Category Archives: Reflections

News Comments, Reflections

“Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity”

By a vote of 2,895 to 0 (with one abstention), China’s rubber-stamp legislature near-unanimously approved sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s electoral process, ensuring that candidates will be “patriots only” per Beijing’s requirement. Concurrently, 47 politicians and activists in Hong Kong were charged with “subversion,” kept in custody pending trial. The message that the PRC is sending to Taiwan could not be clearer: Do not expect your political system to be honored and/or allowed to co-exist should any deal be struck between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.

On a related note, Admiral Philip S. Davidson, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently said that China might be capable of forcing a “reunification” with Taiwan within the next six years, as part of Beijing’s ambition to supplant the U.S. in geopolitical matters in the Western Pacific area. Indeed, “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降) has become a familiar refrain for Chinese officials and state-controlled media outlets as they declared “victory” over COVID-19 and mocked the chaotic responses in the West—in particular, the U.S.—apparently with some “China experts” going along the same line, as I have documented here.

However, Admiral Davidson did not mention that the PLA, while seemingly impressive on the outside, is largely untried in real battles. This, together with the clandestine nature of the PRC’s political and military systems, makes it even harder for both the decision-makers within the PLA and the outside world to evaluate its strengths and conditions (same for other complex issues such as China’s economic growth or its handling of COVID-19 beyond the party line/propaganda). While I predicted last year that the India-China border tension would escalate to one of explicit armed conflict and casualties—which unfortunately turned out to be true just a few days after I posted my thoughts—the melee that actually ensued revealed little information about what would happen should armed clashes break out between the PLA and the Taiwanese armed forces.

China’s obsession with “sovereignty and territorial integrity” (主权和领土完整) has always been part of the core of its authoritarian ethnonationalism (the other part appears to be the “Chinese/Han race”), as is reflected in its “patriotic education” to the point where certain words and phrases such as “separatism” (分裂/分离主义) and “Taiwan independence” (台独) can stimulate strong emotions of contempt and hatred in an average school child. This, in turn, has prevented the average Chinese from ever thinking about these issues because the fear of themselves being associated with a (real or imagined) “separatist” or “Taiwan independence advocate” is so strong that they risk being crushed by the society they live in.

Absent credible external deterrence, taking bold action on Taiwan might just be a good way for the CCP leadership to galvanize nationalist support and deflect attention from increasingly thorny domestic challenges.

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Reflections

“Competent Pandemic Policy”

I cannot entirely agree with the take of some “China experts” on the so-called “competent pandemic policy.” Such a narrative precisely fits in with the CCP leadership’s wishes (正中下怀), but it is not logically sound.

The main issue is that there are uncontrolled covariates when comparing outcomes across countries.

Another source of selection bias is related to testing.

To be clear, by no means am I blindly defending the Trump administration’s poor COVID-19 response, but I believe many popular narratives are dead wrong if one cares to dig a little deeper into the data.

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News Comments, Reflections

New Wine in Old Bottles

James Traub at Foreign Policy recently wrote an article on America no longer being free. This has prompted some in the China watcher community to wonder whether the U.S., both as a polity and a dominant builder of international order, is losing its attractiveness for others to follow and whether the status quo would help promote China.

Here is my take on these issues, together with some theorizing and a small prediction.

Re: Is the U.S. model no longer attractive? Will the China model become more attractive?

Other than some first-generation Chinese immigrants, very few people in the developed world would find the China model an attractive alternative even if the current ruling values in America completely collapse.

On top of that, the “U.S. model” is continually evolving. If “Western” values à la traditional European Enlightenment no longer support American primacy, I cannot think of why something else will not come out to serve that purpose better.

Just to be clear, that “something else” re America’s future on the world stage can come within the liberal idea. It may well be the case that it addresses the limits and shortcomings associated with traditional European liberalism.

Re: Why do many Chinese people living in the West oppose the idea of having liberal democracy in China, even if they themselves have seen firsthand how democracy works and chosen to stay in it?

There are certain knee-jerk reactions to those growing up in mainland China when it comes to the “motherland” (祖国). Think, for instance, of their often subliminal feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem associated with “guochi” (国耻, ethnic-national shame in connection with the Middle Country/Qing Dynasty’s downfall when confronted by Western powers in the 19th century), or of their attitude toward separatism in Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and most recently, Hong Kong.

