No genuine intellect could regard your country’s conduct as right.
No scholarship of any kind can exist in such a place.
March 7, 2022
I am publishing this again.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people around the world.
The following is a chapter published on January 5, 2022, under the title “To Expose China’s Folly? Surely Neither Michael nor NHK Intended That.”
For some reason, this chapter came to mind this morning.
The following, too, is a rough draft.
The day before yesterday, I happened to be watching Michael Sandel’s “heated classroom” on NHK Educational TV.
It was billed as a “heated classroom” conducted online with several students from Harvard University, the University of Tokyo, and Fudan University.
To begin with, I have very little regard for Michael Sandel.
I do not understand why the mass media hold him in such high esteem.
Nor could I understand what NHK intended by airing this program.
To expose China’s folly?
Surely neither Michael nor NHK intended that.
On the contrary, it would be more accurate to call it a program that panders to China under the guise of pseudo-moralism.
It is an unmistakable fact that China establishes Communist Party branches even within its universities.
The woman who did almost all the talking, acting as though she were the leader of the Fudan University students, was probably something like the secretary of the university’s Communist Party branch.
It was not a program that anyone with a sound intellect could bear to watch.
What I found particularly appalling was the scene in which that female student, displaying absolutely no sense of apology for China having brought the coronavirus pandemic upon the world—not the slightest shred of it!—mocked, as it were, the responses of Western countries.
If the Harvard and University of Tokyo students present had been genuinely sensible students,
if Sandel’s classroom had truly been a “heated classroom,”
someone should immediately have said, “What are you saying?
How can you speak that way?
Do you feel no responsibility for the fact that this is a virus spread by your country, by Xi Jinping?
Why does your country so stubbornly obstruct the international community’s investigation into its origins?
Is it not because it has something to hide?
What kind of intellect do you claim to possess in a country that behaves like that?”
Even expressed mildly, far from heatedly, at least this much of a rebuttal should have come immediately.
Of course, if it had truly been a “heated classroom,” the rebuttal would not have been so restrained.
What the hell are you talking about—isn’t this a biological weapon your country spread?
If voices had been raised in fury, Sandel, I would grant you that it was a “heated classroom.”
To begin with, what ought to be said to the Fudan University students is brief and simple.
No genuine intellect could regard your country’s conduct as right.
No scholarship of any kind can exist in such a place.