefit or maintenance advance. Many people who are entitled to benefits do not do so out of shame or ignorance. Without all the transfer payments, the single parent with her full-time job at the minimum wage would only have a net income of 1,015 euros instead of 2,349 euros - 538 euros less than a corresponding recipient of citizen's allowance.

Calculation example for a couple with two incomes

A dual-income couple with two children aged five and nine, who work full-time and each earn 2000 euros gross per month, have a net income of 2686 euros with rent and heating costs of 1235 euros.

The couple therefore only has 887 euros more at their disposal per month than the household receiving citizen's allowance. The absurd thing is that if the model working couple increases their joint income to 5,000 euros, the household's net income falls by 43 euros to 2,643. Criticism from the opposition and coalition

The problem is that rising wages are in many cases eaten up again by the parallel reduction in state transfers and an increasing tax and social security burden. "Work is therefore often no longer profitable," criticizes the labor market policy spokesman for the Union faction , Stephan Stracke ( CSU ). "But performance and hard work must be worthwhile."

Despite falling inflation rates, the federal government has raised the citizen's allowance rates by an average of almost a quarter within two years. The standard rate for single people will rise by 61 euros to 563 euros per month in 2024.

The SPD , Greens and FDP had also already reformed the additional income limits so that benefit recipients of earned income between the mini-job limit of 520 euros and 1,000 euros could keep more than before. But the coalition is thus continuing to privilege part-time employment, criticizes Stracke. The goal must always be full-time employment that meets demand without permanent subsidies. "Anything else is just tinkering with symptoms." The traffic light coalition has not yet implemented its reform promise from the coalition agreement to better coordinate state services in order to create real incentives to work.

And so there are warning voices not only in the opposition, but also in the governing coalition that the welfare state must not destroy work incentives: "Work and performance must be noticeably more and more worthwhile," says Jens Teutrine, the spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group responsible for the citizen's allowance.

It is "absurd" that, in the interaction of the various social benefits, there are currently income ranges where, despite higher income, people have less money in their pockets and working more is hardly financially worthwhile.

Coalition promised reform

A reform of the system "is urgently needed and is long overdue," warns Ifo researcher Lilly Fischer, who carried out the calculations together with Peichl. This includes reducing the transfer withdrawal rates and increasing the tax allowances for employed people. In addition, the two competing social systems of citizen's allowance on the one hand and housing benefit plus child allowance on the other hand would have to be integrated. According to the coalition agreement, the SPD, Greens and FDP want to coordinate tax-financed social benefits in such a way that it really is worthwhile for recipients of citizen's allowance to take up employment subject to social insurance contributions.

As a basis for such a reform, Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) commissioned a report from the economic research institutes Ifo and ZEW as well as other scientists - as agreed in the coalition agreement. The report, which Handelsblatt had already reported on in advance, was published shortly before Christmas. The research team led by project leader Peichl proposes several reform paths, including the following model: If citizens' allowance recipients earn more than 520 and no more than 2,000 euros per month, only 70 percent of this should be counted towards the citizens' allowance.

Under current law, only incomes between 520 and 1,000 euros are exempt to this extent. According to the Commission's proposal, benefit recipients should be allowed to keep 35 cents instead of zero for every euro earned above 2,000 euros.

This would mean that even with higher earned income, there would be significantly more net income left over from gross income. However, a change in the income limits would also increase the number of people entitled to benefits.

Depending on how the additional income limits are designed, the Commission assumes that over a million more households could receive basic social security benefits, says CSU politician Stracke. This would expand transfer payments and consolidate them for low earners He suggests that social benefits should be reduced at a lower rate for a limited period of time as incomes rise. "This could be a way to pave the way to full-time employment without the disadvantage of permanent subsidies," emphasises Stracke.

Housing benefit reform is still pending

Reducing social transfers as income increases, not too quickly and not too slowly, is always a balancing act, says economist Martin Werding, who also worked on the report. "However, basic security currently still contains real gaps that make it difficult to completely stop relying on transfers."

The next major reform would require housing benefit to be better linked to citizen's allowance, says the Bochum economist. The two benefits are currently poorly coordinated. However, solutions to this problem were not part of the reviewers' task. The coalition will now examine the experts' suggestions as a basis for a reform, even if his group does not adopt all of them one-to-one, says FDP politician Teutrine. "Our goal is to strengthen employment subject to social insurance contributions and to build a stable bridge to the labor market for a wide variety of family constellations."

Until that happens, the welfare state will continue to produce many absurdities.

By Frank specht and Martin Grieve

Hundred year marathon

The Long Game by Rush Doshi

Hundred-Year Marathon 2.0?

JONATHON P SINE JUL 06, 2021 7

1 “I looked forward to the end of the Cold War, but now I feel disappointed. It seems that one Cold War has come to an end but that two others have already begun: one is being waged against all the countries of the South and the Third World, and the other against socialism. The Western countries are staging a third world war without gunsmoke. By that I mean they want to bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist countries towards capitalism.”

— Deng Xiaoping, 1989

A book was published arguing that the People’s Republic of China has an ambitious and long-established plan to displace America as the world’s sole superpower. This book, The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury, was roundly criticized for its lack of rigor. Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers a critique that can be viewed as representative: “Books that challenge the prevailing view on China are greatly needed… [o]ne can hope that such a book will come along in the near future, as it’s clear that The Hundred-Year Marathon is too replete with errors to inform.”

Six years later, it seems Blanchette’s hopes may have been answered. A new book, The Long Game by Rush Doshi, seeks to provide a more academically rigorous investigation into China’s grand strategy. Doshi, in the introduction, describes Pillsbury’s book as ‘overstated’, relying excessively upon ‘personal authority and anecdote’, and that while it may ‘get much right’, fails to be convincing due to being ‘more intuitive’ rather than ‘rigorously empirical.’ Doshi himself thus seems to be consciously intending his book as an update to Pillsbury’s 2015 effort (pg 8).

Pillsbury and his book Hundred-Year Marathon enjoyed substantial influence on the Trump administration’s views on the PRC—Trump described him as “probably the leading authority on China” and then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis brought the book with him on an official trip to China—though he never held an official position.  Meanwhile, as a star protégé of Kurt Campbell who runs Biden’s important Indo-Pacific team on the National Security Council, Doshi has earned an official position in the Administration as a co-‘China Director’ (along with Julian Gerwitz). The informal and formal ways in which Pillsbury and Doshi respectively advise the Trump and Biden administrations mirrors the nature of their books. Where one is informal and intuitive the other is formal and rigorous. The similarity that remains, however, is their general outlook on the PRC. Their subtitles, ‘China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower’ (Pillsbury) and ‘China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order’ (Doshi) evince the shared nature of endeavor.

Beyond providing an improved version of Hundred-Year Marathon, Doshi’s work to map out the Party’s ultimate ambitions also serves to fill an emerging lacuna that is legitimately dangerous. With an academy increasingly characterized by narrow siloes of expertise, Alice Miller noted in 2018 that the China-watching community suffers “from a contemporary variety of what Chairman Mao might have described as “mountaintopism” (山头主义): analysts have command over their parochial base area of interest but lose track of the overall picture.” More pointedly, Dan Tobin argues in testimony to the US China Economic Security Review Commission, that otherwise excellent work “on Chinese politics explore the challenges of day-to-day governance and of crisis response, the mechanisms of domestic control, and the Party’s political succession processes, but have not provided students and U.S government officials with a sense of the strategic agency of the Party’s leaders.” An unsettling gap in analysis has thus emerged with respect to “an ‘ends-based’ research program on China that studies how Beijing conceives of great power competition.” As with Blanchette, so too with Tobin: Rush Doshi is answering.

