Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao | Lex Fridman Podcast #466

You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao in the past. What are the parallels between the 2 leaders, and where do they differ? Xi Jinping, of course, has been the leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao was the Communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. What are the commonalities? What are the differences?

#466

The biggest commonality is that they're both the subjects of personality cults. Mao was the center of a very intensely felt personality cult from 1949 to 1976. When he died, there was a tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies.

Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since Mao to have had a sustained personality cult of the kind where, if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him—collections of his speeches. When Mao was alive, you might have thought that's what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. But after Mao's death, there was such an effort not to have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency not to publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power.

I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere. The newspaper wasn't dominated by stories about him, quotations from his words, and things like that. With Xi Jinping, you've had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule that seemed as though it might be a thing of the past.

That's a key commonality, and a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down. He talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King, a legendary figure who could turn the heavens upside down. He reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a way to improve things.

Xi Jinping is very orderly and very concerned with stability and predictability, so you can see them as very different in that way. Mao also liked to stir things up and have people on the streets clamoring. So even though Xi Jinping has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself in that way. He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets or anything that can't be controlled.

There are a lot of ways that they're similar and a lot of ways they're different. They're also different in a way that fits with this orderliness: Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. Confucian traditions are based, for the most part, on stable hierarchies and clear categories of superior and inferior. Mao liked things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that held China back.

You can come up with things that they're similar in, and you can come up with things where they're really opposites. But they both clearly wanted to see China under the rule of the Communist Party, and that's been a continuity that connects them to the leaders in between them, too.

So there's some degree, as you said, that Xi Jinping possesses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. Let's go all the way back. He wrote that, in order to understand the China of today, we have to study its past. The China of today celebrates the ideas of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?

#466

First of all, we don't know that much about the historical Confucius. He's around the same time as figures like Socrates. As with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him, or think we know about him, from what his followers said, things that were attributed to him, and dialogues that were written afterward.

You can have a lot of fun with these axial-age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these axial-age thinkers is that they were trying to make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation of the elite. They had a way of promising that they possessed philosophical ideas that helped decide how you should run a polity.

Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. What he said was that there had been a period of great order in the past, when the lines between inferior and superior were clear and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely.

He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing, and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. The father-and-son relationship was a key one. The father deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. Things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end.

He had a whole series of these relationships. The relationship between husband and wife was again an unequal one, with the husband being superior to the wife, but owing the wife care and her owing him deference. The relationship between the emperor and the ministers was another parallel. There were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism.

Even something that in the West we often think of as a quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers was not egalitarian in the Chinese tradition of Confucianism. There was only the older brother and the younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship; it was one in which the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.

So stable hierarchy was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything, including politics.

#466

There was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. The emperor was the Son of Heaven, with Heaven as this kind of non-personified deity, much as the emperor was a superior to the minister.

For Confucius, we should study the texts and study how the sages of old behaved. Society was becoming corrupted and moving away from the purity of the sages, when the relationships were all in order.

Confucianism was a kind of conservative, or even backward-looking, thing. It wasn't trying to argue for progress; it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past.

In all kinds of ways, it's irreconcilable with many things about Marxism and communism, which are all about struggle and a progressive view of history, moving from one stage to the next. That's the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and the China of today: there's a tension between Confucianism and communism. Marxism and communism are supposed to let go of history, while in Confucianism there's a real veneration of history happening in China today. They're able to wear both hats and balance it.

You could say that at many points in the 20th century there was a struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it the Confucian tradition, or the rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to?

#466

With Xi Jinping, and before him to some extent Hu Jintao—we saw this a little bit at the Olympics—it was more this kind of mix-it-all-together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together.

Xi Jinping says that Mao is one of his heroes, or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. They had so little in common, but they both, in his mind and in the minds of others, suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past.

Yeah. So this Platonic notion of greatness—you could say that's a thread that connects, for Xi Jinping, the great, multi-thousand-year history of China.

#466

It involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China, jumping forward a bit, in 221 BC. He was anti-scholars; he burned books and didn't venerate these kinds of rituals. He was very much against the things that Confucius stood for.

Mao, in a sense, had to choose between Confucius and the first emperor, and he said, "Well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea." Scholars can be a pain. But Xi Jinping, I think, is continually not choosing. He wants to say, "Look at the Great Wall, this wonderful symbol of strength and domination."

By the way, the first emperor didn't build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls, and they were fine. They were good. But the Great Wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later.

Still, this idea that anything suggesting a kind of greatness is something that, in many ways, a nationalist above all else like Xi Jinping can support. Xi Jinping is a supporter of the party and single-party rule. That's something he clearly believes in.

He's a nationalist. He wants to see China be great and acknowledged as great on the world stage.

Boy, so many contradictions—always with Stalin. He was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction also permeates from Mao all the way to Xi Jinping.

But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, “People are pretty much alike at birth but become differentiated via learning.” So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to Confucius’s idea of education and how much it permeates China today?

#466

Sure. So there’s an optimism to this, in the sense of an ability for people to be good and, when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, to want to be like those exemplary figures. So it’s a form of education through emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. It did have this relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education.

I think that shows through in all kinds of things. Even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could potentially be remolded. China was one of the few places where they didn’t kill the last emperor. The idea was that anybody could be turned into a citizen of this, or a subject of this, a good member of this polity through education. Often it was a very forceful form of education, but I think that’s a carryover from Confucian times.

Over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams. The idea was that bureaucracies should be run not by people who were born into the right families, but by ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive exams. The exams were things that could make or break your career, a bit like at some points in the American past, when passing a bar exam—a really intensive thing—could set you on the road to a good career.

In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing scholarly pursuits was strong, but Chinese leaders throughout history, including Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there’s an ambivalence to it, or a contradiction again there.

But to what degree does this idea of meritocracy, which is inherent in the notion that we all start at the same line, carry over to China today? There’s a meritocratic view of human nature there: if you work hard and learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse: if you haven’t succeeded, that means you didn’t work hard and therefore do not deserve the spoils of success. Does that carry over to China today?

#466

There’s such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil service exams, but the question was: if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. One thing that happened there was that families would pull together resources to try to help the brightest in their group become part of the official class. This pooling together of resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure.

But there was always a tension in that. What if you don’t succeed? Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. You had this issue, and then it became something like, “Well, the system was out of whack, and it needed a new leader.”

There was also something built in. It was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main early interpreters, Mencius, who had this idea that can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion, or for a kind of democracy. Even though the emperor rules at the will of Heaven, if he doesn’t act like a true emperor—if he’s not morally upstanding—then Heaven will remove its mandate from him. There’s no obligation to show deference to a ruler who’s not behaving like a true ruler.

It sort of justifies rebellion. The idea is that if the rebellion isn’t justified, then Heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. But if Heaven has removed its support, then the rebellion will succeed, and a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it’s interesting in the sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it’s when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.

Okay. So it’s meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case—maybe you can speak to that—that in the Chinese education system, there seems to be a high value placed on excellence. Hopefully I’m not generalizing too much, but from the things I’ve seen, there are certain cultures and certain peoples where it’s just part of the value system that you need to be a really good student. Is that the case with China today?

#466

There’s been a lot of emphasis on education, working really hard, and excelling at some subjects. There isn’t the civil service exam, but there is the gaokao exam, which really can determine what kind of institution you get into.

Getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of traditions, what it opens you up to is a kind of outrage when there’s a sense of unfairness about who’s getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided. Some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism, which really seems to subvert this whole idea of meritocracy.

The 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, even though in the Western press in particular they were discussed as a movement for democracy, began with a lot of posters that criticized corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism. There was a sense that, despite all the talk—despite the fact that most people seemed to have to study really hard to pass these exams to get good positions in universities—some of those positions were being handed out through the back door.

That led to a kind of outrage. That’s true in many places, but I think it gives a special anger against nepotism because of the way in which so much emphasis is put on the standard exam way of getting ahead.

I hope it’s okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tiananmen Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history, and throughout history in general. What happened in Tiananmen Square?

#466

So in 1989, this massive movement took place. The story of it was largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood in other places, in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the former Soviet bloc. So I think it’s often conflated with what was going on there.

One of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing and opening-up reform that had taken shape after Mao’s death.

In a sense, the student generation of 1989—and I was there in 1986, when there were some warm-up protests—felt a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what the government was talking about. The government was saying, “The party believes in reforming and opening up. We need to liberalize. We need to give people more control of their fate.” The students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm. There were a lot of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really move in that direction.

It may seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in 1986, when I was there in Shanghai in late 1986 and students protested. This was the first time that students had really been on the streets in significant numbers since the Cultural Revolution, or at least since 1976. The students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by the physicist Fang Lizhi, who was often thought of as a Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual.

One of the things that students in Shanghai, where some of the most intense protests of that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert, of all things, by Jan and Dean, the American surf-rock band that was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. They were touring China. It was the first time in Shanghai that there had been a rock concert.

The students were really excited about this because it fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward: letting them be more part of the world. For them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. At the concert, some students got up to dance because that’s what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert. The security guards made them sit down.

For the students in Shanghai, this symbolized what was a feint toward openness that really didn’t have follow-through: “We’re going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance.” So the protests went on for a little while in 1986, and posters went up. The officials at the university said, “No, this is out of hand.”

#466

We had chaos on the streets during the Cultural Revolution. We can’t go back to that. And nobody wanted to go back to that. I saw posters that said, “This is new Red Guardism,” and the students didn’t want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly, and they thought, “We’re not like the Red Guards. We don’t want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power.”

The Red Guards had been passionate about Mao. The analogy partly scared the students, and it also meant that the government was really serious about dealing with them.

Then, in 1989, the protests restart, and there are a variety of reasons why they restart. It’s a very resonant year: the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. But more importantly, it’s the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May Fourth Movement of 1919.

The May Fourth Movement helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some of its leading founders had been student activists. It was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. The anniversary of that movement was always marked and commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students had done in the past, so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something.

Then Hu Yaobang, a leader associated with the more reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party, dies unexpectedly. He had been stripped of a very high office and demoted, partly after taking a fairly light stance toward the 1986–87 protests. He was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up; he had been Deng Xiaoping’s potential successor.

There has to be a funeral for Hu Yaobang because he dies still as an official. The students take advantage of the fact that there have to be commemorations of his death. They put up posters that basically say, “The wrong people are dying.” Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members, so some people said, “Some people are dying too young. Some people don’t seem like they’re ever going to die.” They begin these sorts of protests in April of 1989.

