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20 Apr, 5 tweets, 2 min read
The eyes of #HRW, are like what John Locke calls 'understanding', which, 'like the Eye, whilst it makes us see, and perceive all other Things, takes no notice of it self: And it requires Art and Pain to set it at a distance, and make it its own Object' (rather unlikely ATM).

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Chengxin Pan Profile picture
20 Apr
Oh, that lovely zero-sum mentality of 'winning' - does everything have to have a winner, a top dog? Apparently yes, according to American politicians and strategists, and that winner always has to be the United States. Much of US China policy makes sense in this context.
"China has an overall goal... to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch" Joe Biden whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
"I’m not content that a Chinese citizen can count on a dramatically better standard of, let’s say, train travel than a U.S. citizen. I think Americans should always have the best." Pete Buttigieg whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
Read 14 tweets
Chengxin Pan Profile picture
31 Oct 20
Very well, albeit too late - wish Pompeo were Secretary of State in 1960s. But never mind, there're still US 'gifts' that keep on giving: "America dropped three times more ordnance over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than all sides did during World War II." nytimes.com/2018/03/20/opi…
"Estimates are that at least 350,000 tons of live bombs and mines remain in Vietnam, and that it will take 300 years to clear them from the Vietnamese landscape at the current rate." "For the Vietnamese, the war continues.
Loss of arms, legs and eyesight are for the more fortunate ones. Others have lost their family breadwinners, or their children.... Nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed since the end of the war in 1975, and 67,000 maimed, by land mines, cluster bombs and other ordnance."
Read 4 tweets
Chengxin Pan Profile picture
15 Oct 20
The 'China's assertiveness' narrative in the early 2010s has been debunked by scholars such as Iain Johnston at Harvard and @bjornjerden at @ResearchUI in their excellent works. belfercenter.org/publication/ho…
academic.oup.com/cjip/article/7…
The quoted thread adds more weight to the research:
As far as I can see, the 'China's assertiveness' narrative (a gentler, easier-to-swallow version of the previous 'China threat' narrative) was designed to create fear (of China) and division in the region, fear and division which was largely absent there until roughly 2009-2010.
In 2000 China proposed a free trade area with ASEAN. Framework agreement was signed in 2002. Between 2003-2008, trade with ASEAN grew from US$59.6 billion to US$192.5 billion. One IPE expert noted at a 2007 conference that China hadn't gotten one step wrong in dealing with ASEAN.
Read 28 tweets
Chengxin Pan Profile picture
15 Oct 20
Sometimes I wonder if we've really travelled that far from the blatant anti-Chinese racism of the past in this country. As some Australian scholars pointed out, Chineseness played a central but largely negative role in the formation of Australian identity since Federation.
Helen Irving: "while there was doubt about the meaning of citizenship when Australia federated, there was one certainty amidst the doubt and that was that Australian citizens were not going to be Chinese. The Immigration
Restriction Act made this clear.
... The Chinese were thus used to identify the type of citizenship the Australian nation would not embrace…‘The Chinaman’ was the starkest example of what ‘Australian’ was not." Today of course such overt racism and discrimination against Chineseness has waned, but its never
Read 8 tweets
Chengxin Pan Profile picture
13 Oct 20
This seems to be a case of mutually self-fulfilling prophecies at work: each side claims to be defensive against a foreign threat, and that 'defence' in turn is seen by each other as threatening which justifies further 'defence' preparation which then confirms mutual fear.
Simply insisting that one's own is peaceful whereas the other is completely offensive is just disingenuous. However, 'at least in Asia' (let's be honest, mostly on China's 'doorsteps'), doesn't China have a slightly more credible case than the US when it claims to be defensive?
Unless of course China, seen as the Other and mainly an object, isn't treated as equally human and thus doesn't deserve to have its subjectivity or its own security concerns. In that case, only 'we' are entitled to have concerns. Yet doesn't this border on wishful thinking?
Read 5 tweets
Chengxin Pan Profile picture
12 Oct 20
I cannot help thinking if this might be the resurgence of Chinese exclusion & expulsion that occurred in the 19th & early 20th centuries (so much for the End of History). Exclusion today is less about Chinese immigration than about political participation from Chinese immigrants.
'Chinese Exclusion 2.0' now seems to sweep across the Five-Eyes countries. By coincidence or by design, the five countries were also known for their Chinese exclusion legislations and poll tax policies. Then as now Australia was the canary in the (gold) mine and led the way.
"The Victorian Act of 1855 was the first of its kind in the Australian colonies. It imposed a poll tax of ten pounds upon every Chinese arrival and limited the number of Chinese on board each vessel to one person for every 10 tonnes of goods." peril.com.au/topics/politic…
Read 8 tweets

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