It has long ceased to surprise many that poverty and pressure shortens life expectancy, and this strengthens people tolerance, if not frozens their sympathy into indifference to a matter of life and death as such. A tightening budget usually accompanies a loosening belt. Obesity is prevalent to the bottom of the society. A light purse comes long working hours and invites little sleep. All these symptoms as well as side-effect of poverty, ignored by the government and general public, are palpably riddled in many aspects of our daily life. Given the fact that my mom still works as a waitress in a Shanghai restaurant around the clock to for little more than the minimum wage, plus a two month holiday living at my tiny ripped room yearly, I am still, fortunately and regularly alarmed by how 60% of the Hong Kongers actually live. Not that I am rich now, but I am only free of the cage only at the tremendous expense of my mom and dad. And this is a good reminder and contrast to living in a bubble and mingling with blue-blood who takes elitist education and many other luxury for granted. 

Even one has a shelter (like a public estate in which I has been living since birth) in Hong Kong, which is an enviable luxury now, it is not that promising when it comes to health . It is quite complacently true that I have never encounter any rats yet and the frequency of cockcockes self-inviting themselves into my kitchen is still way less than Indian slums. To a flat that is directly opposite to two tall garbage bins, hygiene was maintained by daily meticulous clean-up (Thanks, dad and mom.) and so it has not been that bad. But what more invidious is the invisible second-handed smoke that wafts from my close neighbour and fill my lung. There is very little I can do.

Desmond did quite well tonight in learning a vocabulary table tonight, to the delight of me and Dad. We have finally made some progress after months. I hope a minor success tonight will repose more confidence in him, of which he has none, and to to whom is most important at the moment. 

In many ways I think Desmond is a better person than I am. He is more generous, selfless, and caring about his families. But he has also been a victim of my mom manifest preference to me since boyhood. He has handled it quite well but fails to hide his disappointment sometimes. 

Dad is grateful for my decision I can tell, I should say in what he will call a sacrifice, was beyond his expectation. Anyway I only have one brother in my life. Fate wills us to meet. I cherish such chance, and only see it as a fortune to have a brother of such great character. 

My academic work has long been put side since I left Adelaide. I have not read much for the past two weeks. Only Elie Wiesel "Night" and a few speeches. Having just started the Alain de Botton "essays in love", a light-hearted collection of prose revolving around his philosophical thoughts and his personal amorous experience. It does not bring many ideas in a way we see the world. But the way he wrote was indeed interesting and deserved to be learnt from.  

Long Live The Emperor!

Things have gone quite terrific for Mr Xi Jinping, as well as the Chinese people since he came to be the ruler of 1.3 billion populations. The CC Government is so much cleaner and more efficient. His anti-corruption campaign won him rounds of applauses from village to the capital, with a recent example of rounding up a Tiger Zhou Yongkong. The Chinese’s economy stays on prosperity – its booming prosperity enable more Chinese, than at any point in history, to afford a green card and immigrate to the US and other Western countries. Indeed a fine achievement as it is, serves conveniently as a beautiful echo to Mr Xi’s quote: “ In many ways the Chinese Dream is not different from the American one.” – most of the Americans prides themselves on their US passports, and so do the Chinese people. China has never been so stable and staunch before - Noises of demanding democracy in Hong Kong is stifled, and in the West, too. The whole world is desperate to do business with the Chinese. Money does not only talk, it also teaches one to talk properly. The “foreign devils” ’ve learnt some manners in the end to speak our language. The Opium humiliation is half-cleansed. They now know to stop using offensive language like human right, democracy, and freedom of speech to hurt a Chinese’s pride and feelings, but put on an ingratiating face like Mr. Cameron. Mr Xi’s remarkable leadership earned him an enviable title from the Time Magazine as “Emperor Xi.” Neither Mr Mugabe nor Mr Putin has such honour yet. The Chinese people have never had it so good. 