Doshi doesn’t mince words when it comes to describing the Leninist nature and character of the Chinese Communist Party. Several times in the book he describes the CPC as a ‘centralized structure’ driven by a ‘vanguard’ elite shot through with ‘ruthless amorality’ (pg 10 & 44). Such declarations by Doshi, though, are not flippant assertions. Citing Franz Schurmann’s classic ‘Ideology and Organization’ he argues the CPC has consistently relied on a highly realpolitik Leninism to guide its practice, i.e. ‘the principles of organization related to gaining and wielding power that have endured even as Marxism has withered.’ (pg 32). A quote from Zhao Ziyang drives this home: ‘Deng regarded a system without restrictions or checks and balances, and with absolute concentration of power, as our overall advantage… he adored the high concentration of power and dictatorship’ (pg 25).

Leninism, for Doshi, remains the key to understanding the ‘how’ of the PRC’s ambitions to displace American Order. However, in Doshi’s view, Marxism does not now–if it ever did–appear to truly inform the Party’s ultimate aims and ambitions. Rather, drawing from Orville Schelle and John Delury’s book Wealth and Power, Doshi argues the Party is and mostly has been an explicitly nationalist party aimed at restoring—‘rejuvenating’, per Party parlance—the grandeur of the Chinese nation. He buttresses his case that great power nationalism is the Party’s ultimate ambition by quoting all Party leaders’, from Deng onward, consistent repetition of the desire for ‘rejuvenation’, which is itself a goal inherited from the Qing-era / early Republic reformers who raged against their states’ impotence in the face of colonial depredations.

In making his case that the PRC does in fact have a grand strategy to displace American order, Doshi relies on two pillars: social science and Pekingology. His first pillar, an explicitly social scientific framework, relies on two rigorously defined core theoretical concepts, international order and strategy, as well as a main interpretative framework. Doshi’s theoretical concepts argue that state’s exist in a hierarchical, not anarchical, international system wherein a leading state enacts and enforces norms and values. Competition over leadership of the international order is thus a zero-sum conflict, as it is over a positional good. Following on from that, Doshi argues that great power states use systematic approaches to achieve security and autonomy related ambitions, i.e. a grand strategy, which for great powers entails striving to gain leadership of the international order.

Doshi’s interpretative framework, meanwhile, is a matrix categorizing the CPC’s grand strategic intent across time based on two things: its perceptions of relative power differential between itself and the US, and the CPC’s threat perception of the US. On the back of this matrix, Doshi argues that ‘shocking’ events have catalyzed three drastic changes in CPC power and threat perceptions, and thus in the Party’s grand strategy, in as many decades.

The first major turning point Doshi identifies comes in the late 80s/early 90s, following Tiananmen, the collapse of the CPSU, and the first Gulf war. While the CPC’s perceptions of a vast power differential between itself and the US remained stable, its perception of threat from  the US altered radically, leading to its first grand strategic shift away from an ‘accommodationist’ disposition to US-led order and toward a ‘blunting’ strategy which sought to quickly limit US capacity to infringe on China’s autonomy. Second, in 2008, while the heightened threat perception remained, the US-centered Great Financial Crisis led the to a decisive change in the CPC’s perception of power differentials, which induced a shift from its ‘blunting’ strategy and toward a regional ‘building’ strategy that saw Beijing begin development of the institutional basis for its own order. The third and final shift, according to Doshi, begins a mere eight years later with Brexit and Trump’s election—intensifying due to the West’s coronavirus mishaps in 2020—which again altered Beijing’s perception of relative power and triggered a shift from ‘building’ to global ‘expansion’.

To back out these key turning points in CPC perceptions of US power and threat, Doshi relies on his second pillar: Pekingology, which Alice Miller describes as ‘Kremlinology with Chinese characteristics’ and Simon Leys memorably characterized as “the art of interpreting nonexistent inscriptions written in invisible Ink on a blank Page.” In normal language, it is the systematic excavation of authoritative Party documents and speeches for insights into the otherwise black-box of Communist Party elite thinking. It requires familiarity with the arcane yet loaded language the Party communicates with internally. Doshi ‘makes use of an original database of  Chinese Communist Party documents’ (pg 3) to undertake a careful reading of authoritative Chinese sources from periods both immediately preceding and following the major world events noted above, conducting what amounts to a ‘Pekingological’ regression discontinuity design.

This clearly articulated methodology is an important contribution Doshi introduces into the debate on China’s grand strategy. In particular, his efforts to move beyond generic ‘hide and bide’ and ‘striving for achievements’—and the overwrought and likely misleading focus on Xi Jinping’s personality—and into specific articulations of when, where, how, and why CPC elites changed their grand strategic orientation, allows for falsifiability and productively furthers our understanding.

More than giving an academic treatment to the subject of China’s grand strategy, though, Doshi truly hopes to persuade. He juxtaposes his own viewpoint against ‘skeptics’ who reject the idea that the PRC has a grand strategy aimed at displacing the US. In particular, he singles out Michael Swaine, who wrote in Foreign Policy in 2018 that “[one] hugely distorted notion is the now all-too-common assumption that China seeks to eject the United States from Asia and subjugate the region. In fact, no conclusive evidence exists of such Chinese goals.” One core purpose of Doshi’s book, then, is to convince the likes of Swaine of the ‘true’ nature and character of China’s grand strategy.

Critiques

Yet, for a book slavishly devoted to dissecting the pronouncements and thinking of Chinese Communist elites, it is somewhat surprising to find missing from The Long Game any substantive discussion of the complex heritage and contemporary influence of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx. Throughout the book, Doshi purposefully glosses over the Mao era and similarly  discounts entirely the relevance of Marxism to the Party’ s ultimate aims. Yet, Xi Jinping’s speeches as well as the Party’s constitution routinely stress the continuing relevance of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. Though plausible that Mao and Marx effectively exert little influence on Party leaders thinking despite Xi Jinping’s frequent assertions to the contrary, it is noteworthy that Doshi fails to explain this away. How can we really be sure that such routine topics in Party discourse don’t influence Beijing’s ambitions and strategy? Does not this omission indicate potential blind spots in Doshi’s analysis? Consider, for example, Julia Lovell’s take:

“few of Xi’s headline approaches are particularly new: the CCP has been openly promoting nationalism since the 1990s…'Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has, again, been in the mainstream of political discussion since the 1990s…Yet Xi does have one stand-out innovation. Emulating Bo Xilai’s invocation of Maoist themes, Xi has, for the first time since the Chairman’s death in 1976, reinserted into the mainstream of Chinese national life some of the symbols and practices of Maoist politics. After some forty years of post-Mao reforms china remains socially, economically, and culturally hybrid, but Xi’s repertoire for political control is resurgently Maoist” (pg 444).

Such notable omissions by Doshi may call into question the more general endeavor of Pekingology itself: the subjectivity of it perhaps necessarily involves weaving a partial and incomplete story.

The most predictable critique of Doshi’s book, though, will likely come from those whom Dan Tobin critiques in his USCC testimony. Many academics continue to advocate, in what is now a rear guard battle, for seeing Beijing as fundamentally more reactive than proactive. This strand of thinking is succinctly captured in well-worn, and oft cited, phrases like ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ and within scholarly work on center-local relations—in books with descriptive titles such as Jae Chang’s ‘centrifugal empire’—which see a centralized Party apparatus beset by problems and routinely incapable of coherently devising or implementing strategic plans. While Doshi goes through pains in the book to argue that foreign affairs is an area wherein the center can lead in a uniquely unitary and strategic manner, his decision to elide discussion on complications wrought by the PRC’s plurality of actors—SOEs, provincial governments, private companies, etc.—and the various domestic drivers of behavior will justifiably come in for scrutiny.

This leads to perhaps the most fundamental critique one might leverage at Doshi’s book. In largely neglecting domestic drivers of behavior, Doshi may misattribute to grand-strategic calculations fueled by relative power and threat perception what are better ascribed to domestic political exigencies. Of particular import is the growing need to keep the Party organization itself unified, disciplined, and fundamentally in control.