The government tries to get the protests to stop quickly. They use the same sort of technique: They issue an editorial in the People’s Daily that says this is creating chaos, which is a code term for, “Take us back to the Cultural Revolution.” This time the students say, “No, we’re just trying to show our patriotism. We believe there’s too much corruption and nepotism. There’s not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party.” So they keep up the protests, and there’s a lot of frustration at this point.

There are also economic frustrations. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily. There’s a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the micromanaging of their private lives on campuses.

The protests at Tiananmen Square, and in plazas all around the country and in other cities as well, become this mix of things. It’s an anti-corruption movement, a call for more democracy, and a call for more freedom of speech. But it also has some counterculture elements. There are rock concerts on the square. The most popular rock musician, Cui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he’s there. There’s a sense of a variety of things rolled into one.

I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc. It was actually, in many ways, more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like the Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the communist bloc, which were about moving toward socialism with a human face—trying to get the parties in power to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them.

There was a kind of disjuncture because it happened at the same time as moves to end communism. Of course, when all the protesters were on the square, there was a possibility that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement, a course correction. But there was also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership, and clearly the political conservatives, even if they believed in economic reform, were getting the upper hand. This was not going to be tolerated.

The students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring into Beijing to join the movement. They don’t want to end the movement when they’ve just arrived. So one thing that keeps it going is that new participants are coming from the provinces. Even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay.

Then workers start joining the movement as well and form an independent labor union. To a certain extent, the Chinese Communist Party might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that student protests sometimes lead to members of other social classes joining them. People look up to students as potential intellectual leaders of the country, and admiration for scholars is part of what turns people out when students protest.

That’s very different from the American case, where there’s often suspicion that student activists are necessarily on the same side as everybody else. But in China, there had been a sense, from the history of the 20th century, of students as potentially a vanguard.

Once labor activists join the movement, troops are called in. There’s a massacre near Tiananmen Square in the middle of the night of June 3 and into the early hours of June 4. The army moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something the People’s Liberation Army is not supposed to be. It is supposed to be the army that saves China from foreign aggression, but it’s acting like an invading force.

This is where the tanks famously roll in. I think you also have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank. That’s a banned image within China. I really think the reason it’s considered so toxic by the regime is that it shows the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force.

Can we talk about that man who’s now called the Tank Man—the man who stood in front of the row of tanks? This was on June 5 in Tiananmen Square. What do we know about him? What do you think about him and the symbolism?

#466

It’s an amazing symbol. He’s on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks, and it’s unquestionably an act of incredible bravery. There are some interesting things about it, some of which are forgotten. One is that, in the end, he climbs up on the tank. The tank swerves; it doesn’t run him over.

The Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, “Look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint. Look at this. He wasn’t mowed down.” They tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially, saying, “Look, the students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution.”

The army showed restraint, and there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their tanks once the massacre began. People got outraged and attacked the soldiers. But by selectively using footage, the Communist Party could say, “Look, actually, the heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers.” For the first few months afterward, they tried to get this narrative to stick. They talked about Tiananmen a lot, and they showed images of the Tank Man.

The problem was that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that, in fact, there had first been firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. Many people—some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers—had simply been mowed down. Lots of people knew somebody who had been killed, so that story just didn’t work.

Then I think the claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event, and particularly to repress the visual imagery of the man in front of a line of tanks. Whatever the tanks did to him or didn’t do, the main takeaway was the idea that there were lines of tanks in a city. The image was of a government that had lost the mandate to rule, and they really didn’t want to have that image out there in the world.

Yeah, we’re watching the video now. He’s got, what, grocery bags in his hands?

#466

And it’s such a symbolic, “I’ve had enough” kind of statement.

Yeah.

#466

It’s probably not a student. It’s often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. It is a powerful image of bravery.

I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man baring his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as the Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. In 1968 in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there.

#466

And so, not that people would know, but that was an image. What was so powerful in that was saying, “We’re not going to put up with this invasion.” Again, I think you have the People’s Liberation Army looking like an invading force, and that’s what the Chinese Communist Party, in a sense, can’t deal with now, even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989—and they do tell a version of this, and some people believe this, I think—is that in 1989, China went one route of not having the Communist Party dramatically change or relinquish control, and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another.

And you could say, “Well, look, after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed, life got better for people in China; life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet bloc. Maybe this was the right way to go.” You can make that kind of argument, but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism.

It’s one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, and one of my favorite videos ever taken, so I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don’t understand the symbolic power of an image until afterward. Perhaps that’s what the Chinese government didn’t quite understand: They lost the information war, the meme war.

So I have to ask: What do you think was going through that man’s head? Was it a heroic statement, or was it purely primal and guttural, like, “I’ve had enough”?

#466

It’s so interesting to just speculate, and we simply don’t know, because he was never able to be interviewed afterward. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important, because one of the students’ main demands—I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square—would have been to say, “We want this to be acknowledged as patriotic. Our goals are patriotic. We’re not here to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We’re here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So, will you admit that?”

And you mentioned the power of the image, and I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something and took to heart the power of the image after that. We saw this when there were protests in Hong Kong. The government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story of crowds out of control. Initially, in 2014 and again in 2019, there were very orderly crowds, and it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents—as there almost always are—of violence by crowds, and then they would show those images over and over again.

They also worked very hard, when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s, to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police, and they tried very hard—and managed to succeed—because the Western press was often saying, “Will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre, or will there be soldiers on the streets?” The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of shooting to kill in the streets. There was shooting to wound. Beanbags were shot, rubber bullets were used, and there were enormous amounts of tear gas. There was even tear gas let fly inside subway stations in 2019.

And all these things are really brutalizing, but they don’t make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like the Tiananmen Tank Man image does, or the image of a young Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm that became another of the iconic images during the Vietnam War. Those images can really have extraordinary power, and I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that.

There are no really gripping photographs—there are very few photographs allowed—of the Xinjiang extralegal detention camps. There’s very little photography. There is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have.

So nobody knows what happened to the Tank Man?

#466

No.

What do you think happened to the Tank Man?

I assume he was killed.

Killed?

I assume he was just disappeared. It’s interesting because very often figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care, so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. But there have been relatively few cases of people being sentenced to death for political crimes recently. It’s much more just: remove them, imprison them.

But the Tank Man—there was never a trial. There was never even a trial where you knew what the result would be, as there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared.

And there’s been somebody else, another figure like this, who’s disappeared. A couple of years ago in Beijing, there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge—Sitong Bridge in Beijing—and it was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was a denunciation of COVID policies, but also of dictatorial rule, and somehow he managed to have it up long enough to be filmed, draw attention, and circulate.

Again, another image of the power of images. He’s disappeared, and there hasn’t been a show trial or even a secret trial. Again, we don’t know if he’s still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn’t want a competing story out there. They don’t want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.

How much censorship is there in modern-day China by the Chinese government?

#466

There’s a lot of censorship. One of my favorite books about Chinese censorship is by Margaret Roberts, where she talks about 3 different ways that the government can control the stories. She says there’s fear, which is this kind of direct censorship—banning things. But there’s also friction, which she says—she has 3 Fs: fear, friction, and flooding—and she says they’re all important.

And I think this is true not just of China, but in other settings too. What friction means is that you just make it harder for people to get answers or information that you don’t want them to get, even though you know that some people will get it. You just make it so that the easiest way—the first answer you’ll get through a search—is not the answer you want.

Mhm.

So, a lot of tech-savvy or globally minded, tapped-in Chinese people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall, but it’s work. The internet moves slower, and you have to keep updating your VPN. So you just create friction, so that some people will find this out.

And then flooding: You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want people to believe. So all those kinds of things exist and are in operation, and I think fear is the easiest side to see in terms of what’s blocked.

I’m always interested in things that you would expect to be censored that aren’t censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarianism. You can read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you just aren’t supposed to be able to read in a somewhat totalitarian or dictatorial state.

But it’s not specifically about China. Censorship is most restrictive when it’s things that are actually about China: things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. There’s intense censorship of that and certain events in that way. But something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a Communist Party-ruled state, can be read.

There were books that were banned up until the very last period of Gorbachev’s rule that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. You’ve been able to since 1985. Again, it’s not about China, and actually, for some people within China in the mid-1980s, they focused on the part of 1984 that’s like the Two Minutes Hate—these rituals of denunciation of people. For some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present.

Then by the 1990s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren’t having fun. And people said, “You could read 1984 and say, ‘Look, this is the world we’re living in. It’s a Big Brother state.’” But others said, “Well, that has some similarities to us, but he wasn’t talking about a country like ours. Look, we’ve got supermarkets, we’ve got McDonald’s. I mean, this is not that bleak world he was imagining. We’ve got fast trains; things are so much better in some ways than our grandparents had it.”

Yeah. You’ve actually spoken about and described China as more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about.

I think about that a lot. I’ve reread Brave New World a couple of times over the past couple of years, and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st century might be defined—to the degree any of the nations are dystopian—more by Brave New World than by 1984. There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other, and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other.

And if we just think about control through distraction and playing to your sense of pleasure, one thing that people forget sometimes, or don’t know, is that Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell, when he was a student at Eton. They were sort of rivals, and in fact, in 1949, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy of 1984 and said, “Look, I’ve written this book that displaces yours.”

He didn't say that. He just said, “I wanted you to have this.”

But he had criticized Brave New World in reviews for not having imagined a world of capitalism run wild before realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October 1949, the same month the Communist Party took control in China. He doesn't mention China, and he just said, “It's a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population.” Basically, saying more like what was in my book than in yours.

I have to say, I think Huxley might be really onto something there. Truly a visionary. Although, to give points to Orwell, I do think that, as far as just a philosophical work of fiction, 1984 is a better book, because Brave New World does not quite construct the philosophical message thoroughly. 1984 contains many very clearly, very poetically defined elements of a totalitarian regime.

Oh, and the dissection of language is just so amazing.

No, I think you've got a point there, and I went back and reread Brave New World. It's fascinating, but it's very messy. I think there's a clarity to Orwell's 1984. There's a clarity to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, similarly in the construction of its elements, and she was a big fan of both 1984 and Brave New World.

But, you know, there was a kind of—it's not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited.

Yes, he did.

In the 1950s, he kind of said, actually, it seems—and he mentions China there. He says that in Mao's China, they're kind of combining the 2 things.

I'm really fascinated by that because it was published in China, on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It's called The Dystopian Trilogy, and it's a box set where you have Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, which inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That's 1 book, and then there's Animal Farm and 1984 as the second book, and then the 3rd volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited.

It was published in traditional Chinese characters. You could buy it in Hong Kong, but I compared it to the book you could buy on the mainland. It's all the same except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scrubbed out. This, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots get taken out.