I feel compelled not be complacent about our great country achievement in spite of myself. China is still riddled with problems. Too many people are ungrateful for what they possess. Let’s take a recent example in Hong Kong. Few groups of students, who are no doubt the minority, has blocked the streets in the city’s financial hub since October to fright for democracy in a name of civil disobedience. This generation of young lads are greedy, and ungrateful. One has to put things into perspective: now young people have, food, shelter, iPhone, condoms, and facebook, something that their grandparents did not take it for granted. When they dear grandfather was still a virgin, he did not have anything as mentioned above but famine. It is good enough to have one stomach stuffed with food, but has one brain to stuff with democratic ideas, oversteps the mark. Also, a national uniqueness of the Chinese, is to be respected. Unlike many other countries, we are quite different. In light of Mrs Laura Cha, the HSBC director, and a senior advisor in the executive council to the city mayor, retorted this democracy nonsense incisively: even the black slaves took 107 years to get the vote in the States, why cannot the Chinese people wait a bit? We should welcome the great leap forward of an evolution from no election to a rig election. We should also celebrate that we are placed in a better footing than those unfortunate black slaves – there is neither slavery nor whipping in Hong Kong. Meantime one cannot stress enough upon how gracious and magnanimous Mr Xi has been to those students: it is reported that his emperorship is an avid reader, who is interested in the enlightenment philosophers’ works, such as Voltaire and Rousseau. He certainly did learn a history lesson in 1989 in Beijing, and applied the ideas of 1700s of Europe in 2014 Hong Kong. Instead of sending tanks to trample and soldiers to shoot down those obstinate Hong Kong students in the former British colony, whose insolent desire for democracy, Mr Xi prefers communication and diplomacy. A few patriotic thugs and gangsters bravely serve their countries: they were dispatched to reason with the students, with cleavers instead of guns. How lenient! Given such open-minded and liberal approach of Emperor Xi, as a patriotic Chinese I see little ground for being pessimistic about the middle kingdom’s future. We have a more civilized approach from a nation, which constantly boasts of its 5000 years brilliant civilization in the end. A lesson learnt from 1989.

The Chinese people are closer to the Chinese Dream than ever before under the new leadership of the blessed emperor. However, the harsh reality is that, we could only wish he was immortal on his throne. This worries me deeply. But from Stalin to Putin, the Russian proves a great tutor again. The Russian has just offered a potential solution of spreading the semen of their great Tsar, Mr. Putin, to preserve his eminent DNA in order to extend the greatness of Russia. Mr Xi should certainly take this into account. Whilst time is pressed, in the short run, Mr Xi’s daughter can come as an expedient, who directly profited the genius blood and went to Harvard, to come to inherit the family dynasty? Problem solved, Chinese dream continues, although the rumor has it that she was too attached to the America air to be back to her beloved country. It does take a bit of convincing and courage to take up the Chinese’s burden. But really I will not worry myself too much – it is said that there are many great brains among 1.3 billion. Since 1949, China has been a country producing strong leaders who make big decisions and are able to leave multiple lasting legacies. Mao’s the Great famine and Cultural Revolution. Dung the World Factory and cheap labour maker. Now we have Mr Xi, a fine maker of the Chinese Dream. Keep on dreaming and we have reason to hope for a better tomorrow.

We suffer all the same but the Past is still better?

Among few merits of taking a largely unplanned gap year is a freedom to choose to be exempt from current affairs, as a student major in International Relations. Keeping abreast of the news is a deeply depressing endurance of atrocity and absurdity that I have long stopped relishing. At first I fly into rage, at the appalling absurdity, and dreadful deeds practiced as a matter of course for many, and I learnt to rebuke and argue. It then steps into disgust beyond disguise, when there is readily a group of people trying to defend these behaviors with a catalogue of illogical gibberish, which can be seen as tasteless jokes at best, or backward inhumanity at worst. A mixture of disgust, and vestiges of anger, was finally grinded down into a complete disappointment and depression, when it is repeated like tide, coated with morality, and there is little you can do about it. And it becomes a disdainful silence. That accounts for my deliberate withdrawal from watching what is going on in the world, when I am allowed such liberty, especially with regard to my hometown. (Umbrella Movement.)

So I take refuge in the past – at least this year. Not that I wish to propose an idea that the past was better and people were happier, on the contrary, I believe that every generation and age has its own frustration in the face of different form of crisis. In Medieval Europe it would be hard to imagine that I could travel across continents in my life, let alone a much lower life expectancy. The pulse of my life would be dictated by harvest, plague and all sort of strange reasons inconceivable at present and insolvable in past. There is little ground to argue the past was better in terms of material, health and hygiene between the past and present. Leo Tolstoy, in his great work Anna Karenina, said that “there are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.” A continuity of human being and civilisation does rely hugely on such astonishing adaptability that serves as both blessings and curse. Human beings prove exceptionally tolerant under harsh, relentless situation, which serves as an obstacle of progress in many cases. If we can tolerate it, so be it, why change? As well as proving how insufferable lives have always been, Tolstoy’s telling quote also tells us our adaptability enables us to acquire happiness, outside of physical world. How much we possess is not the only force that determines how happy we are, neither nor how long we live, for it can be tedious and boring. It is also a matter of depth of life, and what we believe in. Life and happiness were discussed almost two thousand years ago by the Greeks, Chinese and other civilizations. In Iliad Achilles was faced two courses opened to him, either a long quiet life with little “glory” or an ephemeral life that marked his name in history. Confucius talks about the importance of practicing and clinging to virtues at the cost of life in a dilemma of moral crisis. These sages enrich the idea of what life and happiness is about, reminding us of an alternative yardstick of examining meaning of life.  It also reminds us of a perpetual situation of which we are plunged into, that we are forced to adapt and make difficult decisions as long as we breathe. We always suffer.