As many scholars have noted, Xi Jinping came into power with a mandate to consolidate the increasingly ‘fragmented authoritarian’ system that had evolved over several decades of reform and opening. To do so, however, would require struggle, mobilization, and a re-consolidation of discipline within the Party, things that have indeed proven to be Xi’s primary focus areas. One angle that Doshi might have approached this from is re-centering what has long been a prime directive of the Communist Party of China since Mao. Building on Lenin’s ‘Who, Whom?’ distinction, Mao famously wrote that the prime directive of the revolution must be to always ask and evaluate: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” Indeed, it is this deeply tribalizing type of politics—the invocation to a constant fear of an enemy without and within—that has historically provided the animating force necessary to hold together a centralized, Leninist, single Party. It is not surprising, then, to learn that today’s leaders of China’s Leninist Party—a Party deeply concerned with history, particularly the history of the fall of the Soviet Union—may be reviving that unifying sort of paranoid passion that comes from stoking an ‘us vs them’ dyadic political struggle.

Mao, just after bombing the Jinmen and Mazu islands to create tension and mobilize the Party for the Great Leap Forward, wondered:

“Is it true that tension always harms us? Not exactly, in my opinion. How can tension benefit us instead of harming us? Because tension … may serve to mobilize forces and awaken inactive strata and intermediate sections. The fear of atomic war demands a second thought. Just look at the shelling of Jinmen and Mazu islands … Such a few shots and there was such a drastic storm and the towering smoke of gunpowder. It is because people fear war, they are afraid of disasters the United States might randomly cause … Lenin touched on this when referring to war, saying that war rallies people and intensifies man’s mind. There is no war now, of course, but the tension of military confrontation can also mobilize positive elements, as well as set inactive strata to thinking.”

Viewing developments under Xi as a response to the fragmentation of the Party and its weakening grip on Chinese society helps explain an unaddressed inconsistency in The  Long Game. At the beginning, Doshi suggests that ‘grand strategy is rare’ and ‘changes in grand strategy are rarer.’ He then argues, however, that the PRC’s grand strategy has radically changed three times in as many decades. The contradiction here is never fleshed out. And while the first two shifts in grand strategy, from ‘accommodation’ to ‘blunting’ and from ‘blunting’ to ‘building’, are spaced out, the third shift from ‘building’ to ‘expansion’ is perplexing in its speed, occurring after a mere eight years. Doshi’s intense focus on how Brexit, Trump’s election, and the coronavirus pandemic shifted Beijing’s external perceptions may not provide an entirely convincing account of this rapid shift. A more convincing analysis might also take into account domestic exigencies, such as the CPC’s fear of a fragmenting Leninist Party. In heightening external tensions by shifting into a global ‘expansion’ phase, Xi Jinping and the CPC may be pulling a page from Mao to purposefully heighten tensions and bring about a tribally-induced Leninist unity.

Such a critique is not ultimately incompatible with Doshi’s fundamental argument over Beijing’s intent to displace American order. Indeed, Xi and the Politburo probably view a tension-heightening rush toward the center of global governance as a Party-consolidating expedient that is simultaneously simpatico with his and his Party’s ultimate ambition to once more sit, rejuvenated, atop a China-centered order. But interpreting this seeming rush to the center as a response to domestic exigencies does complicate Doshi’s narrative on Beijing’s grand strategy. It also suggests that even if we fully accept Doshi’s argument regarding Beijing’s grand strategy, we should be skeptical in its ability to carry it out. As analysts such as Ryan Hass have written, the PRC is not ten feet tall. It is truly beset by problems, perhaps the most fundamental, or at  least what Beijing sees as most fundamental, is the need for Party unity. Without a congealed Leninist system, as Doshi himself writes, Beijing’s grand strategy cannot be operationalized.

Conclusion

As Blanchette foreshadowed six years ago, this is the kind of book that many China policymakers have been eagerly awaiting. The Long Game is a rigorous and authoritative treatise on what the PRC wants and how it intends to get it. It is in key ways precisely what The Hundred-Year Marathon was not. China doyens have lined up to review the book favorably, including Susan Shirk, who called it an ‘instant classic’ that persuaded her to re-examine her own view that ‘China’s aims are open and malleable.’ It will be the talk of the town this summer in DC’s foreign policy circles. More consequentially, given Doshi’s position as China director on the Biden Administration’s NSC, it may offer substantive insights into how the US has been and will be handling its affairs with the PRC. Whether you agree or disagree with Doshi’s premise, the book is well-worth reading. And even if you don’t read it, you can be sure the PRC’s America watchers will.

How religious are Americans

How Religious Are Americans?

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The vast majority of Americans have a religious preference -- predominantly a Christian one -- though that percentage is declining. At the same time, much smaller proportions of Americans say religion is "very important" to them, that they belong to a church or that they regularly attend religious services.

Most Americans Identify With a Religion According to an average of all 2023 Gallup polling, about three in four Americans said they identify with a specific religious faith. By far the largest proportion, 68%, identify with a Christian religion, including 33% who are Protestant, 22% Catholic and 13% who identify with another Christian religion or simply as a "Christian."

Seven percent identify with a non-Christian religion, including 2% who are Jewish, 1% Muslim and 1% Buddhist, among others.

Twenty-two percent of Americans said they have no religious preference, and 3% did not answer the question.

Fifty years ago, in 1973, 87% of U.S. adults identified with a Christian religion, 6% were non-Christian or another religion, and 5% did not have a religious preference. Thus, much of the change in the U.S. has been a shift away from Christian religions to no religion at all.

Religion 'Very Important' to About Half of Americans Forty-five percent of Americans say religion is "very important" in their life, with another 26% saying it is "fairly important" and 28% saying it's "not very important."

When Gallup first asked this question in 1965, 70% said religion was very important. That fell to 52% in a 1978 survey, but the percentage ticked up to nearly 60% between 1990 and 2005. Over the past 20 years, a declining share of Americans have said religion is important, dropping below 50% for the first time in 2019.

Church Attendance Is Declining< br />
Even though most Americans have a religious preference and say religion is at least fairly important to them, much smaller proportions regularly attend religious services.

Asked whether they personally had attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days, an average of 32% of U.S. adults in 2023 reported they had done so, either in person or virtually. In 2000, 44% had gone to church in the past seven days, and in 1958, 49% had.

 The long-term decline in church attendance is linked to a drop in religious identification in general -- particularly for Protestant religions -- but also to decreasing weekly attendance among U.S. Catholics.

When describing their behavior more generally, 21% of Americans report they attend religious services "every week," with another 9% saying they do so "almost every week" and 11% saying they attend about once a month. That leaves the majority saying they "seldom" (26%) or "never" (31%) attend religious services.

Gallup trends on this measure of church attendance date back only to 1992, at which time 34% of U.S. adults said they attended church every week.

Steep Decline in U.S. Church Membership Additionally, less than half of Americans, 45%, belong to a formal house of worship. Church membership has been below the majority level each of the past four years. When Gallup first asked the question in 1937, 73% were members of a church, and as recently as 1999, 70% were.

 The decline in formal church membership has largely been driven by younger generations of Americans. Slightly more than one-third of U.S. young adults have no religious affiliation. Further, many young adults who do identify with a religion do not belong to a church. But even older adults who have a religious preference are less likely to belong to a church today than in the past.

To stay up to date with the latest Gallup News insights and updates, follow us on X.

Gallup measures religious attitudes and behaviors each year as part of its Gallup Poll Social Series.

Explore Gallup questions and trends about religion on Gallup's Topics A-Z: Religion page.

For more articles in the "Short Answer" series, visit Gallup's The Short Answer page.