I do think the Brave New World side of things—I think with China, I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World, with Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude, boot-on-the-face, 1984 style of control. But then, during the COVID lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that seemed much more the Brave New World kind of style had their Orwellian moment. So you have it now, I think: there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.

I see why it could give a sense, after you've thoroughly internalized the fear, that you have complete freedom of speech. Just don't mention the government. So you could talk about totalitarianism, you could talk about the darkest aspects of human nature; you can even talk about the government in a sort of metaphorical, poetic way that's not directly linkable. But the moment you mention the government, it's like a dumb keyword search.

Yeah, and I think it's one of these really good examples of how China is distinctive, but it's not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn.

One example is in Singapore. The National University of Singapore has a world-class history department, but no Singapore historian in it—nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore, because it's incredibly wide-ranging what you can analyze. But when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets touchy. In Thailand, which I've been working on recently, you have these lèse-majesté laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king. And so, in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around it.

There's a way in which you can say, at the foreign correspondents' clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country next door where you can say basically anything you want. But when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it's touchy.

I should give credit for that insight to Shibani Mahtani, who co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong, Among the Braves. She was talking about how, in Singapore, at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong where you could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club. But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singaporean political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, saying all kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore.

And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Then I went to hear a talk there because I was curious about the culture in this Foreign Correspondents' Club. There was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia, saying things very directly, and then said, “And there are things going on in Thailand that we're not going to talk about.” There was this kind of—yes, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.

One of the things I learned about all of this, which is interesting and I want to learn more about, is the human psychology—the ability of the individual mind to compartmentalize things. It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don't mention a particular topic. My intuition about the human mind would be that if there's anything you're afraid of talking about, that fear will permeate through everything else. You would not be able to do great science, great exploration, or great technology.

And that idea, I think, underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech: why you don't want, in the United States, to censor any—even dangerous—speech, because that will permeate everything else. You won't be able to have great scientists. You won't be able to have great journalists. And I mean, I'm obviously biased toward America, and I think you do need to have that full-on freedom of speech, but this is an interesting case study.

And that's actually something that you speak about: that Mao, if he were alive today and visited China, would be quite surprised. Can you give the Nanjing bookstore as an example? Can you just speak to this? If Mao visited China, let's go with that thought experiment. What would he recognize? What would he be surprised by?

So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao wandering into this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. I thought about how he'd be like, “What's going on? Is the Communist Party not in control?” I mean, he talked about how art and politics needed to, in some ways, go together, and you've got all these kinds of things.

He also would have been shocked by all these books about how to start your own café and bar, sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, and how to get into Harvard. It's like, all of these things just wouldn't compute from his time.

Although I said it would actually maybe make him nostalgic for the time of his youth in the 1910s. He was a participant in the May Fourth Movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, “Well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this.”

Some of the coolest bookstores were things that I was just amazed could exist in the early 2000s. But you can still read and buy copies of 1984, and you can still get some of these other things. That was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I'm not sure you get permission to translate some of those things now. There's more of a sense of caution.

Some of those bookstores would also hold events that would talk about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about their applicability to the situation in China. Some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become shadows of what they were.

One of the best ones—not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one—was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station, and it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping, when things started narrowing, and it had to close in Shanghai.

It's just been reopened in Washington, D.C., as JF Books, and it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub. I'm really delighted. It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June. It's a book on the Milk Tea Alliance, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the rising influence of Beijing. It seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai.

So places like that stopped being able to exist on the mainland. Then they could still exist in Hong Kong, but now in Hong Kong, one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn't feel like it could continue operating under tightening control there. And it's reopened in upstate New York.

So you have this phenomenon of bookstores. There are also a few bookstores called the Nowhere bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai, Taipei, and The Hague. And I heard one is maybe going to open in, or is open in, Japan too. My sometime collaborator Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, sort of carrying on the conversations that people thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't, and imagined someday being able to hold in China but maybe can't.

So, first of all, boy, do I love America. And second of all, it makes me really sad because there are a very large number of incredible people in China, incredible minds. Maybe I'm romantic about this, but books are a catalyst for brilliant minds to flourish, and without that, there's a real loss. So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about.

Sometimes people will think, because of censorship, that there's an idea of brainwashing within China's population through control. I periodically get students from the mainland, and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes. I teach Chinese history, and I feel like, okay, now I'm contradicting the version of the past that they've been drummed into. But I'll still get students who are incredible free thinkers who have come through that system.

It just doesn't hold, or there are limits to it. Some of them are people who just got curious about something, and it is a porous system. It's more porous than North Korea, things like that. So even if there's that fear, friction, and flooding, which Margaret Roberts talks about, that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there are still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued.

They see an image sent by a friend of theirs on social media. Somebody will share something with them on WeChat that doesn't get picked up by the censors, but they look at it carefully and say, “Oh, well, wait a minute. That contradicts what the official line is.” So there are still ways in which creativity and freedom of thinking persist.

I mean, that's really beautiful to hear. Fundamentally, the human spirit is curious and wants to understand, and especially young people, as we mentioned, are suspicious of authority in the best kind of way. They're always asking all kinds of questions, but we always have the child—the young person—inside us, always asking, “Maybe I'm being lied to in all these kinds of ways.”

But still, it's sad, because if you're not deliberately doing that, or if there's not a spark of possibility that comes before you as just a regular citizen of China, you might never really ask. Maybe there's a whole different perspective on history, on world history.

To be fair, I think the United States is often guilty of this very U.S.-centric view of history. It's similar with Europe; Europe has a very Eurocentric view of history. I often enjoy talking to people from different backgrounds, from different parts of the world, about World War II, because it's clear that they've read certain chapters of the story a lot of times and not the other chapters of the story: the Western Front in Europe and the Eastern Front in Europe.

And then Japan's and China's role in World War II, and the history around that before and after World War II in China, is not often talked about in the United States. I'm sure, if I can venture a guess, that the opposite is true in China. I certainly know the opposite was true in the Soviet Union, and even in Europe, which directly experienced it. France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy all have very different ways of speaking and thinking and reading about World War II.

The same goes across all of history and all of culture. So yes, it's always good to question the mainstream narrative in your country and look outside. It's just harder to do in China, based on technology and all the reasons you've mentioned.

And if I can, I just want to give a shout-out. Thank you. I'll look at her work—Margaret Roberts and her ideas about fear, friction, and flooding. I can already tell there's a lot of brilliance here. Fear is the most traditional form, involving overt threats and punishments for accessing and sharing sensitive information.

However, Roberts finds that fear-based censorship is used selectively, mainly targeting high-profile individuals such as journalists or activists. For the average citizen, the risk of punishment is relatively low, and fear alone is not the main deterrent. She goes on to describe friction and flooding. Friction is attacks on access to information, and flooding is less visible than fear or friction, but is a powerful tool for shaping the information environment.

Flooding scares me more and more. Flooding is the brave new world.

Yeah, it is. And I think it's a whole world of short attention spans and social media and how this all works. I brought up Singapore because Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and some of the other leaders, were looking at that. Going to Singapore can sometimes make you feel like you're in this futuristic setting, in terms of a lot of things that eventually came to other parts of the world being tried out there.

I think the seductiveness is that some of these things are really convenient, but at the same time, they strip things away. They're collecting information about you, which can also make your life easier at the same time as it's stripping away your privacy. We talk about the siloing of information and the targeting of ads and news.

Two things come to mind. To mention one, Christina Larson, a very bright journalist and friend of mine, who was working in China, wrote about this in MIT Technology Review. She said, “You need to think about China as having the best as well as the worst internet experience in the world.”

The worst is easy to think of. You know, the Great Firewall: you try to search for what happened, you search for “Tank Man,” and you won't get it. You search for information about the Dalai Lama, and you get all these lies about him. You search for things about Xinjiang, and it makes it seem like it's a place where people are happy rather than a place with massive extralegal detention camps, where your life can be ruined by things you have no control over.

But she said that, in other ways, when it comes to consumer pleasures and things, it was really advanced. A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there, and in massive numbers. Around the time that I had read that, I was in Shanghai, and somebody was explaining it to me.

They were talking about going out to eat. I said, “Oh, we've got such and such.” And I said, “Oh, that's like Yelp.” He said, “Well, yeah, but Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We've got one that can tell you which part of the restaurant you want to sit in because there's a waiter who's in a really bad mood, and people have posted enough information to tell you that, or what the best dish there is in the last week.”

You had a lot of things that were like, “Okay, you're a smart city, and you're controlled.” You can learn things about ease of movement, and Singapore had some of these things tested too. Way before you move into an underground parking lot now in the U.S. and find out whether there are any empty spaces on a floor, that was something that had been done years before in Singapore.

And you used money less often there because you had a kind of transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things. It was something that could be very seductive.

The other line, besides “the best and worst internet,” that I always like is William Gibson, who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present, Neuromancer. He wrote a rare nonfiction piece about Singapore in which he referred to it as “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” There are times when I shouldn't laugh at that, but it is powerful. He's not welcomed in Singapore, let's just say.

He talked about how he went to Japan a lot in the 1980s, at a time when Japan was a place where you got a sense of what the future might hold. The dark side of this is the surveillance state at its worst, which we're seeing in Xinjiang and in other places. There again, it may seem like I'm just obsessed with science fiction, but it really is Minority Report.

It's this idea that you do certain kinds of behaviors, and we're seeing this in other places too. We're seeing versions of it in the U.S., where it's like, “Oh, we can tell from a pattern that you're the kind of person who might do X.”

So in Xinjiang, when they were starting to round people up, there's this great book by a Uyghur poet. He talks about how people were just starting to disappear off the streets, and they were being accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. The cues could be something like somebody giving up smoking or not drinking alcohol, because that was seen as something that sometimes went along with becoming more devoted to Islam and more devoted to a particular version of it.

#466

So he talked about how, when a group of poets and writers would get together, whether or not any of them drank, they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table, because it was simply a way of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kinds of clues.

You really have this dark side of Xinjiang. This is an example in Tibet, too, with incredible tight control, and there’s more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well. But I think the question of whether we give up too much, and who can abuse what we do give up, is something that is being asked in the United States now about big tech companies as well as governments. But it’s also asked about big tech and the trade-offs involved.

I hadn’t thought about it until this conversation, which, I can tell, is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations. You have set lines, but then the conversation goes on and you think in a different way.

So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was that the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power, and they realized that the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc were falling apart. They knew that one reason why communism fell in Eastern Europe—and this is the simple way of understanding it—was partly about ideals and a thirst for freedom, but also that East Germans knew West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff.