If the past and present are not necessarily better off or worse off on solely account of material progression, and people sufferings can be a matter of perception and self-perception, what is it that draws me to the past and makes me turn away from the present? People suffer in the past for all sorts of ridiculous reasons like us today, or many will argue that it was even worse. Sufferings wrench my heart, whenever and wherever they take place. Two things mark the differences between sufferings in the past and sufferings happening now. The past is handled logically, and tampered is with a consolatory chronological order with beginnings and endings. The present is messy and tumultuous. Secondly, reading the past I am an observant who shares little responsibility for what happened, whilst reading the news I am one of the many participants that is endowed with duty to shape our future.

I am sympathetic with the people sufferings in the past. The Russian Revolution was made up of heaps of skeletons, streams of blood and piles of corpse. I was working on this topic in my first year at St. Andrews, and I spent nights of research on such topic in the library to a point that I felt too depressed to continue. It was a pain of witnessing an unfortunate fall of the liberals and following ascendance of Lenin and Stalin, no doubt at the will of many Russian people, and at the expense of their lives too. I tried to extract and examine many strings of cold causation in that period, formed them into arguments, a process of extracting knowledge from it. Apart from this mechanical job, I seemed to hear voices of screaming and crying of those Russian people that night in the library, when I closed the book and put it aside. Pining so much hope on the promising future human beings, I cannot stress enough a power of imagination that enables to tolerate with so much misfortunates after repeated broken promises. Always hope for the better tomorrow, and it never comes. I have so much sympathy with them, but I am fortunate in one way that I was not one of them. I am only an observer that watches them with detachment. That is why I can endure reading the past. Whilst in looking at the news and present, I am one of the characters, no matter how trivial I am, in the tragedy that has been performing for thousands years.

Out Of Place

I awake to the launch of the civil disobedience in Hong Kong in the morning. 

This is almost my third week in Australia now. Similar to St Andrews, I am cushioned in a bubble. I relish a comfort of being financially secured, a relief from a necessity to internship or part time, and a liberty to travel around on shoestring budgets. However, what I enjoy most is an absence of internet that makes my life so reclusive. Australia, being one of the most developed countries on this planet, is appallingly undeveloped in internet. It takes me half-an hour by bus to a cafe in town to check email. Usually I cannot bother. Apart from skyping with my father, and maintaining necessary contact with a few friends, I fond of taking a refuge from the internet. 

An absence of internet gives me a blend of guilt and pleasure. I entered into a lethargy from tragedies, and self-deluded complacy of living in a small bubble. It pains me to see regular updates concerning how rampant lies and how impassive people act in Hong Kong, on facebook from a few of my socially active and politically conscious friends. I am also disgusted by the blatant audacity and lies pouring out of the mouth from many public figures and government officials whose salaries are paid by us. These people betray no shame when they bluster, as fig leaves are not even needed. Whilst they can take a deaf ear to voices of just and conscience, I feel there is very little I can do save switching off my laptop and TV since I realise I can hardly turn a blind eye to these repulsive acts without being helplessly furious. This, accounts for my cowardice and a corrupt pleasure of taking a haven from the troubled world, by sneaking from a world of lies, to a world of partial truth.  