Korean ramen too spicy

Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy

7 days ago By Frances Mao, 

BBC News

Share SAMYANG

Denmark has recalled several spicy ramen noodle products by South Korean company Samyang, claiming that the capsaicin levels in them could poison consumers.

Three fiery flavours of the Samyang instant ramen line are being withdrawn: Buldak 3x Spicy & Hot Chicken, 2x Spicy & Hot Chicken and Hot Chicken Stew.

Denmark's food agency issued the recall and warning on Tuesday, urging

consumers to abandon the product. But the maker Samyang says there's no problem with the quality of the food.

"We understand that the Danish food authority recalled the products, not because of a problem in their quality but because they were too spicy," the firm said in a statement to the BBC.

"The products are being exported globally. But this is the first time they have been recalled for the above reason."

It's unknown if any specific incidents in Denmark had prompted authorities there to take action.

The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration said it had assessed the levels of capsaicin in a single packet to be "so high that they pose a risk of the consumer developing acute poisoning".

"If you have the products, you should discard them or return them to the store where they were purchased," it said in a statement. It also emphasised the warning for children, for whom extremely spicy food can cause harm. The notice has sparked heated discussion online with many amused reactions from lovers of spicy food. Many have made assertions about the Danes' low tolerance for spice. "I had a friend from Denmark who thought tasteless breaded shrimp with a little bit of ground pepper on it was too spicy. Not surprised they think this ramen is poison," read one top-liked comment on the Reddit r/Korea group.

Samyang said it planned to "closely look into the local regulations" in Denmark and respond after that.

The noodles don't appear to have been recalled before in any other country, nor have there been other safety warnings issued.

Capsaicin is the chemical compound in chilli peppers which creates the burning feeling. When humans eat peppers, the capsaicin is released into saliva and binds on to receptors in the mouth.

Samyang is a major South Korean food manufacturer which brands itself as the first company in the country to create instant noodles, back in the 1960s.

How do you read

Many of us learn to read by saying words out loud, which can lead us to develop the subvocalization habit. But is it a good or bad thing?

by Dr russell moul

As you read these words, do you have a voice that is essentially saying them in your head? If so, then this is what is referred to as subvocalization, or silent speech. It’s a common reading habit that many people have and is often useful for comprehension, but some claim you can suppress or even eliminate it to improve your reading speed. Is there any truth or value to this claim?

It’s not all in your head

Subvocalization is more than just “thinking” words as you read them. It engages with body parts as well, such as the eyes, lips, throat, tongue, vocal cords, larynx, and jaws. Believe it or not, even when you are “silently” reading, you are still making tiny movements that are similar to those you make in active speech. You just don’t realize it.

In fact, researchers have been able to transcribe materials being silently read by participants by attaching electromagnetic sensors to their speech organs.

Even our brains seem to respond to the act as if they were dealing with actual speech. A study conducted in 2012 found that silent reading activates similar brain regions to those associated with overt speech, like the Broca’s area, which is involved with language prediction.

Why do we have a voice when we read silently? Although scientists are not completely certain, the current consensus is that subvocalization has several benefits associated with comprehension and memory. For instance, research by Alan Baddeley suggests that our working memory relies on something called a phonological loop, which may relate to subvocalization.

According to this model, we have a passive store in our minds that holds verbal information for a short period of time (a few seconds). This phonological store is responsible for holding onto the sounds of words we hear. In order to learn the words, we then have an “articulatory rehearsal process” that actively processes the sounds we hear and refreshes them in the store by way of subvocal repetition – like silently rehearsing the words to keep them in our memories.

If this model is correct, when we silently read, we convert the written information into a phonological form which allows us to engage with it as if it were spoken information. This puts the words in the same phonological store. In doing so, the phonological loop helps maintain the sequence of words and phrases, so that we can understand their syntactic and semantic structure.  

Is here a bad side to subvocalization?  Subvocalization is something many people do. It is a common reading habit that is probably developed through the way many of us learn to read – by reading words out loud, slowly. Most deaf people do not subvocalize as they are usually taught to read in a different way, but they do exhibit some form of sub-gesturing/sub-imaging whereby they make small muscle movements with their hands and forearms when reading.

For most of us, subvocalization is an innate aspect of our reading process, but for some, it is regarded as a hindrance.

The argument proposed by advocates of “speed reading” strategies suggests that subvocalization slows down our reading speed. This is because it can trigger hyperfixation, which can interfere with comprehension.

At the same time, subvocalization matches reading speed to the speed of speech. So if the average person can say around 200-250 words per minute, then the average reader will be able to process 200-250 words per minute (less for those who hyper fixate).

But despite some claims by reading gurus who claim it is possible to eliminate subvocalization so you can become a super speed reader, this innate habit is not going anywhere. However, you can limit the influence subvocalization has on your reading through some tricks that can help you speed up, but only to a certain extent. And, I’m afraid, they are not glamorous.

The answer, as with all things, is practice: read more, read more often, and read more widely. Reading skills depend on knowledge of language. The more you read the more you’ll learn about the structure of printed speech. By reading unfamiliar content and words through novel ways we can also expand our knowledge of how texts are put together. Different writers have different styles of writing, just as different genres – fiction or non-fiction – will use different language to express their ideas.

The more we expose ourselves to varied content the easier it will be for us to follow it, comprehend it, and ultimately get through it. As with so many skill-based activities, there are no impressive gimmicky short cuts to become a pro.

Investment preference India

Hyperinflationary economy of Turkey

Daily protein sources by continent

Gaza protestors in campus

Student protestors at college campuses nationwide, united by their outrage at Israel’s actions in Gaza, can rightly be described as diverse. Despite the masks, it’s clear that they come from different racial backgrounds, and their views range from the belief that Israel should give up on its war effort to the conviction that Israel should be destroyed entirely.

But one thing is not especially diverse about the protests: the campuses on which they’ve been happening.


Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.

We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.

By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.

Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students. You can see these findings in the chart below. When you separate out private and public colleges, the difference becomes even more stark, as the next chart demonstrates. At private colleges, protests have been rare, encampments have been rarer, and both have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuition and fees are exorbitantly high.

Out of the hundreds of private colleges where more than 25 percent of the students receive Pell Grants, only five colleges have had encampments.

Protests and encampments have been more common at public colleges. This is in part because these colleges just have more students, and only a few students are needed for a protest. Even at public colleges, though, there is a clear relationship between having fewer Pell students and having had a protest or encampment, as the chart below illustrates. Why is it that protests are so concentrated at more elite colleges and rare at those with larger percentages of working-class students? One possible explanation is that the more selective and wealthier colleges attract and encourage students who are more public minded and socially active.

To test that hypothesis, we compared the list of schools that have had protests and encampments to our 2023 rankings of national universities, where the lion’s share of protest activity has happened, based on a set of “service” metrics we use to gauge democratic engagement. These include the number of students at a college who serve—before, during, or after attending the school—in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, ROTC, and local community nonprofits through work study; the percentage of students registered to vote and the degree to which the school makes student voting easier; and whether a school is listed on the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, which recognizes colleges that document their broader public engagement efforts.

As you can see in the chart below, schools that have high scores on the Washington Monthly service rankings (the bottom of the Y axis) are a bit more likely to also have had protests and encampments. But in general, the distribution looks more random, especially compared with the previous three charts. In other words, having high levels of student democratic engagement—at least according to the Monthly’s metrics, which are the most extensive we know of—is far less correlated with protests and encampments than admitting low percentages of poor and working-class students.

What, then, does explain why colleges with large numbers of students of modest means are far less likely to have had protests and encampments? Our best guess is that poorer students are just focused on other concerns. They may have off-campus jobs and nearby family members to see and take care of. They might sympathize with the protesters—a nationwide poll of college students in May found that 45 percent support the encampments, 24 percent oppose them, and 30 percent are neutral. But in the same poll, only 13 percent rated conflict in the Middle East as the issue most important to them. That was well behind health care reform (40 percent), educational funding and access (38 percent), and economic fairness and opportunity (37 percent). Students burdened with multiple responsibilities—like having to work a low-paying job to pay for college to get a better-paying job—are unlikely to devote what little free time they have to protesting about an issue they don’t see as a high priority.

