READING (EAST/WEST) 閱讀 （東/西）
IN-FINITY/無-限
Posted May 25, 2020
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QUESTION AND ANSWER
ON THE MOUNTAIN
Li Bai
(d. 762 CE)
You ask for what reason I stay on
the green mountain,
I smile, but do not answer, my
heart is at leisure.
Peach blossom is carried off by
flowing water,
Apart, I have heaven and earth
in the human world.
– Li Bai (d. 762 CE)
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BILL BISSETT
(2020)
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THE BAMBOO BY LI-CH’E YUN’S WINDOW
Po Chu-i
(772-846)
Don’t cut it to make a flute.
Don’t trim it for a fishing
Pole. When the grass and flowers
Are all gone, it will be beautiful
Under the falling snowflakes.
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Is there such a thing as human nature? Of course there is. But there is only human nature in the concrete, no human nature in the abstract.
— Mao Zedong (1942)
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MEMO to CAUSA
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 Communist Party, 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 (and Tibetan and Mongolian) peoples, or the systematic 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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Long March 5B Rocket – taking off from the Wencheng launch site, southern China – May 5, 2020.
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Agence France-Presse:
China has successfully launched a new rocket and prototype spacecraft [5 May 2020], according to state media, in a major test of its ambitions to operate a space station and send astronauts to the moon.
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The next big mission for Beijing is to land a probe on Mars, with lift-off expected this year.
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CAUSA CONNECTIVITY 