Hello everyone!
Getting back from a longish posting gap, it’s delightful beyond words to find new subscribers on board, and next to no wanderers-off.
This confirms the impression forming since our launch in mid-2021: there is a need both for current On My Radar-type soundings, and for deep dives into millennia-deep historical and spiritual institutions that locate them in universal human history
Speaking of universal human history, I've spent some recent downtime catching up on some general reading. Rather than bore you with yet another ‘my best reads of last year’, let me put in a word for David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
I’m an admirer of Graeber’s, who passed away before his time in late 2020. His Debt: the First 5,000 Years threw important light on China, demonstrating that Chinese culture has more in common with ‘ours’ than is often assumed. I pledge to unpack what is meant by that, in due course.
Meanwhile, there’s been a build-up of things crying for our attention. They’ll have to be posted in machine-gun fashion: commentary will be sparse till the backlog is back to normal.
Jia Qingguo
Beijing has never been relaxed about national security (guójiā ānquán 国家安全). But the topic is surely in hyperdrive now, with new formulations, connotations and deeply unsettling enactments (in Hong Kong, for starters).
All the more intriguing that Jia Qingguo 贾庆国, director of Peking University’s Institute of International Studies, should recently publish a solid piece of analysis in our beloved highbrow aggregator, Aisixiang. Professor Jia has an excellent reputation for independent critical scholarship, despite the need to avoid open conflict with a certain author’s ‘New Era Thought on Diplomacy’.
Here’s a link to my translation of Jia’s ‘The hallmarks of national security and principles of governance’. Warning: this is written in PRC academic set-piece style. Its value lies in the light it sheds, almost incidentally, on the predatory nature of ‘national security’, the readiness with which it crowds out, not to say gobbles up, other policy concerns. Its readiness, in other words, to tune rationality out.
Translations like this devour time. It is published here as a live document, meaning some fine-tuning may take place even after this posting.
links seem broken?
Thanks for these, I really find your translations insightful. I'm interested in PLA doctrine myself, Unrestricted Warfare was an amazing piece and I've always wondered how they go about actually employing those ideas. Have you ever run across anything like that? Would you say the general translation I see for Unrestricted Warfare is accurate?