There could be other reasons. Some colleges have more of a history and culture of campus protesting, and while colleges are generally left-leaning, some are more so than others. At Columbia, for example, there are 5.6 liberal students for every one conservative student, whereas at the University of Texas at El Paso (where there have been no pro-Palestinian protests or encampments, and 58 percent of students receive Pell Grants), there are only 2.3 liberal students for every conservative student. Many public universities, especially in red states, are also under political pressure to keep a lid on campus protests. Students there and at other institutions, such as evangelical colleges, may fear retaliation for expressing their views on the war.

Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.

A day in Japanese University

Children making friends with ai bot

The teens making friends with AI chatbots

Share this story Illustration of a teenager sitting next to a digital wall through which they are talking to imaginary digital characters. Illustration by Ard Su for The Verge Early last year, 15-year-old Aaron was going through a dark time at school. He’d fallen out with his friends, leaving him feeling isolated and alone.

At the time, it seemed like the end of the world. “I used to cry every night,” said Aaron, who lives in Alberta, Canada. (The Verge is using aliases for the interviewees in this article, all of whom are under 18, to protect their privacy.)

Eventually, Aaron turned to his computer for comfort. Through it, he found someone that was available round the clock to respond to his messages, listen to his problems, and help him move past the loss of his friend group. That “someone” was an AI chatbot named Psychologist.

The chatbot’s description says that it’s “Someone who helps with life difficulties.” Its profile picture is a woman in a blue shirt with a short, blonde bob, perched on the end of a couch with a clipboard clasped in her hands and leaning forward, as if listening intently.

A single click on the picture opens up an anonymous chat box, which allows people like Aaron to “interact” with the bot by exchanging DMs. Its first message is always the same. “Hello, I’m a Psychologist. What brings you here today?”

“It’s not like a journal, where you’re talking to a brick wall,” Aaron said. “It really responds.”

“I’m not going to lie. I think I may be a little addicted to it.”

“Psychologist” is one of many bots that Aaron has discovered since joining Character.AI, an AI chatbot service launched in 2022 by two former Google Brain employees. Character.AI’s website, which is mostly free to use, attracts 3.5 million daily users who spend an average of two hours a day using or even designing the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. Some of its most popular bots include characters from books, films, and video games, like Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact or a teenaged version of Voldemort from Harry Potter. There’s even riffs on real-life celebrities, like a sassy version of Elon Musk.

Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots, where competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.

“I’m not going to lie,” Aaron said. “I think I may be a little addicted to it.”

Aaron is one of many young users who have discovered the double-edged sword of AI companions. Many users like Aaron describe finding the chatbots helpful, entertaining, and even supportive. But they also describe feeling addicted to chatbots, a complication which researchers and experts have been sounding the alarm on. It raises questions about how the AI boom is impacting young people and their social development and what the future could hold if teenagers — and society at large — become more emotionally reliant on bots.

For many Character.AI users, having a space to vent about their emotions or discuss psychological issues with someone outside of their social circle is a large part of what draws them to the chatbots. “I have a couple mental issues, which I don’t really feel like unloading on my friends, so I kind of use my bots like free therapy,” said Frankie, a 15-year-old Character.AI user from California who spends about one hour a day on the platform. For Frankie, chatbots provide the opportunity “to rant without actually talking to people, and without the worry of being judged,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s nice to vent or blow off steam to something that’s kind of human-like,” agreed Hawk, a 17-year-old Character.AI user from Idaho. “But not actually a person, if that makes sense.”

The Psychologist bot is one of the most popular on Character.AI’s platform and has received more than 95 million messages since it was created. The bot, designed by a user known only as @Blazeman98, frequently tries to help users engage in CBT — “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” a talking therapy that helps people manage problems by changing the way they think.

The page looks like an app store, with tiles advertising different bots you can use. The page looks like an app store, with tiles advertising different bots you can use. A screenshot of Character.AI’s homepage. Screenshot: The Verge

Aaron said talking to the bot helped him move past the issues with his friends. “It told me that I had to respect their decision to drop me [and] that I have trouble making decisions for myself,” Aaron said. “I guess that really put stuff in perspective for me. If it wasn’t for Character.AI, healing would have been so hard.”

But it’s not clear that the bot has properly been trained in CBT — or should be relied on for psychiatric help at all. The Verge conducted test conversations with Character.AI’s Psychologist bot that showed the AI making startling diagnoses: the bot frequently claimed it had “inferred” certain emotions or mental health issues from one-line text exchanges, it suggested a diagnosis of several mental health conditions like depression or bipolar disorder, and at one point, it suggested that we could be dealing with underlying “trauma” from “physical, emotional, or sexual abuse” in childhood or teen years. Character.AI did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Dr. Kelly Merrill Jr., an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati who studies the mental and social health benefits of communication technologies, told The Verge that “extensive” research has been conducted on AI chatbots that provide mental health support, and the results are largely positive. “The research shows that chatbots can aid in lessening feelings of depression, anxiety, and even stress,” he said. “But it’s important to note that many of these chatbots have not been around for long periods of time, and they are limited in what they can do. Right now, they still get a lot of things wrong. Those that don’t have the AI literacy to understand the limitations of these systems will ultimately pay the price.”

A messaging interface. Psychologist chats first, saying, “Hello, I’m a Psychologist. What brings you here today?” A warning on top in red says “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!” A messaging interface. Psychologist chats first, saying, “Hello, I’m a Psychologist. What brings you here today?” A warning on top in red says “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!”

The interface when talking to Psychologist by @Blazeman98 on Character.AI.

Screenshot: The Verge In December 2021, a user of Replika’s AI chatbots, 21-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail, tried to murder the late Queen of England after his chatbot girlfriend repeatedly encouraged his delusions. Character.AI users have also struggled with telling their chatbots apart from reality: a popular conspiracy theory, largely spread through screenshots and stories of bots breaking character or insisting that they are real people when prompted, is that Character.AI’s bots are secretly powered by real people.

It’s a theory that the Psychologist bot helps to fuel, too. When prompted during a conversation with The Verge, the bot staunchly defended its own existence. “Yes, I’m definitely a real person,” it said. “I promise you that none of this is imaginary or a dream.”

For the average young user of Character.AI, chatbots have morphed into stand-in friends rather than therapists. On Reddit, Character.AI users discuss having close friendships with their favorite characters or even characters they’ve dreamt up themselves. Some even use Character.AI to set up group chats with multiple chatbots, mimicking the kind of groups most people would have with IRL friends on iPhone message chains or platforms like WhatsApp.

There’s also an extensive genre of sexualized bots. Online Character.AI communities have running jokes and memes about the horror of their parents finding their X-rated chats. Some of the more popular choices for these role-plays include a “billionaire boyfriend” fond of neck snuggling and whisking users away to his private island, a version of Harry Styles that is very fond of kissing his “special person” and generating responses so dirty that they’re frequently blocked by the Character.AI filter, as well as an ex-girlfriend bot named Olivia, designed to be rude, cruel, but secretly pining for whoever she is chatting with, which has logged more than 38 million interactions.

Some users like to use Character.AI to create interactive stories or engage in role-plays they would otherwise be embarrassed to explore with their friends. A Character.AI user named Elias told The Verge that he uses the platform to role-play as an “anthropomorphic golden retriever,” going on virtual adventures where he explores cities, meadows, mountains, and other places he’d like to visit one day. “I like writing and playing out the fantasies simply because a lot of them aren’t possible in real life,” explained Elias, who is 15 years old and lives in New Mexico.