When some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went was this department store, to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. It was true. I think this is as human as the desire for more freedom.

One of the things that the Chinese Communist Party never articulated this way was: How can we try to get to a stage where we don’t have things like Tiananmen again? What if we tried to make a deal with people? We’ll give them more choices in their daily lives. We’ll give them better stuff. We’ll give them more choices at the store and more choices about what to read, because we’ll give them more choices in the consumer goods and intellectual goods they want, or allow them to watch the movies and read the books that other people like them around the world are reading.

So we’ll give them more choices. We won’t open the floodgates completely, but we’ll give them more choices—not at the ballot box or in politics. This was the new kind of social compact: Allow us to keep ruling, and we’ll make sure that you’re living better than the last generation in terms of choices and material goods.

Now, one of the things that’s happening is that the economy under the Chinese Communist Party isn’t booming the way it was before. The sense that we’re clearly living better materially than the generation before—it’s not as easy an argument to make when you have slower growth rates and things like that. But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now: The rest of the world is in chaos, and we’re more stable.

The thing that I hadn’t thought about, and that I’m now going to think about differently, is that the argument was, “We’ll give you more choices, and you’ll have more of a private life.” But now, in the period we’re in globally, there’s a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choice. The post-Tiananmen generation was promised a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state, and now globally we worry about the prying eyes of whether it’s the state or tech companies.

It’s a different moment. What does it mean to say you have more choices? It’s almost like you have 2 knobs. One is 1984 and one is Brave New World. At first, they turned up the Brave New World—more choices—and now they’re turning up 1984, keeping the choices but turning up the surveillance. So the choices you make have to be more public.

Do you have a sense that the increase in censorship we’ve been talking about predates Xi Jinping? Is Xi Jinping part of that increase in censorship? What is that dynamic? What role does Xi Jinping play in what China has gone through over the past, let’s say, decade and a half?

#466

That’s a really great question. I was actually just writing a review of 2 books. One is called The Xi Jinping Effect, which was an academic volume of scholars looking at different topics and asking how much Xi Jinping, as a person, has really affected them. They come up with all kinds of answers.

But there’s a book I really like. Emily Feng of NPR has a new book out called Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. What she talks about, in covering the changes in China from the mid-2010s onward—and I think this really is one of Xi Jinping’s imprints on the country—is a narrowing of the spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country.

This goes against the grain of a pattern in the post-Tiananmen period of allowing more space for civil society, but also allowing Muslims to feel that they didn’t have to choose between their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity. There’s more and more of a kind of narrowing. We see this in Xi Jinping becoming impatient with Hong Kong, where there was a way in which—okay, this is a city that’s part of the PRC, but it really operates very differently.

He seems to be uncomfortable with difference, I guess, and he’s not alone among strongmen in wanting to impose a kind of singular vision of what Chinese identity means and what loyalty to the status quo means. There’s been a kind of tightening of controls over all the borders. One thing she reported on was Mongolian in Inner Mongolia. It had been seen as an unproblematic kind of frontier area—who cares if there was some revival of the Mongolian language? But under Xi, there’s been less patience with those kinds of differences.

There’s been more of a resurgence of patriarchy. All kinds of things have happened under him, but how much is it just him, and how much is it also a kind of mood or group within the party? Some of these trends, I think, began before he took power in late 2012.

My own feeling, from going to China fairly often from the mid-1990s until about 2018, was that until 2008—the year of the Olympics—each trip would feel like, “Oh, there’s just more space. There’s more breathing room.” It wasn’t becoming a liberal democracy, but I would notice things that felt like, “I’m surprised that that happens.” People just felt less worried about what they were saying and what they were doing.

That trend continued up until about 2008. But from the Olympics, and then the financial crisis after that, the Chinese Communist Party felt—I guess it was still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. It was as if they were saying, “Okay, maybe we can start asserting more control over things.”

I think that’s been stronger under Xi Jinping’s time in power, and he was already the designated successor by 2008. He was in charge of security for the Olympics. The Olympics was supposed to be a moment of possibly more opening up, because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right-wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. Some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way, and it went quite the opposite.

You mentioned that we don’t know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping or the party apparatus, and that question goes back to Confucius and hierarchy: How does power within this very strict one-party state work? What can we say? What do we know about the structure of this Communist Party apparatus? How much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system?

#466

James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about how we should really be straight about what a black box Chinese elite politics are, and really not try to pretend we know more than we do.

We did used to have more of a sense of these ideological factions, but also of different views about how much tinkering there should be with the economy and things like that. They were also partly based on personalities and personal ties. We did have a sense that you could sort of map out these rival power bases and things.

We just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It’s very hard to know, other than the small group around him, how it works. We don’t have a major defector who says, “Yeah, this is how Xi Jinping works.” We have Xi Jinping’s self-presentation and a lot of things that are then said about him.

There were some false expectations about him. Some people thought, “Oh, he’s going to be a reformer,” because his father was a liberalizing figure, but that doesn’t work that way. He does seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China’s deep past.

We know he’s a strong nationalist and a kind of cultural nationalist as well as a political nationalist, but beyond that, we don’t have that much of a sense of what makes him tick. We get little hints. There was a secret speech that leaked out in which he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed because the leadership hadn’t paid enough attention to ideology.

#466

And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So I imagine that if he and Putin ever have a heart-to-heart conversation, 1 thing they’d find to agree on is this distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was doing things the wrong way—not manly enough.

Yeah.

#466

And 2, not strong enough about really keeping control. For Putin, it would be that it led to the loss of an empire. But for Xi Jinping, there’s a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union: “I’m not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this landmass that was, in a sense, rebuilt over time under Mao and then Deng Xiaoping.”

You have this very powerful story about the Chinese past that the Chinese Communist Party makes a lot out of, but that the Nationalist Party, which was Mao’s great rival, also made a lot out of. It has a partial basis in fact: from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, China, which had been a strong force in the world, got bullied and nibbled away at by foreign powers.

It’s important to realize that there are elements of that story that are very true, and the answer they had was, “Under my watch, that’s not going to happen.” The reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China’s place in the world. Both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party predicated themselves on this nationalistic story of being in a position to prevent that from happening again.

This is a bit of a tricky question, but is it safe for journalists—for folks who write excellent books about the topic—to travel to China?

#466

I think there are all kinds of different considerations about safety. Until recently, at least, the people who were most vulnerable were people of Chinese descent—people originally from China who had gone abroad and were coming back, or even Chinese Americans who went there. There was a higher expectation that they should be on board.

So you had early cases. My friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Al Jazeera and reporting on Xinjiang. That’s 1 kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal.

Another kind of person who was vulnerable—or, in this case, more likely to be blocked from China—were people from outside China who were amplifying the voices of people within China or exiles from China whom the government would like to silence. The Communist Party is particularly concerned about that.

The Dalai Lama, and scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to the Dalai Lama, were early people to have trouble going to the PRC. Then there were scholars who worked on Xinjiang and were connected to Uyghurs. But there also were people who were personally connected to dissidents or exiles who would amplify their voices, translate their work, or promote them.

In that case, it wasn’t necessarily dangerous if you got into China, but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party. I published them in some high-profile places. I’ve written a lot about Tiananmen and about human rights issues, and I kept getting visas to go to China.

I testified to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China about the Tiananmen protests on the 25th anniversary. Some people said, “Oh, that’s the kind of thing that would lead to you not getting a visa.” I got a visa right after that.

Now I think it might be different. Some of these expectations have changed. There have been people who’ve very surprisingly gotten in trouble. These 2 Canadians were clearly a kind of tit-for-tat, partly because a tech magnate’s relative was being held in Canada. It was also about not picking a fight with Americans.

But there were certain kinds of things where you could map out what was the riskiest thing to do. So I went in the 2010s, having written forcefully about Tiananmen, and I didn’t feel in danger. I felt there was an awareness, in some cases, of what I was saying. If I was giving a public talk, there was an awareness of what it was.

Sometimes you didn’t want to get your host, who had brought you to a university, in trouble by saying something that would get them in trouble. I think it was often that you were more vulnerable if you were within China or connected to China in different ways.

For me, it’s been confusing these last few years. I wrote 1 piece about this: I’m not going to any part of the PRC for the time being. But I always thought that Hong Kong was a place that I’d be free to go, even if things got difficult. I didn’t get a visa for the mainland; you didn’t need a visa for Hong Kong.

With the mainland, I had kept a kind of distance from the dissidents that I was writing about. With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules didn’t apply, and I was more connected to them—more friends with some of them. Then, with the crackdown that’s come to Hong Kong, there are exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads.

So now I feel that it’s not necessarily that anything would happen to me if I went to Hong Kong, but I feel I would be very closely watched. I wouldn’t want to meet with some of my friends there who aren’t this high-profile. I don’t want to go to a place where I would feel that I was toxic in some way, right?

1, you’re walking on eggshells, and 2, you can get others in trouble. That kind of dynamic is complicated.

So it’s fascinating that Hong Kong is now part of that calculus. I’ve gotten a chance to speak to a bunch of world leaders. Do you think it’s possible that I would be able to do an interview with Xi Jinping?

#466

If you do, I would be very pleased, because I could watch that interview and get some insights about Xi that have been very hard to get. It’s been really difficult. There have been very few discussions with him. He doesn’t meet with the press, and he doesn’t give press conferences. There are a variety of things, and this is different from some of his predecessors.

Jiang Zemin famously was interviewed by Barbara Walters and asked about Tiananmen, and he tried to make out that it wasn’t a big deal. There were a variety of things, but he had relatively spontaneous conversations. He’s the only Chinese leader I’ve met, but I met him before he was a major, major leader. He was the party secretary or mayor of Shanghai, and it matters because the party secretary is the more important role.

He met with a group of foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in 1988 for a conference on Shanghai history. Just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what’s going on in Chinese politics—and predictability is very hard in general in the world—the consensus among us, and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China, was that this was somebody who had probably topped out because he was meeting with us. He must not be heading anywhere up. And then, after Tiananmen, he became the top leader in China.

But you could pick things out from being in a room with him. He liked to show off his cosmopolitanism. Xi Jinping gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read, but it’s all very scripted, at least in his own head, too. It’s very carefully done to present a certain image of himself. We really don’t get many senses of what he’s like in unguarded moments, or whether he has them.

Sometimes we get the illusion of them. There was an image of him and Obama in their shirtsleeves at the Sunnylands meetings, and the photo showed them walking and talking. But there’s no translator in the image, so how are they talking? What language are they using? How is this? Or is it just a kind of performance?

