READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西)
Interactional Fields 互動領域
Posted February 28, 2022
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Marshall McLuhan
(1953)
The area of spatial communication is that of politics, business and power. Time is the sphere of language and knowledge. Equilibrium between these interests means social viability. Divorce between them is the breakdown of communication – the jamming of the social network.
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Zhu Xi
(d. 1200 CE)
In all things allow spare ground. Having obtained the objective, don’t go further.
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UKRAINE CRISIS
Aljazeera Media Network, 24 Feb 2022
Russia has launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine by land, air and sea, the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War II and confirmation of the worst fears of the West.
The attacks began on Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a television address that he had approved a “special military operation” to protect people, including Russian citizens who had been subject to “genocide” in Ukraine, an accusation the West has long described as absurd propaganda.
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Nam June Paik, ‘But Then I Thought: Actually “Zen” Is Boring Too.’ Exhibition announcement card – with video image of the artist. ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1972.
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The deepest truth lies in the principle of identity. … The ignorant and the enlightened are of one essence – they are not really to be separated.
— Hui-k’o (d. 593 CE) … Second Patriarch of Zen Buddhism
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China’s Xi speaks to Putin; calls for ‘negotiation‘ with Ukraine
Al Jazeera News Agency, 25 Feb 2022
China’s President Xi Jinping (in a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin) said he supported solving the Ukraine crisis through talks, after Moscow launched an invasion of its neighbour.
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Beijing has trod a cautious diplomatic line on the crisis and refused to call it an “invasion” or condemn the actions of Russia, its close ally.
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Ukraine crisis to test Japan’s democratic principles
Aljazeera News Network, Feb 25, 2022
Tokyo — For Japan with long-standing disputes over Russian-held Islands, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday is an occasion testing the rule of law, foreign policy experts say.
The situation surrounding Ukraine has a massive implication on the Indo-Pacific region; they say, adding that China’s military assertiveness, especially against Taiwan, would possibly further grow if Japan sets a bad precedent of showing a tolerance to altering the status quo by force.
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Other than Taiwan … India is also presumably watching the situation in Ukraine as its own.
Relations between India and China have been strained, particularly since their troops clashed in a disputed Himalayan border area in June 2020 and Indian troops were killed by Chinese troops for the first time in about 45 years.
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Cognitive Distortion
Mokurai
(2018)
The only way to discuss
the social evil is to get
at once to the social ideal.
— G.K. Chesterton
Flaunting the role of sudden
madness (a moving fantasy
designed for no purpose but
to amuse the eye at the back
of some deeply sullen pretext)
future sincerity of sentiment
(swept by a single shuddering
movement—when turned upside
down) remains unutterable in
the scattered (unmentionable)
concentration of mental faculties
that functions to disassemble both
the self-styled ‘locus lucis’ of
hide-out (hideaway) imposture and
its fitful (if forgettable) simulations.
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Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world and that will usher in the dawn.
— Emma Goldman (1910)
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WHY THE CHINESE INVASION
Li Yuan
Feb. 27, 2022
If President V. Putin is looking for international support, he can turn to the Chinese Internet.
Its supporters have called him “Putin the Great,” “the best legacy of the former Soviet Union” and “the greatest strategist of this century.” They have chastised Russians who protested against the War, saying they had been brainwashed by the United States.
. . .
Mr. Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a victim of the West’s political, ideological and military aggression has resonated deeply, with many on social media. It dovetails with China’s rise and the alternative world order it could create.
For its part, the Chinese government, Russia’s most powerful partner, has been circumspect. Officials have declined to call Russia’s invasion an invasion, nor have they condemned it. But they have not endorsed it either.
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Memo to CAUSA
25 May 2020
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from Terence Russell, Senior Scholar,
Asian Studies Centre, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
After reading Crawford Kilian’s article, “Canada and China: Can this Relationship Be Saved” (The Tyee online edition, May 21, 2020), I cannot but give a robust thumbs up to the author’s suggestion that we charge our “highly educated and very intelligent” foreign service personnel, a class with whom he apparently feels great intellectual symmetry, with the task of finding ways to “co-operate to build a world that’s in all our long-term interests” in conversation with their Chinese counterparts. However, when it comes to the principles that Mr. Kilian would have our diplomats follow as they walk down the road towards “stability and prosperity,” arm in arm with representatives of the Chinese CommunistParty, I find myself scratching my head.
Having dismissed both realpolitik and values diplomacy as the product of “bullshit artists,” he appears to plant the feet of his sharp-witted foreign service persona directly in the deepest manure by suggesting that the best way forward is to forget about the “scores of millions of
Chinese” who have died under Chinese Communist Party oppression, and “go easy on behaviour that pisses the other country’s public off.” In other words, there would be mutual agreement not to comment on certain areas of past history, or current events like the cultural genocide against Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian peoples, or the systematical rounding up and imprisonment of dissidents. Apparently Mr. Kilian feels that if we are to work out a mutually beneficial bilateral relationship for the future, no good can come of dwelling on those “transient problems.” Such a line of argument strikes me as about as realpolitik as realpolitik gets. It is a line of thinking that runs exactly parallel to the realpolitik diplomacy that saw Stalin welcomed as an ally against the Nazis in the Second World War, diplomacy upon which Mr. Kilian piles scorn.
In the end, as Mr. Kilian leaves us waiting upon a Chinese response to the appeal for co-operation, we must consider what the end product of such co-operation would look like. What does “a China with Chinese characteristics, a Canada with Canadian characteristics…” imply? Unfortunately, it appears that in Mr. Kilian’s realpolitik world the future of China’s long-suffering masses is to be decided solely by the persistently brutal and oppressive Chinese Communist Party. Any values-based intervention by other nations would be abandoned in the name of creating a civilization in which we all enjoy stability and prosperity. In such a scenario, the Chinese Communist Party élite and their clients would most certainly continue to live the charmed, affluent lives to which they are accustomed. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs would remain captive in the “thought-reform” gulag; thousands of human rights dissenters and members of disapproved religions would remain heavily surveilled, imprisoned, and subject to murder by vital organ harvesting; and the millions of migrant workers who produce the wealth that the upper classes rely upon would remain poor, exploited and politically voiceless. But perhaps for Canadians that is just none of our business. Life would be so much easier if it were not.
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CAUSA CONNECTIVITY 