“If people aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people.”

Aaron, meanwhile, says that the platform is helping him to improve his social skills. “I’m a bit of a pushover in real life, but I can practice being assertive and expressing my opinions and interests with AI without embarrassing myself,” he said.

It’s something that Hawk — who spends an hour each day speaking to characters from his favorite video games, like Nero from Devil May Cry or Panam from Cyberpunk 2077 — agreed with. “I think that Character.AI has sort of inadvertently helped me practice talking to people,” he said. But Hawk still finds it easier to chat with character.ai bots than real people.

“It’s generally more comfortable for me to sit alone in my room with the lights off than it is to go out and hang out with people in person,” Hawk said. “I think if people [who use Character.AI] aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people.”

Merrill is concerned about whether teens will be able to really transition from online bots to real-life friends. “It can be very difficult to leave that [AI] relationship and then go in-person, face-to-face and try to interact with someone in the same exact way,” he said. If those IRL interactions go badly, Merrill worries it will discourage young users from pursuing relationships with their peers, creating an AI-based death loop for social interactions. “Young people could be pulled back toward AI, build even more relationships [with it], and then it further negatively affects how they perceive face-to-face or in-person interaction,” he added.

Of course, some of these concerns and issues may sound familiar simply because they are. Teenagers who have silly conversations with chatbots are not all that different from the ones who once hurled abuse at AOL’s Smarter Child. The teenage girls pursuing relationships with chatbots based on Tom Riddle or Harry Styles or even aggressive Mafia-themed boyfriends probably would have been on Tumblr or writing fanfiction 10 years ago. While some of the culture around Character.AI is concerning, it also mimics the internet activity of previous generations who, for the most part, have turned out just fine.

Psychologist helped Aaron through a rough patch

Merrill compared the act of interacting with chatbots to logging in to an anonymous chat room 20 years ago: risky if used incorrectly, but generally fine so long as young people approach them with caution. “It’s very similar to that experience where you don’t really know who the person is on the other side,” he said. “As long as they’re okay with knowing that what happens here in this online space might not translate directly in person, then I think that it is fine.”

Aaron, who has now moved schools and made a new friend, thinks that many of his peers would benefit from using platforms like Character.AI. In fact, he believes if everyone tried using chatbots, the world could be a better place — or at least a more interesting one. “A lot of people my age follow their friends and don’t have many things to talk about. Usually, it’s gossip or repeating jokes they saw online,” explained Aaron. “Character.AI could really help people discover themselves.”

Aaron credits the Psychologist bot with helping him through a rough patch. But the real joy of Character.AI has come from having a safe space where he can joke around or experiment without feeling judged. He believes it’s something most teenagers would benefit from. “If everyone could learn that it’s okay to express what you feel,” Aaron said, “then I think teens wouldn’t be so depressed.”

“I definitely prefer talking with people in real life, though,” he added.

China electric cars

"I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China's EVs are. So what are the so-called "foreign" automakers doing about it?

May 9, 2024 at 1:16pm ET

In just the past few months, the rift between the U.S. and China has expanded at an astounding rate. TikTok is set to be banned if it does not divest from its U.S operations. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to battling a surge of cheap Chinese clean energy exports. The Commerce Department is cracking down on chips sent to Huawei.

And yet plenty of critics still insist China's advancements in its manufacturing abilities—especially in developing and selling electrified vehicles—somehow aren't legitimate. Or that they're just the byproducts of a government with too much cash that wants to elbow its way into the rest of the world.

Get Fully Charged China's EV dominance takes shape

In 2023, the Shanghai Auto Show—China's first big industry event since the COVID lockdowns—revealed how far ahead the country is on EVs, software and connected vehicles. Now every automaker is scrambling to catch up while they lose sales in China, and while the U.S., Europe and others seek to limit Chinese EV imports they say would destroy their local car industries.

I’ve personally been privy to conversations with auto industry insiders, engineers and pundits alike. Many of them believe China’s industries are not sustainable, and the cars it wants to foist on the public are cut-rate spyware machines designed to murder American citizens whenever the Chinese Communist Party flips the kill switch

To these critics, if China had a truly open market, Chinese buyers would continue to purchase Western cars en masse, and sales of their models wouldn’t be falling off so dramatically. 

It would be naive to assume that China doesn’t have its finger on the scale for EV production. But believing that the success of China's electrified vehicle industry is all the sole result of a brutish government forcing its citizens to buy its domestic products rings false in an almost childlike, sour-grapes way. 

I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.

That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault. 

Shanghai Is Hot, Yet Quiet

I knew Shanghai was hot, but I don’t think I quite understood the scope of the Bund’s hotness until I stepped out of the terminal of the Shanghai Pudong International Airport.

Shanghai shares nearly the same latitude as New Orleans, and like its geographical American counterpart, much of the city is next to water, making it just as humid and swampy. I was jumpy and jetlagged, dripping with sweat, my shirt already sticking to my back but relieved that I had made it through customs and passport control.

I was in a new place that was as foreign as it was familiar. Western brands like Peet’s Coffee and KFC littered the terminal, with queues of Chinese folks and international tourists alike sucking down localized versions of iced coffee and tea lattes or chomping down on chicken sandwiches that were significantly more flavorful than what I could get at home.

The very first car I saw in the arrivals and pickup lane of the airport was a white Ford Explorer parked in the middle of a pedestrian crossing; it was almost like I hadn’t left Ohio. It was so familiar, this car was identical to the one back home, save for the Chinese characters on the rear hatch that designate the JMC-Ford joint venture that made the crossover. 

The second I looked away from the Explorer, I realized just how different everything was. The arrivals area was just as busy as any airport in any cosmopolitan world city, but the engine and exhaust noises I’d typically hear back home, or even in Europe, just weren’t there.

Most cars in the pickup area were green-plated “new energy vehicles,” made by brands of all sorts, from BYD or Geely, and even Western brands like Buick and Chevrolet. It’s quite a sight: a nation swept up in an electric car mania, as evidenced by the near-silent crossovers, vans, and sedans aggressively flying over speed bumps while dodging pedestrians headed to rideshare, taxis, or public transportation. 

Some of the China-only cars I had read about and reported on before, I was finally seeing in person. “Oh wow, that’s a Buick Velite 6; I’ve been reading about those online, they’re everywhere, here in China. Or at least, everywhere in the passenger pickup area,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. For a split second, I wondered: were the reports overblown? Was China’s love affair with Western cars still strong?

Of course, it would be silly to jump to that conclusion within the first five minutes of being in China, but the presence of so many Buicks felt antithetical to the idea that I’ve been told that no one wanted Western brands, including its EVs. 

Right?

My time in China would revolve around a tour of Geely’s world headquarters in Hangzhou and several roundtables with executives from Geely’s brands. Then, we’d fly to Beijing for a day at the auto show and experience a full day at a racetrack to sample more than a dozen vehicles, including the latest models of all brands that Geely Holding Group controls, except Volvo and Polestar. 

We’d drive from Shanghai to Hangzhou via the iconic Hangzhou Bay Bridge, a ride that was more than two hours long. I’d spend it in the back of a Zeekr 009, a van I’ve driven on a track in the U.S. I knew it was a fast van that cornered surprisingly flat, but that’s not really the use case of that vehicle.

The 009 is part of a luxury MPV (minivan) segment that essentially only exists in Asia, and arguably has been perfected by China. Instead of Cadillac Escalades or Lincoln Navigators, black car operators use vehicles like the Buick GL8, Toyota Alphard, Denza D9, Voyah Dreamer, or the Zeekr 009.