There are, of course, exchanges with top leaders, and Trump will say they’re friends, or say these kinds of things. Xi Jinping can talk about somebody or some country being a friend, but we don’t have a sense of what makes him tick as a person.

So maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway and see if he really gets excited about him, because in the generic things he talks about, all these authors, you can feel him ticking things off: “Oh yes, I’m glad to be in England, the country of Shakespeare,” and this. He goes off these set things.

But Hemingway—there’s some sense that he had some special feeling, which fits in with some of the macho side. That would be interesting. He doesn’t mention Orwell as 1 of his favorite British authors as much. He says he likes Victor Hugo a lot, and that became a little tricky because “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables became 1 of the protest songs in Hong Kong.

Victor Hugo is a rare Western author who’s had a pretty steadily positive image in China, even during periods when all Western authors were problematic. Victor Hugo famously wrote a statement denouncing the European destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War. He said, “How can we claim to be civilized when we’ve destroyed 1 of the great creations of civilization?”

So that made him a long-term friend to the Chinese nation. Mark Twain has had a pretty good reputation because he was a critic of American imperialism. If you do get to talk to Xi Jinping, talk to him about Ernest Hemingway and Victor Hugo, and I’ll be curious to see if those were the ones who really resonated.

One of the things—and it’s a strange thing that I’ve become aware of, having spoken with world leaders—is that I’m distinctly aware there’s a real possibility that the black box we mentioned, the Communist Party of China, will listen to the words I’m saying now. And so I have to wonder how much that affects my possible tourist-like trip to China, because there’s a difference between an influencer that does fun things, plays video games, and goes over to China, and somebody that actually covers China to some degree, whether critical or supportive or nuanced, or any kind of way in the full spectrum of ideas you can have about China, including Chinese history.

Whether that’s going to be seen, carefully analyzed, and have repercussions when you travel—that, and because of the black-box nature, and because it’s, for me personally, just a culture that’s very different from anything I’m familiar with, it makes me a bit nervous.

#466

It’s certainly gotten harder for journalists to operate in China. There’s a way in which journalists now look back to the early 2000s, and it was really quite extraordinary what they could do. Well, you have a lot of listeners. I don’t think there’s that tight a watching of what an academic writes about the Chinese Communist Party, but there are certain things that are clearly kind of tightly policed.

One is discussions of the private life of Chinese leaders and their families, and issues of really following money trails for corruption and things like that. So there was the case of the Hong Kong booksellers who were kidnapped, and one of them is still in a Chinese prison. He would be a good example: Gui Minhai, the kind of person who was vulnerable.

He was born in China. He is a Swedish citizen, and he was spirited out of Thailand into the mainland. The reason why he was on the radar of the Communist Party was that the publishing house in Hong Kong that he was connected to was publishing works about the top tier of the Chinese Communist Party and contradicting the vision of them as a certain kind of moral exemplars.

That’s different from writing things about China having a bad human rights record, or something like that, as I did. These were books that were exposés—some of them kind of gossipy and lightly sourced, some of them much more serious—but they were about something that the Communist Party leadership wants to make a no-go zone.

I’ve thought sometimes that Xi Jinping seems to have lèse-majesté envy. I don’t think it’s general criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party as an authoritarian structure, or of it as a place that doesn’t deserve to rule, in very general terms. I don’t think that’s something where they then pick you up at the border and say, “Oh, no. We can’t let that person in,” because people are let in.

It’s not rational. It’s not a rational process. There are people who’ve been denied visas, and it seems pretty inexplicable. I think the rules are changing very quickly all over the world for what’s safe to say and do.

Well, either way, I do know that the Communist Party and likely Xi Jinping himself watched my conversation with Prime Minister Modi. They responded to it, and I do hope—and I will definitely go to China—that I hope to talk to Xi Jinping. It’s a fascinating, historic, ancient culture, and China is the major player on the world stage in the 21st century. It would be fascinating to understand the mind of the leader of that great superpower.

Speaking of leaders, what do we understand about the relationship between Xi Jinping and our current president of the United States, Donald Trump? Is there really a human connection, something approximating a friendship, as they’ve spoken about, or is it just purely realpolitik maneuvering—world leaders playing a game of chess? Or is it a bit of both?

#466

There’s a degree to which I think there’s some confusion about a couple of things. One is that, when there’s a sense that Trump is uniquely tough on the Chinese Communist Party, he has periodically said things praising Xi Jinping as a leader, even praising Xi Jinping’s strength. So, in some ways, for the personality cult of Xi Jinping, some of this is useful, because the Chinese Communist Party needs to tell a story about why it deserves to keep ruling. One of those stories is that the world is a dangerous place and there isn’t enough respect for China.

So when there’s very tough talk about China coming out of the White House, that’s useful. The other part is about Xi Jinping being just the right person to have at the helm. When there’s praise for him and his showing toughness, that also works well.

The argument among at least some China specialists is that the Chinese Communist Party likes predictability, and Xi Jinping seems to like predictability in particular. Donald Trump clearly isn’t a predictable figure, so there might be a way in which this is unsettling.

But I think the other part of it is that, under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party wants to gain more allies around the world. Xi Jinping wants China to be seen with more respect around the world, and at the moment he is in a position where he can present himself as an orderly, thoughtful, gradualist figure.

In some ways, as much as there is tension between the 2 capitals, things are going in a way that benefits Xi Jinping and can seem good. That doesn’t explain what their personal relationship is, how they actually see each other when they’re in the room together, and whether that matters or is part of the calculus at all, because after all, they are leaders of superpowers.

I think for Trump it matters. Personal relationships matter. But, of course, we see a lot. We know a lot about Donald Trump. We know a lot about the White House. Actually, let me just say as a tangent: for whatever you think about this particular White House, one of the things I really like is that every single member of the Cabinet is willing to talk for many hours every single week about what they think, how they see the world, and to explain Donald Trump’s approach.

It doesn’t matter if you disagree with what they’re saying. Maybe you say they’re dishonest, maybe they’re misrepresenting things, but there’s a lot of information. That’s something we don’t have with China, and it makes me, as a fan of history and as a fan of deep political analysis of the world, sad, because it’s a very asymmetrical amount of information.

But anyway, let me lay out this particular complexity we’re in now: this trade war between the United States and China. You’re not an economist. In fact, you think deeply about the history of peoples and the history of China. You think about culture, protests, movements, and so on. There’s some degree to which this trade war is less about the economics. That layer is also very important, and we could discuss it, but there’s also a deeply cultural standoff almost happening here, which would be interesting.

In April, as people know, Trump escalated a trade war with China, using tariffs and raising them on Chinese imports to 145%. Xi Jinping then responded by raising tariffs on US goods to 125% and suspending exports of certain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated it would limit the import of Hollywood films and restricted certain American companies from operating in China.

After that, Xi Jinping broke his silence on April 11 and again on April 14, basically saying that China is not backing down, and positioned himself and China as the “responsible superpower” that promotes, as you were saying, a reasonable multilateral global trading framework and a stable global supply chain. He said, “For over 70 years, China’s progress has been built on self-reliance and hard work, never on handouts from others, and it remains unafraid of any unjust oppression.”

He also said, “There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation.” This was all said as part of a tour of Southeast Asia, and he was calling on China and the European Union to defend international rules opposing unilateral bullying.

At the same time, I saw that China’s escalating internal propaganda included, interestingly—it would be nice to talk to you about it—the use of Mao Zedong’s 1953 speech during the Korean War, where he says, “We will never yield.” My question is, with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go?

I think one persistent theme—there’s a lot to unpack there for a historian, too—is that the reference to being bullied by a foreign power is something that comes up periodically and plays to this notion of the 100 years of national humiliation that’s been talked about by generations of Chinese leaders, referring to the period from the 1840s to the 1940s.

There was a group of foreign powers involved in bullying China in one way or another, and you can selectively pick one or another. If Xi Jinping gives that kind of speech in Southeast Asia, he’s speaking to a place where there is knowledge of times in the past when the United States was an aggressive force there. It’s also a part of the world where there have been times when China has been that.

So there is a way of positioning vis-à-vis other parts of the world that is a crucial part of this. I guess I’m circling around it, but there’s a tendency in discussions of US-China relations to think about it in terms of a bilateral discussion or dispute, even though time and again we realize that places other than the United States are key variables in these things.

So, with the US and China being at odds during the Mao era, what changed things dramatically?

#466

It wasn't so much a change in—I mean, yes, Nixon was the one who went to China, but what made it possible for Nixon to go to China was that the Sino-Soviet split happened. It was actually tensions between China and the Soviet Union that altered the equations for the United States and China.

Another example: I happened to be in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and 3 Chinese citizens died. There was tremendous discontent and anger about that within China. There were some rare protests that the government allowed to happen, but students were worked up about it, and there were protests outside the American embassy and the British embassy. That happened, and then in 2001 there was a spy plane incident. There was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see US-China tensions being the major force in the world.

9/11 happened. It was a dramatic reset for the trajectory that the US and China were on. These are 2 totally different things: the Sino-Soviet split and 9/11. In both cases, no matter how careful you were at parsing what was likely to be the next 5 years for US-China relations, it got dramatically changed by something that happened that wasn't the US and China.

During the current situation, the trade war, I know that it will be very important that China can increase—try to increase—sales of consumer products to Europe. This is something, and Europe's view about the United States is changing right now. These are all kinds of variables that are outside of simply Washington and Beijing being the 2 actors. Sometimes Beijing can't control what's happening outside, and sometimes Washington can't. So, I guess this is simply saying that when you're watching and trying to keep your eye on the ball, it matters a lot what India's relationship to China and the United States is.

All of these are happening there. So, I think that's it: it's both tremendously important what's going on between China and the United States, but it's important to remember that they're not the only players in this dynamic.

Also, on top of this, how much cultural will is there to sort of not surrender to bullying? How much of that is there? So, like you said, the century of humiliation, both for Xi Jinping and the Chinese populace—like, willingness to go through some short-term pain to not be humiliated.

#466

The story that's been intensively told about the past is something that provides the possibility for this to matter a lot. It's so much a part of the legitimating story of the Chinese Communist Party. Then you have to look at whether there are things that are happening that aid the Chinese Communist Party's story.

So, the rise of what can seem like, or is, anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States can feed that propaganda story. Certainly, during COVID, there was a way that if you're the Chinese Communist Party and you're saying, “We get a disproportionate amount of blame for whatever happens in the world,” then if there were things you could point to in the foreign media or from foreign governments, that helps you.

So, I think there is a setup here where, certainly for Xi Jinping, the desire to not be seen as weak is crucial.

