Category Archives: Comments

DDP: Never Miss an Oppotunity to Miss an Oppotunity

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In Mainland China, excellent students can not go to Universities simply because the educational resources are so scarce. The lack of education resources becomes a serious problem for the government, considering education’s traditional role of facilitating social democracy. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the government has strive to resolve the problem, but to no avail. In 2005, it turned to universities in Hongkong and Macao, hoping that they would contribute more resources. The new strategy succeeded–although partially. Seeing the success, the government now turns to Taiwan.

Taiwan has more educational resources than it needs. It will be a blessing for the  Taiwan universities to have extra students, for they will be able to open more courses and support the research. And it will equally benefit the government–the government of Taiwan complains for the heavy burden of supporting unnecessary educational institutes.

However, recent news shows that the DDP government has declined the Mainland China’s offer to send students to Taiwan.

stupidity
DDP’s decision also messes up a good opportunity for Taiwan to compete with Mainland China in terms of political institutions. People in Taiwan have long waited for an opportunity to “educate” Mainland Chinese why the political institutions in Taiwan is desirable. Such an opportunity is hopelessly hard to find, for the only way for the Mainland Chinese to compare is to live under democracy and experience it. (As is said in an article by Long Yingtai, a famous Taiwan writer, “democracy is above all a style of life.”) Considering the dismal probability for the two governments to reach an agreement of free immigration,little can be done in terms of this “education”. Here comes this precious opportunity to exchange students. Taiwan now can show the younger generation, from which the future political and business leaders will grow, the style of life that people in Taiwan will defend at the cost of their lives–according to Long Yingtai. But the DDP government turns it down. After so many years of waiting for opportunities to compete with Mainland China , DDP withdraw from the battlefield like a coward.

Article from NY Book Review: Scandals of Higher Education

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Scandals of Higher Education

By Andrew Delbanco

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20011

The enduring theme in the US Higher Education is equality–although people may disagree in what aspect equality should be addressed . Sex, race or class? Some writers consider this situation problematic, because one aspect could be used to misdirect people’s attention.

“In the transformed world of what was once an old boys club, “feminism,” he writes, “is what you appeal to when you want to make it sound as if the women of Wall Street and the women of Wal-Mart are both victims of sexism.” In fact, few of the former are victims of sexism and many of the latter are victims, first and foremost, of poverty. In short, Michaels thinks the academic left willfully misses the point —that the big obstacle to equal opportunity is not race or gender, but class.”

I have a similar observation on Chinese Higher Education.  There are at least two themes today: freedom and equality.  The freedom theme is intentionally avoided in public discussions, while the equality theme is welcomed.

The Achilles’ Heel of Analytical Positivist Jurisprudence

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(Quote fromDuncan Kennedy’s defination of legal formalism)

The modern usages of the word (formalism) derive from the work of leading legal theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were much concerned with two historical phenomena that play little role in the late twentieth-century discussion. One of these was `primitive formalism,’ meaning the practice of deciding disputes through devices such as oracles and trial by battle, regarded as `irrational.’ The other was the ancient Roman and medieval English system of `formulary justice’ or `strict law,’ in which a claimant could get redress through the legal system only by fitting his case into a closed class of `actions.’
No overarching principles were available, at least according to the theory, to deal with cases that fell outside the class, but within generally held ideas of moral responsibility. Modern law, in the nineteenthcentury view, was characterized by its movement beyond both primitive formalism and formulary justice, but had to find a way to preserve some of the virtues of these earlier systems. (Maine 1917, von Jhering 1869, Holmes 1881, Pollock and Maitland 1898, Weber 1954).

Thought on pictures

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stalinstalin 2hitlerhitler2

“Peering at the two faces, one tries to descry some quiddity, some dark halo, some sly intimation of the horrors to come; but the photographs are old, definition is poor, one cannot be sure, and besides, a camera is not a divining tool.

…What will be the destinies of these children? Which of them will go the furthest?— has a particular pointedness in the cases of Stalin and Hitler. Is it possible that some of us are evil from the moment we leave our mother’s womb? If not, when does evil enter us, and how? Or, to put the question in a less metaphysical form, how is it that some of us never develop a restraining moral conscience? In regard to Stalin and Hitler, did the fault lie in the way they were reared? With educational practices in Georgia and Austria of the late nineteenth century? Or did the boys in fact develop a conscience, and then at some later time lose it: were Iosif and Adolf, at the time they were photographed, still normal, sweet lads, and did they turn into monsters later, as a consequence perhaps of the books they read, or the company they kept, or the pressures of their times? Or was there nothing special about them after all, early or late: did the script of history simply demand two butchers, a Butcher of Germany and a Butcher of Russia; and had Iosif Dzhugashvili and Adolf Hitler not been in the right place at the right time, would history have found another pair of actors, just as good (that is, just as bad), to play the roles? “