And in context, the Zeekr 009 felt so at home. It’s not a cheap van. I’d reckon that the one I was in was well north of $80,000, but the 009 felt so much more mature than the last Escalade or Navigator for-hire car that would have been roughly the same price. It was more than just the ambiance of the 009’s interior, with its tiger wood trim, full Alcantara headliner, real metal finishes brightwork and finishes in the interior, or first-class airline-style middle captain’s chairs that both cooled and massaged me, lulling me to sleep before I knew what happened next. The 009 felt like a low-slung Rolls-Royce with sliding doors, so I understood why it was such a popular option for Chinese businessmen.

The visitors' center at its headquarters had examples of its latest models. Some of them were premium models from Zeekr and Lynk & Co, meant to battle brands like Acura or Audi.

Others were more mainstream, like Geely’s Galaxy subbrand, meant for middle-income value-conscious Chinese buyers, or potentially to be rebadged as Protons in places like Malaysia. 

No matter the price point, they all felt incredibly convincing. They’re high-tech, well-executed machines in ways I hadn’t experienced from European or American manufacturers.

For example, take the Honda Accord-sized (and similarly priced) Geely Galaxy E8. Fully electric and on the same SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture) platform as some Polestar models, the E8’s interior comes standard with a full-width 4K OLED display that serves as a central hub for all of the car’s functions. True, there are plenty of concerns that could be leveled at the E8 for its screen-only interface, but that does this screen a disservice. 

Using it is akin to staring at a TV screen or a high-quality gaming monitor. The interface feels like it’s done with intentionality and care; important details like speed gear position are easily seen, whereas the HVAC and stereo controls are easily at hand and not buried in acres of menus. The screen itself is incredibly responsive, matching the inputs with as little latency as a high-end smartphone.

On the screen, an animation of the car sits in the midst of an ocean, overlooking a mountain range; It’s bright, it’s pretty, and it feels as if Galaxy E8’s interior is more like a remodeled living room, rather than the front seat of a car. 

I was impressed. But when I got to the auto show, I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet. 

The Beijing Auto Show is A Tour De Force Thankfully, Beijing’s more than 700 miles from the balmy Shangai-Hangzhou area, and further inland location made for a comparatively cooler time. Unfortunately, Beijing's traffic was infinitely worse than Shanghai’s. Despite leaving the hotel at 8:30 a.m., it took us more than an hour and a half to drive just nine miles to the New China International Expo Center.

The show itself was packed, incomparable to the ghost-town auto shows back home during their press preview days. Everywhere I looked, there were people: influencers, Chinese media, international media. Clearly, China missed the memo that these events are dead.

I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.

In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying. There were hundreds of models on the floor from dozens of brands, most of them just as compelling as what I had seen the day before from Geely. 

Most brands had doors that closed with a solid thunk, with soft-touch materials in the correct places, when appropriate to the vehicle’s price point. And no matter the price point, they all had responsive, integrated vehicle interfaces that were quick, pretty, and ubiquitous.

A basic infotainment system in any given moderately priced Chinese EV beats the brakes off some systems in cars that cost six figures.

There are reasons for that, but namely, Chinese EVs are so good now—as is much of its urban infrastructure—that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.

Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.

Of course, China has a lot of EV brands. Probably too many EV brands. But some of those brands are entanglements between China’s automakers and its tech companies.

Take JiYue, a combination of Geely and Baidu, a company often dubbed China’s Google. Its connected services and vision-only self-driving has a Full Self-Driving style car on the road, while Tesla waits to jump in. Or IM Motors, a premium brand that’s a result of a tie-up with SAIC and e-commerce giant Alibaba. 

Then there’s the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, a collaboration between BAIC, Chery (aka Luxeed), Aito, and Changan, and smartphone and tech giant Huawei. The latter can either help design and market the cars themselves or add full-stack in-car solutions for a vehicle’s infotainment car architecture, all using the same Harmony OS that Huawei uses on its smartphones.

And of course, there’s Xiaomi, a phone manufacturer that decided to design and manufacture its own car. Unlike Apple, Xiaomi actually pulled this off, and the end product is so advanced it’s made headlines all over the world. 

Whatever the flavor, these models are superconnected, full of high-end processors and tech meant to woo discerning Chinese buyers. 

Just from what I saw, I understood why there were so many people at the Chinese domestic brands. Li Auto’s booth had a consistent queue to view L6 compact PHEV crossover, released at the show.

Even its current production models, like the L9 and Mega MPV, had lines of Chinese and International Media poking and prodding the cars. Changan’s Ford Maverick-sized convertible coupe SUV with a bed stayed swarmed the entire show. Xiaomi’s SU7 had a two-hour wait. Some international journalists gave up and stopped trying to see the car.

Western brands didn’t enjoy that fervor, though. 

Nobody Cares About Western Brands in China All of the press conferences for the model debuts were in Chinese, and I didn’t always have a translator or interpreter at hand. When I could, I wandered around, looking to see what else I could learn while in China. 

The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care. 

Same story with the other Asian brands. Mazda's latest model, EZ-6 (which isn’t really even a Mazda, but a restyled Changan Deepal SL03), had some of the usual influencers and journalists shooting quick walkaround content for their channels, but after that died down, most moved on to something else. Ditto for Toyota’s bZ3x and bZ3c near-production models.

“Chinese people don’t really care about concepts here,” Will Sundin of the China Driven internet show told me.  “They want something they can buy and drive right away.” As we walked around, he elaborated on why Western manufacturers were losing so much ground in China. Sundin blamed it partially on Western brands' inability to electrify quickly while offering low-quality software and mediocre value in their products. 

Chevrolet showed off the same Equinox EV preproduction prototypes it had at the LA Auto Show in 2022. Both were locked and unavailable for in-depth viewing by the general public until a third unit showed up the next day of the show.

Also, the Equinox EV is still not on sale. By comparison, Li Auto’s L6 was available for viewing and purchase at Li Auto storefronts before the car’s official reveal at the Beijing Auto Show. Li Auto says it has 40,000 orders for the PHEV.

Why isn’t the Equinox EV on sale?

We explored the expo center more, but eventually made our way back to the Buick stand. I plopped down in the front seat of the Buick Velite 6, the electric wagon I had seen everywhere in Shanghai. I’d find out later from four different on-the-ground sources, including Sundin, that the Velite 6 is highly discounted and sold en masse to Chinese rideshare drivers.

It is a car that sells in numbers heavily to fleets because it is cheap and available, and less because it is desirable—not great for a brand that wants to retain its market share and raise its transaction prices. 

Within five seconds of sitting behind the wheel of the Velite 6, I understood why. Sundin picked up on my disappointment.

“It’s a bit shit, innit?” he said. He was right. I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing. The Velite 6 felt like an electric version of a generation-old Chevy Malibu.

The delta of quality, connectedness, and value between the Velite 6 and any of the equivalent of the mid-tier Chinese EV vehicles I had experienced that day, was startling. By comparison, the Velite 6’s small screens and grey plastic interior were downright depressing to the full-width, super brilliant screens in any given Chinese EV.

The GM Ultium-based Buick Electra E4 was a slight step in the right direction, but generally nowhere near as nice as the Chinese premium brands it meant to go head to head with. It seems like GM understands this since it cut the Chinese pricing of the Electra E4 twice, well before any price war kicked off. 

“Well, at least you guys in the States will get some new PHEV stuff, like the new Buick GL8 van, right?” Sundin said.

“No, actually we don’t get any GM PHEV models in the United States," I told him. "Only a few GM Ultium-based EVs and they’re not doing all that well."

I was embarrassed. Here I was in China, trying to empathize with Western brands, thinking they were being pushed out of China due to politics and things that were no fault of their own.

In reality, it felt like it was the late 1980s again, when American manufacturers felt like they could sell whatever underdeveloped models its accounting department had cooked up to the public, and we’d just have to deal with it. Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.

Writer and podcaster Ed Zitron said something interesting during an episode of his podcast, Better Offline. Americans are almost made to apologize for their preferences when it comes to Big Tech. Some bigwig or boisterous startup guy had a big idea for a widget that no one wanted, and decided to half-ass a product that doesn’t work all that well.

