Emailing Dr Yu

Following the Economist's latest cover story ‘Most dangerous place on Earth’, I can only think about how the Republic of China on Taiwan is a deep-rooted experience in my life and how I think about their future as if it was my own country. Earlier this year, I resumed email conversations with my mentor in Taiwan-Strait Affairs. It's been 16 years.

Dear 老師,

What a delight - the experience of reading your 2021 monograph. Despite the disturbances ranging from my restless little ones to overtime work, I have managed to print it and now have a perfect bound hard file folder I walk around with during the weekends. With a massive amount of time spent in front of a computer handling businesses comms, I have developed dry eyes and still opt for paper books regardless of the lack of space on our shelves. I have been following a hectic routine at work but happy to have been involved in projects such as covering communications on Shell’s first (and industry-first) commercial-grade batch of synthetic kerosene that was used to power a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Madrid. This project demonstrated an additional option of producing lower carbon, sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) to power the next generation of flight. 

Even though I haven’t pursued an academic career and am not frustrated about that, I am still an enthusiast of the Far East and geopolitics in general. I do still have a need to collect and archive. 

I reminisce the debate, contradictions and attempts to rationalize everything as a student though. In this respect your One Dot theory In Debunking Social Science and Confiding the _______Theory: Cheat and Last Cheat, I am particularly interested in its associations of authenticity and increased clarity (probably because your reader here has aged/matured), power, and the universal applicability of dialectical thinking in a work of art, a political stance, anything. This monograph proves to be apt for elucidating the fundamentals of your 2011 book, reiterating that your model yields a framework that allows reasonable dialogue debate with situation phenomena, time, context, interpretations. I think professor Hsiung must be proud of being your mentor, not only because of the impact that your theory has had in academia but for its independent nature, its lack of publicity-oriented affiliations; its universal applicability. 

Personally, I wish I could see your TaijiTu gaining prominence among Latin American scholars. Our realm of social sciences inevitably (and fatally) falls into the orbit of neo-Marxism where it is compartmentalized in that one school of thought that is also the only morally accepted path. Given the overwhelming burden of social stratification, lack of social mobility etc, in a similar effect to what you have described about Sarawakians. The issue of the rich and poor is of startling effect to us.

In ‘The Loss of El Dorado’, my favorite writer, VS Naipaul, writes about a British-sponsored attempt to set going a revolution of ‘high principles’ in the Spanish Empire in the late 16th century from the newly captured island of Trinidad. The mythical kingdom, essentially a ‘Spanish delusion’ is the only thing in that near-lawless community permeated by multinational intrigue and local plunder, malice stratification. Naipaul was commissioned by an American publisher to write a guidebook about the island’s capital but instead, he delivered a splendid history book. And he wrote about a society built upon slavery and a massive social gap. Inequality being the one thing that united them. Five centuries later, international organizations that monitor I think we are reversal of progress on tackling inequality.

We are still discussing the Dependency Theory, spearheaded by thinkers such as Andre Gunder Frank some fifty years ago when the critics of the Patria Grande (an idyllic community encompassing all of Latin America and the Caribbean) had to face two dramatic options for the countries of the capitalist periphery: underdevelopment or revolution. It was Gunder Frank who carried out the most complete criticism of the dualism played by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. After him, intellectual demands have become insurmountable obstacles to university academicism as well as to the producers of ideology.  Under his vast and largely unprecedented work: silence was the manifestation of rejection - this effective weapon that censors the undesirables in democracies without the burden of dictatorship. Gunder Frank initiated generations of critical thinking but his approach, also did, ironically, “a great harm to political science” because he made it harder to cheat.

On page 83 of your monograph, you mentioned Dr Hsiung’s thoughts on ‘…most academics and experts in the West feel that dialectics is closely related to Marx and Hegel…’. I feel inclined to agree with that remark and that’s where a great deal of cheating takes place.

Latin America needs a find a way to tackle the vicissitudes of ideology and pragmatism. Richard J. Bernstein defends the thesis that we have lost the notion of a ‘communal wellbeing’. I see it materialized in today’s Brazil with the second-highest coronavirus death toll after the US, at more than a quarter of a million and with Jair Bolsonaro’s continued downplaying of the COVID-19 pandemic, contempt for the law, science, education etc. How I’d use your model to assess whether Brazil does practice 100% democracy (at 1) or not?  My answer is a sound No! I would say it is 30% or so of democracy or somewhere close to 3 or 4 in that respect. Despite being democratically elected, the current federal administration is marked by the intimidation of institutions such as the Supreme Court and a huge military presence in the cabinet.  If I place Populism within the A B C D E spectrum, I believe we have reached the edge of the danger zone for the president’s practices of organizing and joining rallies (well throughout the pandemic) urging the closing of the Supreme Court and/or calling for military intervention in domestic politics do perfectly meet all the requirements for an impeachment case.  Brazil is well within D or about 80%.  I must admit my helpless unawareness of Tsai Ing-wen's intentions or views.

On the topic of  以德服人/ YiDeFuRen /win, I do still struggle to understand the PRC’s influence piece. I found your reflections about China’s action within the nine-dash line in the South China Sea particularly elucidative to understand behavior. However, I cannot read/interpret their technological stance or scale. It can range from sophisticated telecommunication technologies to surveillance based on the collection of DNA material of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population. Is it political warfare, totalitarianism, business interests? Considering that by the year 2030, mainland China's economy will rank number one in the world, I think this would be a good exercise for your model. Or perhaps another book?

Thinking on a global scale, I believe hegemony is increasingly less representative of nationalism (be it liberal, right-wing, left-wing) and more representative of technology businesses. I recall the former president of Uruguay (and former Marxist guerrilla) Jose ‘Pepe’ Mujica’s way of addressing to the United Nations general assembly in September 2013: "Politics, which should rule human relations, has succumbed to economics and become a mere administrator of what the financial system does not control."