Sometimes I wonder how much these leaders operate on pure ego, because politically and on a human level they don't want to come off as losers in a standoff versus coming to an economic win-win for both nations. And I worry that there is a real pride here, that the century of humiliation has deeply saturated the populace and the Communist Party—this idea that they're just not going to back down.

And that, I think, will cause tremendous pain in the short term for the United States, for China, and the world, because it completely transforms the supply chain of everything. There is a global nature, a multilateral nature, of all the economic partnerships that have formed throughout the 21st century.

This kind of protectionist, nationalistic ideology goes in the face of all of that, and it's going to create a huge amount of pain for regular Americans. But also, I worry that this increases, not decreases, the chance of a global war or conflict of different kinds. Do you see a hopeful possibility for resolution, for de-escalation here?

#466

It's a hard time to figure out what you can do to find hopeful angles. I mean, I guess what's hard is to even balance these things out.

One of the things that I've thought about when you talk about rising chances of war, Taiwan often comes to mind with China. One of the things that I've thought of is that, for Xi Jinping, the chances of military action against Taiwan would be increased by a sense of desperation, a sense of losing popularity, or a sense of not having a good story to tell about why he and the party deserve to lead.

So then there's a kind of way of playing to the national sentiments of some part of the population. In a sense, it's hopeful that, in some ways, right now Xi Jinping is not looking desperate in the eyes of the world. He can focus on potentially being seen more positively in other parts of the world by seeming like a kind of force for stability, seen as somebody who's supporting rather than challenging some elements of the global order.

That might lessen the chances of a rash action toward Taiwan. That would be a kind of desperation move.

The complicated thing here is that if he gives in, he can come off as the responsible person who cares about the world, or he can come off weak. If he doesn't give in and even escalates the tariffs—although I think he said no more escalation on the China front—then he comes off strong, but also the equally unreasonable person who doesn't care about the world, who only cares about his own ego and maybe some aspect of the Communist Party maintaining power.

Because, just like with Tiananmen Square and the Tank Man, you don't know, once you make the decision, how the world will read that decision, what kinds of things will become viral memes about the telling of that story. And, of course, in part, I think Donald Trump's reach is much wider because he's constantly out there, and I think there's more reserved, less messaging out of Beijing.

So, it's a really chaotic environment in which to make strong decisions. But since you brought it up, we'll talk about Hong Kong, but let's talk about Taiwan, and maybe there are some parallels there. Given Xi Jinping's emphasis on the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and unification with Taiwan being a crucial part of his vision for China, what do you think are the chances, and how willing is he to use force to annex—to forcibly gain control over—Taiwan in the coming years?

#466

I'll frame it in a way that I think does lead into talking about Hong Kong, because I think these are connected issues. In 1984—the year, not the book this time—that's when a deal was struck, basically, between London and Beijing over what would happen to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Island became a British colony at the end of the First Opium War, in the 1840s. Then the Kowloon Peninsula near there became a British colony in the 1860s, after the Second Opium War. But then there was a large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong, called the New Territories, that came under British control in 1898 but was not a colony. It was a 99-year lease.

So, 1997 was this kind of expiration date for the lease of this large amount of territory of what we now think of as Hong Kong. It's a large amount of territory that the rest of Hong Kong—Hong Kong Island and Kowloon—depend on for energy, water, and food. So, it would have been very hard to just give back, to transfer those parts to the People's Republic of China.

A deal needed to be struck over what would happen in 1997. The London side wanted to do something to protect what was going to happen to the people there. Remember, this is not what usually happens to colonies. Colonies usually go from being part of an empire to being some degree of self-governed.

Because of that, the Chinese representative at the UN insisted that Hong Kong was not a colony and Macau was not a colony, because then they would have to be decolonized and become independent. But, anyway, there was an understanding that something would have to happen in 1997.

London wanted some protection for the people in Hong Kong, who they knew were living in a very different way than people lived under Communist Party rule. There was a different kind of rule of law. There wasn't democracy, but there was some degree of input in governance.

The colonial authority in Hong Kong—the most powerful person in Hong Kong—was appointed by London. After 1997, the most powerful person would probably have to be somebody who could work with Beijing. But in this negotiation, something called “one country, two systems” was come up with.

Hong Kong would become part of the People's Republic of China in diplomatic terms. It wouldn't have its own military, but it would have its own system for 50 years. That was the idea, from 1997 till 2047. There was tension from the beginning over what that other system was going to be, what part was going to be separate.

#466

Clearly, everybody agreed that Hong Kong would need to have a different economic system. It had capitalism, so people agreed on that. But there was tension from the start over legal, political, cultural, and other things. Things were written into this deal: over time, Hong Kong people would govern Hong Kong. But Beijing thought they would govern Hong Kong, and it would be a Hong Kong person whom Beijing played a role in choosing.

The reason why Taiwan is relevant to all this is that in 1984, as they were discussing this, the Chinese Communist Party said, “We’ll come up with this arrangement, and people in Taiwan should pay attention to it, because it could provide a model for what could happen with them being absorbed into the People’s Republic of China.” The idea was that Beijing was saying, “Hey, people in Taiwan, watch what happens to Hong Kong after 1997 and think about it as a model for what could happen with you.” It was saying, “Watch how smoothly it will go.”

Over time, people in Hong Kong started saying, “Well, wait. Beijing keeps nibbling away at, chipping away at, these things that make us separate.” Especially after 2008—I mean, there were reasons why Beijing went especially light on Hong Kong early on after 1997. They wanted to join the WTO. They wanted to host the Olympics. A big move against Hong Kong then could have endangered those things. Also, at that point, the PRC was heavily dependent on the Hong Kong economy.

Also, because I’m a university person, in 1997, when Hong Kong became part of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong universities were the only universities in the PRC that were considered totally world-class. The University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong were highly rated institutions. At that point, Peking University and Tsinghua University were not yet considered world-class institutions, because they didn’t have the kind of economic and academic freedom in the humanities that was, at that point, needed to have higher ratings. Over time, that difference started to go away, because global ratings of universities stopped caring as much about academic freedom and things like that. Beijing universities surpassed Hong Kong universities.

By the 2010s, when you started to have these protests in Hong Kong pushing back against what was called mainlandization, and against this sort of clamping down, Hong Kong protesters in 2014 put up a banner. Beijing was holding the line against Hong Kong people who wanted to have real elections to choose the chief executive, rather than a system where there were elections but only people whom Beijing approved could basically run. Hong Kong activists put up a banner saying, “Hey, Taiwan, look at Hong Kong. Taiwan, beware. Hong Kong’s today could be Taiwan’s tomorrow.” So, basically, they were turning the one-country, two-systems argument around and saying, “Yeah, Taiwan, you should watch what happens here.”

One way to think of Chinese leaders since Mao is that Mao and those after him wanted to make China territorially bigger than it had been, to try to reclaim land. Under Mao, Tibet, which had not been part of China, became part of the People’s Republic of China. Mao offered something a little bit like one country, two systems to it. Isabel Hilton, who writes wonderfully about Tibet, has talked about the parallels with the Hong Kong system, and some Hong Kong activists saw parallels as well.

Tibet was supposed to go its own way as part of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Then, by 1959, the center got restless and tried to interfere more. Local people pushed back against it, and what seemed like it might work out somehow, against all odds, exploded. The Dalai Lama went into exile. The Dalai Lama had previously thought that maybe he and Mao could work together, but that didn’t work.

In Hong Kong, a new version of the experiment happens, and it becomes clear in the 2010s that it’s not really workable. The center is less patient, needs Hong Kong less, and the Hong Kong people feel that it’s more of a now-or-never period to push back.

You could say that Deng Xiaoping oversaw the deal that got Hong Kong and Macau to become part of the People’s Republic of China. He could point to that, even though he died right before 1997. But he had achieved that kind of deal. Xi Jinping could argue—you could argue—that he finished the deal of making Hong Kong fully a part of the People’s Republic of China, doing away with this degree of difference. You could say that this is a stepping stone toward Taiwan. Or you could say that this and the South China Sea island buildup might be enough for him to put his stamp on having been the kind of leader who expanded Beijing’s reach.

He probably wants both. To the extent that he would like Taiwan to become part of the People’s Republic of China—which Taiwan has never been part of—the hope was that it could happen through a more gradual absorption, with people in Taiwan being willing to think of that. Yet, in part because of what’s happened to places like Hong Kong, there’s a fiercer, stronger sense of Taiwanese identity now than there was at an earlier point. The parties that are more willing to try to negotiate some kind of tighter connection with the PRC are often doing badly in elections there because of this mood.

2047 is 50 years from the 1997 handover that you were talking about with Hong Kong. On top of that, 2049 is 100 years from Mao taking power. It feels like at that moment China could take Taiwan, because it does seem that there’s a kind of value for history in China, and they take these dates very seriously.

On the other hand, as you have studied, there are tensions, displeasure, and protests—some of the biggest in human history—in Hong Kong. Put all of that together, and so many possible trajectories of human history can happen here.

#466

Yeah. I mean, I’m particularly interested in youth movements, and one of the things about generations—I think generation is such an important factor. People know that generation is important, but sometimes people think that if you divide people up into economic groups, or into racial or ethnic classes, those groups somehow seem more tangible. But I think with things like the Hong Kong protests, there was a process of what was seen as mainlandization, of Beijing moving to make the things that were really distinctive about Hong Kong less distinctive and minimizing the differences.

This process sped up dramatically after the 2019 protests. Partly because of the distraction of COVID and the distraction of the world, there was this imposition of a national security law that basically did away with the differences. You had some people in the city from an older generation saying, “Why couldn’t they have just been more patient? Why did these protests force the hand of the people in power?”

But I think age has a lot to do with it. If there was this kind of gradual erosion, or there was going to be this process of doing away with the things that made Hong Kong really special and that people loved passionately about it, including a freer press, or just a freer associational life and things like that, then the age you were mattered. If you were 17 in 2019 and people were saying, “By 2047, it will all be gone,” or, “Maybe it’ll even all be gone in 10 years,” then you’re talking about living most of your life in a Hong Kong that isn’t the Hong Kong you really love. Whereas, if you were 80, you were saying, “Why not be patient?”

People in between had all kinds of other things. This is one thing that often leads to a kind of rationality toward younger people being more militant about certain kinds of things. I think we see the same thing with climate change and climate activism. You’re talking about whatever the projection is of when things are going to get worse further down the line. The younger you are, the more of your life is going to be lived in that scenario. There’s a logic for more of that kind of impatience.