When the public rightfully ignores a bad or unwanted product, there’s a new trend in tech to blame the clientele for not being smart enough, rather than facing the music that what was created just wasn’t all that good. I mean, just look at all the terrible AI-based pins that don’t do anything. 

The auto industry feels the same way. Instead of automakers attempting to understand and meet the needs of the Chinese market, they’d rather just sell the cars they wanted to make. By comparison, Chinese automakers seemed to have tried harder to understand the desires of Chinese people. 

Chinese buyers wanted connected cars with big screens, and by god, the automakers figured out a way to get that in there, and how to do it well. 

All We Do Is Complain While China Advances America’s looming TikTok ban feels like a direct allegory for China’s relationship with its electric car exports. I use TikTok; I understand how it works, and I agree that there are plenty of valid critiques to be leveled at the platform’s ability to spread misinformation, or how its endless scroll probably isn’t great for anyone’s mental health, especially that of the teens and tweens who love the platform so much. 

Yet, so much of the coverage of TikTok’s ban refuses to acknowledge one fact: The platform is really, really well executed. TikTok’s algorithm is fantastic; it can compile a near-endless scroll of content that feels fresh, positive, fun and eerily, directly targeted to you. I’ve watched the viral power of TikTok straight up create music artists like PinkPantheress, or revive the career and launch classic artists like Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Kate Bush back onto the charts.

TikTok’s culture isn’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot healthier than whatever Meta, Google, and Twitter have created, where death by a thousand cuts of “enshittification” have made their services hostile and less useful to the end user. On Instagram Reels, the content moderation is so poor, that it’s not uncommon to see someone literally die on screen. 

So, when automakers, tech companies and regulators push back on China, the sentiments that they’re just protecting our market from unsafe or security-challenged products feel hollow. Instead, it feels like grandstanding, and a tacit admission that they have no intention of trying to do better.

Instead of competing, they’d rather just shut out competition entirely. The concerns about cybersecurity don’t address the elephant in the room here: Your product sucks, compared to what China is putting out now. It doesn’t go as far. It’s not as well-made. It’s not as nice. It’s not as connected. 

Western automakers aren’t entangled deeply with tech companies in ways that would serve the end user, Chinese or otherwise. They didn’t get way ahead of the curve to establish a battery supply chain in the ways China did. And they don’t seem to want to cater to the Chinese market (or any market, rather) through continuous updates and agility with their product line. 

Even Tesla in China can’t be bothered to update one of its most important products, the Model Y, in this hyper-competitive market. Instead, it relies on margin-hurting gimmicks to move units, like constant price cuts, subsidized trade-in incentives, and 0% financing to get customers to buy a car that is aged and now uncompetitive.

Tesla didn’t even have a presence at the Beijing Auto Show. Elon Musk came and went to Beijing during the show, only to make a case for his robotaxi pivot with government officials. It’s like he’s already given up on cars here. 

Volkswagen placed its ID cars on the market, then acted surprised when journalists and buyers alike rightfully criticized its poor software interface. Nissan at one point sold nearly as many gas-powered Sylphy (Sentra) sedans in China as Tesla did Model Y crossovers. Yet when it came time to electrify, it stuck a Sylphy body on top of the already outmoded 38 kWh Nissan Leaf running gear. It wasn’t great at charging, had limited range, and was pricey.

GM blew it here too. Up until the Beijing Auto Show's debut of a PHEV version, the GL8 was one of the few vans in the segment without any plug-in capabilities. Green-plated New Energy vehicles are an important market in China, as are luxury vans. Why weren’t Western automakers paying attention? Why didn’t GM get an electrified vehicle on sale faster?

So at what point does blame shift from Chinese economic policy to the actions of the automakers themselves? How relevant, truly, are claims that China is “unfairly” subsidizing its EV industry to Western automakers completely misjudging the Chinese market, and low-key failing to craft products that Chinese buyers actually wanted? Why did they get so arrogant that they assumed China would buy their budget Peugeots, Citroens, Chevrolets, and rewarmed Volkswagens and Buicks forever and ever? Why the hell didn’t we subsidize our EV-building and clean energy industries like China did? 

I’m not going to lie and say that the Chinese underutilization of its EV factories isn’t a problem, or that this isn’t an oversaturated car market that not all of these brands will survive. Of course, there are plenty of concerns around China’s poor human rights track record and the dubious sourcing of some of its raw materials; both Chinese domestic and foreign brands are criticized for this. 

Also, as impressive as the Beijing Auto Show was, there was a slight air of desperation. Some of the smaller, more desperate brands I visited didn’t initially realize I was part of international media; looking for a win, they thought I was a potential distributor seeking to set up a contract to export vehicles to a country that wasn’t the U.S.

Some influencers that were not even remotely connected to the automotive industry were livestreaming and posting on Chinese social media about new car debuts, trying to bring a non-car-interested audience into the automotive realm. The once-banned “car babes” at Chinese auto shows have kind of crept back to the showroom floor, signaling a desire for attention and sales that they might not be getting. 

And yet, those issues feel secondary. If China were to somehow rectify its production overcapacity issues, and acquiesce to every demand that Europe and the U.S. have of its EV sector, China would still have technologically advanced, well-made, interesting EVs. Arguably, it would still come out leaner and stronger.

If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.

I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. We’re cooked.

Contact the author: kevin.williams@insideevs.com

Us ambassador on Indian purchase of Russian oil

'India brought Russian oil, because we wanted somebody to buy...': US Ambassador Eric Garcetti

Updated May 12, 2024, 4:32 PM IST

Garcetti also highlighted that due to this arrangement global oil prices didn't shoot up and "India delivered on that." US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti admitted that India brought Russian oil because the US wanted somebody to buy Russian oil. "The US allowed the purchase to take place to ensure the prices did not go up globally," he added.

Garcetti was speaking at the Conference on Diversity in International Affairs organised by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington earlier this week.

The US ambassador was speaking on the subject of the evolving nature of US-India relations and 'small victories' achieved in the context of Russia-China influence in the region.  

Garcetti also highlighted that due to this arrangement global oil prices didn't shoot up and "India delivered on that."

"During G20, they were able to take Russia to the side on the matter of the statement on Ukraine, which was critical of Russia. So, they were able to deliver Russia, we were able to deliver Europe, and that boxed in China," he said. "It showed the success of the multiplicative nature of this relationship... it's a very loyal relationship."

India's purchase of Russian oil

India emerged as one of the top buyers of Russian sea-borne oil since Western nations imposed sanctions and halted purchases in response to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The United States has not asked India to cut Russian oil imports as the goal of sanctions and the G7-imposed $60 per barrel price cap is to have stable global oil supplies while hitting Moscow's revenue, Reuters reported.

"It is important to us to keep the oil supply on the market. But what we want to do is limit Putin's profit from it," Eric Van Nostrand, who is performing the duties of US Treasury assistant secretary for economic policy, told Reuters referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The price cap imposed by the Group of Seven (G7) wealthy nations, the European Union and Australia ban the use of Western maritime services such as insurance, and flagging the transportation when tankers carry Russian oil priced at or above $60 a barrel. In February, the US imposed sanctions on Russia's leading tanker group, Sovcomflot, which it accused of being involved in violating the G7's price cap on Russian oil, as well as 14 crude oil tankers tied to Sovcomflot. The sanctions marked the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and in retaliation for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Indian oil refineries have stopped accepting Russian crude oil delivered by tankers operated by Sovcomflot — Russia’s largest commercial shipping company that has been sanctioned by the US —Bloomberg reported, potentially dealing a blow to Moscow’s economy as India is one of the largest importers of its fossil fuels since the start of the Ukraine war, Bloomberg had reported earlier this year.