Hong Kong, where the majority readily recognises the rule of lies, make me feel dishonest. Living abroad is not honest either, where comfort has an expiry date. I hate to turn my life, like many Chinese counterparts, into a set-out for obtaining a Western-country passport since I consider this unjust, nor do I want to live passively under lies, dishonesty, and corruption. The HKSAR passport carried in my pocket, it occurs to me, does not really represent me as I look at "PRC". I then question if that justifies me to secure a foreign citizenship, I have thus far failed to arrive a sufficiently staunch defence for such deed. The BNO, which I have not renewed since five years old, hardly has any national attachment to me either. Yet, to live and stay in a prison where I struggle to capture even a gleam of hope, and to endure the utmost indifference of the public toward injustice and lies, I feel tormented. To endure and embrace this truth is too painful, for it implies an self-imposed imprisonment of lies and dishonesty and inhumanity. To exile, it appears to me an equally painful option, for I resent being an outsider of witnessing a daily routines of tragedies of unjust. To make a difference, against the ever-rising authority and party machine of the CCP, that sounds worse than a slogon and soundbite from the Westminister elites. The authority is a collective, absorbing, and staunch power machine. To live with an harsh truth, one has to learn to dream, especially when nightmares take place under the broad daylight. I wish the civil disobedience participants, and Hong Kong well. 

Foreign Affairs - Size Doesn't Matter - Jeremy Shapiro

Jeremy Shapiro, explains that the Scottish Independence Referendum was not only about a festering governance crisis at the national level between London and Edinburgh, given Northern part of England shares similar concern with such detachment, but also, an political evolution made possible by the European Union. The EU, serves, as a "key plank on the platform of independence movement."

Quote. "The main difference is that Scottish nationalism and the political framework of devolution have given Scotland a vocabulary and platform for doing something that people elsewhere in the United Kingdom cannot: seek independence from London."

Shapiro also proposes the doubt if smaller community needs a larger national entity to thrive, and "exercise the function of nationhood." The question concerning if size matters to the viability of state, is therefore misplaced. This was explained by the case of Luxembourg, where 50,000,0 population is resided. This is made possible under globalisation and the potential membership of the European Union, and was made more apparent when the United Kingdom are more euro-skeptic generally. 

There are three things to be addressed. The rise of regionalism that flared up from frustration at centralised state government, against the background of a common market built by the semi-federal European Union. It is a piecemeal progress of political system evolution, as embodied as devolution. The Scottish Referendum will not be the last, it is a beginning. 

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141981/fiona-hill-and-jeremy-shapiro/size-doesnt-matter

Summerisation - FA - ISIS Gruesome Gamble

Foreign Affairs - ISIS Gruesome Gamble

Theme
Barak Mendelsohn explains why an overreaching expansion and confrontational stance posed by ISIS is not a miscalculation, and why US should take action to roll it back, despite the potential resentment toward its intervention.

Background
The boldness of ISIS of taking on a broad array of enemies, including the US, Syria and Lebanon. It also targets American Alliance such as Jordan, and the Kurdish. Peshmarga and Iraqi National Armed Forces failed to serve as a strong deterrence from ISIS unimpeded expansion. From a military perspective, the rapid expansion of ISIS is impressive and shall be explored and explained later.

Main Argument - It was not a miscalculation.
ISIS perceives an obvious distaste and unwillingness of American's entanglement in Iraq. Obama administration reluctance to intervene in Syria reassures ISIS that it is unlikely for the US to intervene.

On the other hand, if the US does intervenue, the bombing and airstrikes can serve as evidence of the US waging on against the Islamic World, and therefore, strengthens the support for ISIS within the jihadist camp.

It was miscalculation - potential risk
ISIS does not have an answer to the American air force, furthermore, they are also running the risk of being reversed their advances by the US, if, the American put the troops on the ground.

Fulfillment of ISIS ideology 
the persecution of the minorities can be seen as an accomplishment of its ideology. It is of exclusive and expansionist

Conclusion
The author admits the risk of which an American intervention shall carry, however, "the danger that would result from allowing ISIS to expand unchecked is far worse."
A lasting solution to such problem runs deep in the political situation in Iraq.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141884/barak-mendelsohn/isis-gruesome-gamble

why a blog again

If life and plan had gone hand in hand together, things would have been much simpler. But it isn't, as I have learnt again this summer, in August.

I aim to maintain an academic discipline by constantly putting my train of thought and array of random ideas, into a structured and logical way, whereby this blog is therefore born. Despite an unexpected gap year, I hope there will not have a wide gap channelled between and my counterparts at St Andrews after a year. I shall make it as fulfilling as possible. This is, after all, what this blog is all about. 

To cut to the chase, reviews upon current affairs and books I have pored over shall be the topic which I aspire to write about mostly. This is written a day before my trip flying to the my dearest brother in Australia, and on this day, with firm and grateful mind, I truly wish the coming year, my brother will have better idea of which he is going to do and be a happier and more responsible person. Whilst, my parents shall have less stress in life. As for myself, who is not so important, will have serene but rewarding life in Adelaide and other parts of the world.