There’s also a sense of frustration with an older generation not having done enough to resolve issues. These are things with Hong Kong, with climate change, and with Thailand, the place that I’ve been working on lately. One of the slogans in 2020, when there was a push for democracy, was, “Let it end with this generation,” which again expressed this kind of sense that gradual solutions are fine, but we’re carrying more of the burden of what we’re going to live with.

With 2019 and the protests, some of the things that were being chipped away at by Beijing had begun earlier. In 2012, there was an effort to impose mainland-style patriotic education. It was seen as something like, “Who cares how civics is taught?” But actually, that has a lot to do with the larger political story. The protesters that year—young people—stood up and actually got the government to blink. The local authorities backed down on bringing in mainland-style education.

In 2014, the protest was an attempt to get full voting rights for the chief executive. The government didn’t blink on that. That was something where they held the line. It was a big, colorful, exciting protest, but in the end, it hit a dead end.

In 2019, there were even bigger protests, and at first, it seems surprising what the issue was. The issue was an extradition law that would have potentially allowed people who committed crimes in Hong Kong to be tried for them on the mainland if the mainland wanted them. The difference is that they’re really different court systems. Hong Kong never had democracy under the British, but it did have a stronger rule of law and more independent courts—courts that sometimes decided things that went against what the government wanted. The mainland doesn’t have that kind of court system.

#466

98–99% conviction rate. In Hong Kong, if you were arrested, even before 2020, under a kind of politically related charge, you were out on bail and giving interviews with the press. On the mainland, that didn’t happen.

So I think in 2019, having lost the battle over voting, there was this idea that, okay, we’ve really got to take a last stand to defend the rule of law and a kind of degree of separation of powers. That doesn’t sound like an obviously compelling thing for slogans, but it is something that I think we’ve realized in this country and in other countries as well is really definitive about where things are politically.

Well, I should also say this is more dramatic than it sounds with extradition, because it gives power to mainland China to imprison political activists and then try them in a very different way. It’s not just a different system; it gives another lever, and a powerful one, to punish people who speak against China. I mentioned the Hong Kong booksellers who were spirited over the border, and one of them was still in prison for having published things in Hong Kong that it was supposed to be okay to publish in Hong Kong, but not on the mainland, and yet they ended up being charged.

There was a clear sense that if they didn’t protest, would they be able to protest later? This was one of maybe the biggest protests in history, percentage-wise, because there were 1–2 million people in the biggest protests, and this is a 7.5-million-person city. If you think about what that means, it’s just enormous.

There were some very daring protests around that period: the Hong Kong ones, and the year after that, protests in other places, including Belarus, where people were again taking big risks. If people have a feeling that it’s a kind of last moment, these were giant, and the protests kept growing. I think they kept growing in part—and this happens with protests; it’s always hard to figure out—but in the case of Tiananmen and in the case of Hong Kong in 2019, if people feel that the protesters have the moral high ground in one way or another, that can make a difference.

What tipped it that way in Hong Kong, I think, was really that the police were using strong-arm methods, and the government was never apologizing or saying, “We need to investigate that.” What really kept the protests going was that they became a referendum on the right to protest itself. What I think the government hoped, and what Beijing certainly hoped, was that some of the protesters would start taking militant, violent actions that would alienate the populace from the protests.

The protesters did do some of those things, but they tended to attack property; the violence was often against property. When there was occasional violence against people, people within the movement would apologize or try to distance themselves from it. Meanwhile, the government was never apologizing or distancing itself from the police. That created a dynamic where they had these enormous numbers of people who were previously on the fence about things turning up for these protests and leading to them being giant.

Even people were turning up, and this was a city that sometimes had the reputation—an often-misunderstood reputation—of being one where people didn’t care that much about politics; they just focused on living a good life. But there was a sense that they wouldn’t have that possibility if the police were behaving this way. The police used to be really highly respected in Hong Kong, but they lost that.

Maybe you can speak to some of the dynamics of this. First of all, you were there in the early days, as I understand. How does a protest of this scale explode as it did? It starts with small groups of students, of young people. From all the studying of youth protests, how does maybe anger, maybe ideological optimism, maybe the desire for revolution and for better times amongst a small group of students become a movement? How does that become a gigantic protest?

#466

One of the things emphasized by some of the most impressive books I’ve been reading about other places is that protests are often preceded by other protests that may seem like dead ends, but actually provide people with the kinds of skills, scripts, and repertoires to then carry out things on a larger scale.

We often get captivated by a moment that seems to come out of nowhere, but it often doesn’t. The ground can be laid by an earlier generation that passes on the stories about it, or it can be laid just a few years before. Sometimes a new generation will say, “Look at what they did. That was exciting, but we want to put our mark on things,” generation by generation.

In 1986, there were protests that sort of fizzled out, which helped lay the groundwork for the 1989 ones. In Hong Kong, there were the 2012 and 2014 protests that laid the groundwork for 2019. Sometimes it was the same activists out on the streets again, but sometimes it was a younger generation that said, “Yeah, okay, but that failed, so what can we do differently?”

We see this in cases in the U.S. and around the world: this kind of percolation of things that happen, sometimes in conversations that continue. Sometimes failures can seem like dead ends, but over a long period of time, we see them as succeeding. It can seem irrational to try to do something after the last 3 times people have tried to do it have failed. But occasionally history shows that the 3rd time, or the 5th time, or the 20th time actually does succeed.

In Eastern Europe, you would say that in 1956 there was a rising, and it was crushed. In ’68, there were risings, and they were crushed. In Poland in 1981, martial law was imposed. In 1989, what were East German protesters thinking when they poured out onto the streets? Then it happened. But this time, it wasn’t crushed.

I think there’s a way in which social movements are fundamentally unpredictable, and there are just times when, against all seeming odds, something that seemed like it would be there forever just no longer is.

And that’s the case you make for when the odds seem impossible: it’s still worthwhile.

#466

It doesn’t mean that it will work. But I think history has enough examples of things that seemed impossible. This explains why certain figures are so inspirational for generations of activists. There’s a reason why people talk about Václav Havel, whereas if Václav Havel had died in 1988, people would have said, “Oh, maybe he was a great writer, but he didn’t live to see his political project come to fruition.” But then he lived to 1989 and became president, against all expectations.

Rebecca Solnit has a new book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, and she’s talking about taking a longer view of some struggles that seem to achieve things after the point when people might have imagined that they had run into dead ends. She’s talking about keeping your eye on the gains that happen, even incrementally, and the ways in which there’s a need to take a longer-term perspective on some of these things.

I think it’s a strange thing because there’s also often an impatience in movements, with people wanting immediate results. But as a historian looking at situations, I mentioned Eastern Europe and Central Europe. Taiwan was a right-wing dictatorship under a version of martial law for decades, and at each stage it would seem that people struggling to change it were on a quixotic, impossible kind of mission. South Korea was in a similar situation, and then in the late 1980s you start to have those things unravel.

It’s partly because of a kind of steady resistance, and it’s partly because something in the world changes, but there’s often a combination of those things. I’m interested in that whole question. We know that what happened in Hong Kong in the short run didn’t work, and I don’t see a way in which the national security law is reversed or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that it was a completely impossible effort, even though we know the result in that case was failure.

So the protests are generally worthwhile. As I look at the description of the migratory routes ideas take, they seed ideas in the minds of people. Then they live with those ideas and share those ideas; they deliberate through those ideas; they might travel to different places in the world, and then those ideas return and rise up again and again.

There are 2 parts of the world that I think are fascinating and unpredictable. One is Iran, where the trajectory that place takes might have a completely transformative effect on the Middle East. The other one is China, and the protests—whether in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or maybe other influential parts of China—could have a completely transformative effect on the world if those ideas keep percolating up and up again.

#466

So maybe this is another case where the people and leaders in the Chinese Communist Party do know about history, and they care about history. One history they know is that the Chinese Communist Party was almost destroyed in 1927. I mean, if you were taking odds on the chances that this ragtag group being pursued in Shanghai would survive, they would have seemed very low, and yet over time they somehow managed to ride it out and eventually come to power.

#466

There's an awareness of the ways in which the seemingly impossible can happen. It doesn't mean it will. This is why I think one of the really tragic or heart-rending things is that you can have situations in which movements that seem to be pursuing an impossible end result achieve that result, and then, after another period, the country goes into another really difficult period, or it seems that the successes are being rolled back.

My new Milk Tea Alliance book that I've just written is dedicated to 2 people who've lived through a variety of these things. One is a Burmese activist who was involved in a failed uprising in 1988. He then was an exile who didn't know whether he could ever see his brothers, whom he loves, back in Burma. Something magical changed, and in the 2010s it seemed that there was a kind of democratization that turned out to be a false dawn.

He was able to go back, and now, again, when there's been a coup and a crackdown, he's again cut off. At one point, I was asking him how he feels about this while he's still trying to raise awareness globally about what's happening in Myanmar, and he said, “I feel helpless, but not hopeless.” I think, how does somebody maintain hope in that?

The other person I dedicated it to is Miklós Haraszti, a Hungarian friend of mine who was an activist before ’89 and saw this amazing thing happen, with communist party rule ending. He was part of that process, and he was friends with Václav Havel. Havel was there, Poland was changing, and all of this was an exhilarating moment, but he ends up being a critic of Orbán, following a tightening of control and a rolling back of many of the things that were victorious then.

There's no straight road. There's something disquieting about these unexpected things being blows to where you thought the direction of history was going. But history just shows you that history doesn't have a direction. There isn't a straight road.

Yeah. The idealism of youth can lead to things like the Russian Revolution, and then you get Stalin, World War II, and the purges and all of that entailed. A successful protest and a successful revolution might have unintended consequences that far overshadow whatever ideals and dreams you had fighting for the working class, whatever it was in that particular case.

That can cause immeasurable suffering. So, there is no direction to history. There's just some lessons we pick up along the way, and we try to help humanity flourish. We barely know what we're doing, and now we have nuclear weapons.

#466

Some of the people I find really admirable are not trying to create totalistic change. They focus on trying to do what they can, within constrained circumstances, for the things they believe in. In Thailand, they've hit a roadblock again over trying to bring about electoral change. A party that did really well was then disqualified.

The activists I know are focusing on local efforts to improve a neighborhood, to keep a neighborhood from suffering from a kind of unthinking gentrification. They're thinking small. They're thinking, sometimes, about just, “What can we do to improve the lives of people within certain communities?” How can we build? How can we contribute to the kinds of social groups that might make some kind of incremental improvement toward creating the kind of world that we want to live in? People do that in all kinds of ways.

What kind of parallels can we draw between Taiwan and Hong Kong? What do you think the people of Taiwan are thinking, looking at Hong Kong?