Liu Xiaobo: Nationalism Incited by the Government in a Peace Time is the Last Hidden Place for Bastards

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在和平时期煽动的民族主义是恶棍的最后避难所

……

国家独立和人的解放是近代民族主义的两大支柱，为近现代世界留下了民族主义和自由主义两大政治遗产。或者说，抵抗外族的武力入侵及其暴力欺压的斗争，只有当争取民族独立（包括自决、自治等权利）与争取人的自由（包括平等、民主等权利）相一致时，民族主义才具有道义正当性和积极意义。然而，反殖民的斗争一旦 放弃了“人的解放”的ziyou zhuyi目标，就将陷于“国家至上”的极端民族主义泥潭，反侵略战争的胜利也将随之变成Du * Cai *的胜利……它将淹没人类的共同价值和破坏国际正义，混淆自由与Du * Cai *、人性和反人性、战争与和平、正义之战和不义之战之间的实质性区别，使善与恶、真与 假、公正与不公、文明与野蛮等基本道义原则失去意义。而为Du * Cai *者民族主义付出最大代价的只有人民，其代价之大几乎就是“人的毁灭”——不仅是生命和财产的 代价，更是彻底丧失的尊严和自由的代价。

……

在日益全球化的世界上，激进民族主义往往成为抗拒全球化的野蛮价值和邪恶制度的避难所，既会造成本民族的自戕，也将对普世人权与世界和平构成严重威胁。……在全球化的背景之下，最愿意高举民族主义旗子的政权，……North Korea、Cuba……

和平时期的民族主义，特别是Du * Cai *国家的民族主义或爱国主义，它既是一种自我膨胀的虚幻群体意识，也是一种为转移内部危机而夸大外部危险的统治策略，它是官*方*故意制造的外部威胁幻想，也是民间相信官*方*爱国主义幻想的盲目——国力弱小时产生封闭排外的夜郎自大和崇洋媚外的自卑自贱，国力强大时就将在盲目Du * Cai *意志的主导下，走向对外扩张的大国沙文主义、本民族文化至上的原教旨主义或民族精神的法西斯化。

也就是说，Du * Cai *政权在和平时期煽动的民族主义，已经不是“善恶双刃剑”，而只是单刃毒剑——恶棍的最后避难所，既是政客们弄权的意*识*形*态*工具，也是一个心智不成熟的民族坠入蒙昧深渊的标志。

Yu Hua: Is He Shameless or Ignorant?

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余华是无耻还是无知?

◎高氏兄弟

 

曾 经怀有余华情结的诗人宇向曾多次和我们谈起余华的作品，赞叹其语言的魅力与叙事的精妙，建议我们阅读余华的作品，并将她购藏的《许三观卖血记》借给我们 看。虽然对于解冻之前一切浮在上的东西敬而远之是我们的通常态度，但这并不妨碍我们对那些东西偶尔瞥上两眼。据说余华是众多文学批评家最看好的中国当代作 家之一，是最具文化冲击力和颠覆性的先锋作家，是中国未来诺贝尔文学奖的种子选手。然而，最近我们翻阅余华的言论与作品，却发现这位广受赞誉的先锋作家对 中国社会真实的历史与现实状况竟然惊人地无知，而且其作品的所谓“文化冲击力和颠覆性”也实属可疑。 Continue reading →

Gao Zhisheng: the Hero of Chinese Lawyers

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Gao Zhisheng, a Beijing lawyer, has recently been sentenced guilty by a local court and driven out of Beijing secretly.

Gao is a hero today in the heart of many ordinary Chinese. He has washed off the shame on many lawyers. The shame, as professor Dworkin understood, is that Chinese lawyers “pretended that they have not seen the real situation of human rights in China; they carefully avoid sensitive issues and only talked about irrelevant big topics; they tried not to annoy the government by cautiously sensor their own speeches; they unanimously sang an optimistic prayer for China’s future; they even happily enjoy the illusion that, as long as they behave within the borders implicitly drawn by the government, they could have more freedom of speech than ordinary Chinese people. ”

When the government was persecuting a group of Chinese against religious reasons, he stood up and fought back courageously, although he was hopelessly defeated in all the cases he took. Facing a shameless government which was willing to take every illegal means for self-justification, no lawyer could possibly win.

It has been hard, therefore, for Gao or any other lawyer involved. What sustains Gao may be his faith. Gao became a Christian several months ago, when he was facing a challenging situation.

But This Wolf Comes As A Wolf

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Scalia described the legislative choice as a naked rent-seeking legislation to protect the position of politically favored actors.

…That is what this suit is about. Power. The allocation of power among Congress, the President, and the courts in such fashion as to preserve the equilibrium the Constitution sought to establish — so that “a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,” Federalist No. 51, p. 321 (J. Madison), can effectively be resisted. Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.

Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 699, 101 L. Ed. 2d 569, 108 S. Ct. 2597 (1988) (Scalia, J. dissenting)