In political sciences, there is often a temptation to separate theory from practice – discreetly. Whilst nominally we would insist that all theoretical models, frameworks, and paradigms ought to refle ...More
EJ Insight2024-01-15
There’s a story I very much enjoyed telling some of my debating students – back when I was an active coach. Consider a close circle of friends, Bob, Mary, Sue, and Thornton. Through years of fraternis ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-27
On December 19th, the Colorado Supreme Court voted by a 4-3 narrow majority to remove Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot. Pending Trump’s appeal to the US Supreme Court, this ruling would be pl ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-22
It would be no understatement to say that our city is in the midst of a serious mental health crisis. Suicide numbers amongst the youth of this city have almost doubled in less than a decade, to a rec ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-19
Recent events have caused me to return – time and time again – to the harrowing words of Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if y ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-18
Groupthink - at an age of echo chambers, hyper-technologisation (through the advent of social media and digital platforms), and intensifying geopolitical competition and rivalry - is fundamentally per ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-06
These days, it’s trendy to talk down Hong Kong. After all, who doesn’t enjoy trashing a city that has seen, in the span of four to five years, unprecedented political turmoil, a pandemic that has left ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-05
Part of the following was based on a few scrambled notes and thoughts I had put together in a personal journal a few years back. The rest, of course, is history – or rather, the byproduct culminating ...More
EJ Insight2023-12-04
The headlines say it all. The suicide rate amongst 15-24 year olds in Hong Kong rose to a record high of 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people, as compared with just over a half of this number 8 years ago. 2 ...More
EJ Insight2023-11-30
Those who know me would know that I have long been a fervent advocate of promoting competitive debating – in both English and Chinese – across China, including, of course, in Hong Kong. Yet debating i ...More
EJ Insight2023-11-08
What makes Hong Kong valuable to its own country? I would posit that the answer lies not with, ‘out-performing mainland counterparts in feigning loyalty through flimsy sycophancy that convinces no one ...More
EJ Insight2023-11-07
On October 23, Governor of California Gavin Newsom paid a visit to Hong Kong. In an absolutely jam-packed room, he delivered a lecture that was attended by hundreds of students, faculty, and veterans ...More
EJ Insight2023-10-30
Fun anecdote. After a cozy, intimate discussion in which I discussed the present state of the Chinese political economy and the rational undergirding its industrial policy in Oxford, I was asked by a ...More
EJ Insight2023-10-27
I have always felt like an impostor of sorts. From a young age, when I’d take to the stage at a debating competition, only to find myself waiting with trepidation and hoping for the best in the result ...More
EJ Insight2023-10-19
Moral equivalence – the treatment of two (or more) parties as if they bore equal degrees of moral blameworthiness and wrongness in their actions, attitudes, and intentions. The claim that two (or more ...More
EJ Insight2023-10-13
Hong Kong recorded almost 13 million arrivals in the first six months of 2023 – a paltry fraction as compared with pre-COVID days. The political turmoil in 2019, three years’ worth of lockdown in face ...More
EJ Insight2023-10-10
The age of geopolitics is upon us. From the war in Ukraine to the intensification of Sino-American rivalry, from increasing tensions over the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits to the Indo-Pakista ...More
EJ Insight2023-10-09
Groupthink - at an age of echo chambers, hyper-technologisation (through the advent of social media and digital platforms), and intensifying geopolitical competition and rivalry - is fundamentally per ...More
EJ Insight2023-09-18
These days, it’s trendy to talk down Hong Kong. After all, who doesn’t enjoy trashing a city that has seen, in the span of four to five years, unprecedented political turmoil, a pandemic that has left ...More
EJ Insight2023-09-18
A reasonable society ought to make provisions and accommodation, such that any and all reasonable preferences, tastes, opinions, and needs, can be reflected by the way people are treated by the laws a ...More
EJ Insight2023-09-12