The CCP has successfully exploited these narratives (e.g., using meticulously designed propaganda and “patriotic education”) to shore up its legitimacy. And together with China’s information decoupling (e.g., WeChat and Weibo accounts catering to overseas Chinese students, most of whom do not read from local sources), the majority of Chinese cannot recognize how subconsciously they are under the influence.

Such ideas as “democracy is too risky” and “the Chinese people are not ready for democracy” are also among those pumped into their heads. As a result, liberal values that are learned even after moving to the West cannot easily override these conditioned responses from their younger selves’ own experience. Many observers have noted that even reasonable Chinese people would suddenly become irrational when certain buttons are pushed.

Re: Various forms of democracy exist—even between the U.S. and the U.K., there are many differences in their respective systems. China should have a democratic system that is different from the rest of the world.

“Democracy,” “freedom,” “equality of rights,” “liberty,” … one can call it whatever they like. But to quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.”

Sure, for the U.S. (presidential), U.K. (Westminster), France (semi-presidential), or a presumably genuinely democratic system in a future China, each can have vastly different arrangements on the cultural, social normative, and political functional levels. But what I see is that all are founded on the same type of liberal social contract and source of political truth (i.e., clashes of varied ideas, as reflected in votes, protests, and political debates), whose origins can be traced back to the works of Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau—regardless of whether a theory of “natural rights” is invoked.

In contrast, the “democracy with Chinese characteristics” system under the CCP is a completely different animal, and it is not compatible with the above.

That being said, unless there is some serious structural change on the societal level—something on the scale of a civil war or a revolution—it seems unlikely to me that China would transition to a genuinely democratic system in the foreseeable future.

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Reflections

Pretending to Be Asleep

Cross-posted on Quora under the question “What can non-Chinese do to convince the Chinese that they are being oppressed?”

I do not think non-Chinese people should do anything. There is a popular saying in China: you cannot wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep (你叫不醒一个装睡的人). I believe this is a proper description of what is going on today with many Chinese people.

The recent emergence of a flurry of overseas Chinese who have grown up in mainland China and who continue to show unwavering, sometimes unconditional support for the CCP-ruled “motherland” (祖国) after they have moved abroad, often accompanied by zero tolerance for any (imagined or real) “criticism/insult against China” (辱华), has provided a good opportunity for the world to see how some Chinese people are pretending to be asleep, even if they are no longer obliged to do so. I would refer to Chris Wang’s answer under this same thread for a plausibly representative perspective from the said group. But before I give my two cents on the issue, I would commend Chris Wang for pointing out that, whether a person grows up under the CCP rule or in the West, they are very much likely to be brainwashed either way.

However, the crux of the matter is, how many types of brainwashing can there be?

For those growing up under the CCP rule (like myself), there is basically only one type of brainwashing, i.e. listening to the Party. This includes explicit propagandas, censorship/eradication of unwanted voices offline and online, patriotic/nationalistic education that is mandatory for school children, etc. Even if a member from this group has physically relocated to another country, the knee-jerk responses from their younger selves’ experience still strongly resemble an integral part of their way of life (political or otherwise).

Now compare that to those growing up in an environment where there are numerous channels and countless ways of brainwashing, including, but not limited to, the press (say, the New York Times, which, by the way, is a profit-making business whose stock price has gone up almost 200% in the past three years), social media, Wikipedia, Q&A platforms such as Quora, this Chinese-politics-related Quora question, the many (oft-opposing) answers people have submitted under this question, the comments on the answers, the comments on the comments, and so on—all of which are freely available on the internet. And if you go into the streets, parks, and sidewalks during a protest, you might see more eye-widening or even repugnant brainwashing ideas. Sure, these brainwashing ideas are not equally distributed, but the possibilities are endless, and vastly different brainwashing ideas do have a fair chance to compete against each other, at least in theory.

So why do some overseas Chinese people like Chris Wang still feel oppressed, provided that more is better when it comes to brainwashing? I believe this lies in the fact that unlike what they were accustomed to back where they grew up, they have now realized that in the West it is not at all easy to brainwash another person using only one type of brainwashing technique—which they themselves acquired from being brainwashed as they grew up—no matter how well the people in the “motherland” have responded.

Hence the feeling of powerlessness.

But remember, even when they are showing such grievances against the “other,” those overseas Chinese are not forced to shut up by any authority. Indeed, when they freely express their opinions which their Western neighbors, police officers, mayors, and prime ministers might not like, they are completely aware that they can do this precisely because whatever they say there will be relatively minor if any real oppression—with the only exception being “bad-mouthing China,” possibly because “it is my motherland,” or more likely because “my current/future business is there.”

While few of them would openly acknowledge this “I can say whatever I want to say” privilege, they nevertheless take it for granted when they vent their anger on Facebook, Twitter, and Quora, as well as when they march through the streets carrying the Five-starred Red Flag, knowing from the bottom of their hearts that none of these is feasible today where they grew up. Moreover, here they are given a full opportunity to brainwash the “other” using their very own, albeit limited, argument (or name-calling, for better or for worse), which is impossible for the “other” to do in the same way in China without some serious repercussions.

So you think they need to wake up? They have been awake since the very beginning.

A question remains to be answered: for those overseas Chinese who claim that they truly feel oppressed by the non-Chinese actors in their diasporas (the press, the government, the “other” people, etc.) but not their own government and people back in China, if they are reasonable, consistent, and honest to themselves, then why don’t they simply refrain from publicly expressing their complaints—just like what they would self-consciously do towards their “less oppressive motherland”—and go back to China for an ostensibly better future?

I bet many of them know exactly why they are not doing it.

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Mathematics, Reflections

On Kant and Mathematics

Cross-posted on Quora under the question “Did Kant make a mistake when he said that mathematics is synthetic and a priori?”

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously claimed in his Critique of Pure Reason that mathematics contains a body of knowledge that is synthetic a priori. I believe this claim is wrong, and here is why.

First, it seems obvious to me that there is some mathematics involved in our everyday interaction with the physical world. Yet, to say that such mathematics is a priori and true becomes questionable as soon as we look more closely into how human brains “think” mathematics.

From an evolutionary biology and cognitive science perspective, our brains can “think” everyday mathematics mainly because:

  1. Natural selection has preserved such hunting-and-gathering-related capacities as perceiving, abstracting, classifying, and grouping objects, which is coded in our genes and expressed as part of the biological development of our brains;
  2. Through subjective experience in the real world, especially during early childhood, our brains have acquired stereotyped “principles” and “rules” in relation to objects and their mathematical properties, which are operationalized by physical/chemical reactions among neurons under specific arrangements/relations/patterns in our brains.

Now, to evaluate the claim that mathematics is synthetic a priori, we may need to review the particular definition of the term that Kant used. According to Wikipedia (Analytic–synthetic distinction):

In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contrasts his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions with another distinction, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori propositions. He defines these terms as follows:

a priori proposition: a proposition whose justification does not rely upon experience. Moreover, the proposition can be validated by experience, but is not grounded in experience. Therefore, it is logically necessary.

…

So basically an a priori mathematical proposition is justifiable independently of any experience whatsoever. For instance, and I follow Kant’s famous example, one can see that 5 + 7 = 12 is “true” by merely thinking about it, without referencing any experience such as 5 apples, 7 apples, 12 apples, and so on.

However, when we take the human brain’s inner workings into account, the fact that you know 5 + 7 = 12 is “true” by merely thinking about it actually involves the firing of neurons whose arrangements/relations/patterns have all been determined by the previous physical and experiential processes as I have described above. There is absolutely no guarantee that these processes will lead to truth. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that to the type of mathematics involved in the quantum world, the commutative law of multiplication (i.e., a × b = b × a) that we take for granted does not apply. There really is no a priori truth other than what you believe to be true mostly because of your heuristic experience with the world, which has been embedded in your thinking apparatus when you make the calculation.

To an outsider who can observe your neural activities, this whole “I know 5 + 7 = 12 by merely thinking about it” magic is no more different, in principle, than a mechanical Turing machine manipulating symbols on a strip of tape according to a predetermined table of rules, which will unmistakably give the result “5 + 7 = 12” (in its binary form) if requested. But there is nothing that prevents the rules from changing so that something like “5 + 7 = 21” becomes the result. And that is exactly why mathematics can be done analytically.

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