#466

I think the way that things developed in Hong Kong has undermined the kind of trust in any story coming out of Beijing that there's a place within Xi Jinping's version, at least, of the People's Republic of China for people who live very different kinds of lives. I think a lot of people in Taiwan feel they're living a very different kind of life from people on the mainland.

So, in that way, I think Hong Kong was an important example. There were connections between Taiwan and Hong Kong. There was a Taiwan protest in 2014, before the big protest in Hong Kong, by young people who felt the government then was moving too much toward working together with Beijing.

They've been interconnected stories, and I think we sometimes miss how people within a region are looking at what other people in the region are doing and taking clues from it about how to agitate for the things they care about, what the risks are, and what the dangers are. Autocrats within different parts of the region are looking at each other, too, as well as globally.

That's in part because there's a great dependence in the United States on TSMC, and in that way on Taiwan, for different supply chains—for electronics, for semiconductors, for a lot of our economy. There's been a lot of nervousness about Taiwan. What are the chances that there is some brewing military conflict over this question of Taiwan in the coming decades, and how can we avoid it?

It's one of these really worrisome issues. There isn't an easy answer. I think any experts who tell you they know the X, Y, and Z about this are deluding themselves. There are probably so many variables. Maybe you could just elaborate on the possible clues we have.

#466

So, from talking to people in Taiwan and from Taiwan, there are a couple of things that are clear. One is that daily life in Taiwan does not consist of people waking up each morning and living their lives based on the fact that they're in such a perilous predicament. Life goes on, and a lot of people feel very fortunate to be in Taiwan. There are many reasons why it seems like a great place to live in many ways.

Even though this is hanging over them, at the same time there is an awareness of things that increase precariousness. There was a lot of concern with the invasion of Ukraine and watching how the response to that was handled. There was a sense of it being analogous. There was a sense that Xi Jinping would be watching the response to Putin and seeing what he would do then.

So, there was a sense of relief, I think, when there was as unified a Western and NATO response, including the United States, as there was. Then there's concern about the Trump presidency because of Ukraine. At the same time, there are mixed signals. I'm sure there are people there who are saying, “Trump is going to be tough toward the Chinese Communist Party,” and others are going to say, “But if he's not supporting Ukraine, what does that say for the defense of Taiwan?”

They're not the same situations, but all people have, in a sense, sometimes with unknowable situations, is to look at things that have any degree of parallel connections in other places.

Do you think Xi Jinping knows what he's going to do in the next 5–10 years with Taiwan? Or is it really that there's a loose historical notion that Taiwan should be part of China, with Xi Jinping and the Communist Party believing that this loose idea was accepted?

#466

Chiang Kai-shek and Mao both thought that these 2 places were somehow destined to be the same. During that period, Chiang Kai-shek thought, “How long until I take over the mainland and it all becomes the Republic of China?” This is not now something that any leader in Taiwan believes.

There is a degree to which that remains a kind of sense within the Chinese Communist Party leadership as an eventuality. I don't think there's a set plan, in part because I think it is also dependent on what the costs in various realms would be of doing that. I think it still does. One scenario would possibly be becoming strong enough not to have to worry about the consequences.

I think another scenario, which I still think is more likely to some extent, would be a sense of weakness or precarity in maintaining power domestically and needing to do something to distract. Another complexity about this is that it's not always so clear where the line is between no conflict and conflict.

There are a lot of gray-zone tactics of nonviolent pressure that China could exert. It could use non-military violence. It could then escalate that to nonviolent military intimidation. All of this has consequences for the United States because there's a messaging component going on here. Then, of course, that could go to full-on “do as you're told” actions that come at a high risk of a hot military conflict.

So, basically, don't do military violence, but just apply full-on pressure, ordering Taiwan to do things. At that point, the only way to respond is with violence. You're completely trapped. If you're saying no, you have to say no with a military force behind it. And then what do you do?

At every step in this, it's such an unstable, nonlinear dynamical system where anything could happen. Unintended consequences can happen, and it could just escalate in a matter of days, if not hours. This is where I think it's really important to find mechanisms, tactics, and strategies for de-escalation.

That's why this trade war that's happening—one of the nice things about being so connected by trade is that it creates a disincentive for any of this kind of posturing. I do agree with you, but I think it will start, as these things often do, as a kind of military early-step posturing in order to maintain power internally. So, China will just create military conflict—conflict of different kinds—in order to distract.

But then how does that escalate?

#466

As if all that wasn't complicated enough, Taiwan isn't just one place or one island. There are also other islands that are closer to the mainland, like Kinmen, and the degrees of integration are different. But your comment about integration of trade and having it serve as a check on violence is important.

There's a Chinese writer, Han Han, who's a fascinating guy. He was a race-car driver, a filmmaker, and a bad-boy novelist. In his heyday, he was an interesting kind of blogger who was testing the edges of things, and he had this blog post in the early 2000s where he was talking about how China was building the massive Three Gorges Dam project.

He said some people were arguing that building these dams would make it so easy for the Americans to just bomb them and destroy the country, because it would cause a massive flood. And he said, “But that's really silly. That's a really silly argument, because Americans know that downriver from there, what would be flooded out is the place where their iPhones are built, and they want their iPhones.”

So, through a humorous point, he's making this notion of the way in which interconnectedness can be a check. Interconnectedness can take all kinds of forms: the flow of people between places, and having people from one place living in another, traveling to another, studying in another. That can actually be something that helps to stabilize the world, and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.

Since you mentioned the Long March and the unlikely coming to power of the Communist Party, let's go back. We began comparing Xi Jinping and Mao. Let's go back to Mao. How did Mao come to power? What was the road to Mao coming to power?

#466

We need to first say that China was under the rule of emperors until 1911, when they were overthrown by an upheaval that was partly led by people who wanted to change China into a republic. But some people also wanted to get rid of the last dynasty, which was ruled by a group of Manchu ruling families, because they saw them as ethnic outsiders.

It was a strange combination of ethnic nationalists who wanted China back under the control of Han Chinese and other people who thought the time for rule by emperors was over and wanted to establish a republic. Sun Yat-sen became the provisional president of this newly formed Republic of China. But then he got nudged out of power by a military strongman, and there was a period when the country was really divided. The Republic of China didn't have a strong government.

But there were then 2 groups. One rallied around Sun Yat-sen, who had founded something that became known as the Nationalist Party. And then there was a small group of people who formed the Communist Party. Mao was one of them. These were intellectuals who were part of the May Fourth Movement of 1919.

They were inspired by Marxist ideas, but they were also inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia was nearby. It seemed good to think with. It had a largely rural population, and somehow it seemed to be getting stronger in the world. There was interest in what China could do to achieve that.

The newly formed Soviet Union did something very important. There were a group of foreign powers, including Tsarist Russia, that had gained big concessions out of China when the Boxer Uprising had taken place in 1900 and then been crushed by a consortium of foreign powers that had gotten privileges and indemnities out of it. The newly formed Soviet Union renounced those, saying, “That was the old order. That was imperialism.”

Marx's ideas were attractive to some Chinese thinkers, but Lenin was very attractive because of his combination of anti-imperialism and his notion of a vanguard party leading a country forward. So there was a small Communist Party and a bigger Nationalist Party. They were involved in protests against warlords and against imperialists.

While Sun Yat-sen was alive, he got the 2 parties to work together. Sun Yat-sen wasn't a Marxist. He didn't believe in class struggle, but he admired Lenin and Leninism. So he said that the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party might have had different views of the path forward for China, but they agreed on who the enemies were.

The enemies were the warlords, who were keeping China weak and too willing to compromise with Japan and foreign imperialism. China needed to get rid of the warlords and become a stronger country, and then they could sort out what road to take.

Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, initially kept the alliance going with the Communist Party. But in 1927, he turned against the Communists and tried to carry out a purge against Communist Party members. He was the head of the Nationalists, and he was a culturally more conservative figure.

What's important in part about this is that there were some members of the Chinese Communist Party who accepted the basic ideas of Marxism—that revolution comes from the cities—but Mao had this idea. He loved the idea of peasant rebellions in China's past driving history forward, and he started writing about how, in China's case, the peasantry—farmers—could be a radical force.

The Communist Party was on the run. It was being pushed around, and the Nationalists were trying to exterminate it. But eventually, the Nationalists and the Communists allied again after Japan invaded China in the 1930s. They formed what was called a Second United Front.

During this period, Mao was emerging as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, with a different vision of communist revolution in which the revolutionary vanguard was somehow the peasantry. After World War II, after the 2 parties had brokered a truce and worked together against Japan, there was a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Against all odds, the Communist Party won.

The Communist Party got support from the Soviet Union, and the Nationalists got support from the United States, even though neither of them were quite doing things the way their backer would have liked them to. But there is also a way in which the Communist Party leaders remember this.

There's a feeling that the Nationalist Party didn't really believe its own rhetoric, that, in fact, all it cared about was having power and that it was internally corrupt. Chiang Kai-shek himself isn't viewed as personally corrupt, but his family members are, and there's an idea that there's just a small band of people who are benefiting. There's a kind of disgust with the leader and with the Nationalists.

The Nationalists end up in retreat in Taiwan. That's why Taiwan then becomes the Republic of China. There's an uprising there that Chiang Kai-shek's people, the Nationalists, repress, and from the late 1940s on, there begins this long period of martial law on Taiwan.

There is then a period in which the mainland is under the control of a Leninist party that believes in one-party rule and believes that it was a very bad period in Chinese history when China was unable to stand up to imperialists. Taiwan is controlled by a Leninist party that believes in one-party rule, limits on participation, and that there was a bad time when China was being bullied by imperialists.

What distinguishes Chiang Kai-shek?

#466

Chiang Kai-shek had a personality cult. Mao had a personality cult. They had a lot in common, but one clear thing that made them different was that Chiang Kai-shek said that what was wrong with the Communist Party was that it had abandoned traditional Chinese values of Confucianism. Mao said that, for the Nationalists, what was really bad was that they were still wedded to those traditional Chinese values of Confucianism.

Cycling back to where we began with Mao and Xi, you could actually say that Xi Jinping, in some ways, is living out the dream that Chiang Kai-shek had of one-party rule and also of celebrating Confucianism.

Yeah, there are elements of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao that Xi Jinping kind of combines. You've also mentioned an interesting side-by-side similarity. If we had $100 to talk about it, there's another interesting similarity that you point to: Xi Jinping's wife is out there as a known entity, a part of his public image, and the same was the case with Chiang Kai-shek, right?

#466

Yes. Both of them had high-profile wives who were celebrity figures, made a good impression globally, and were more like first ladies. But both Chiang Kai-shek and Xi Jinping oversaw periods of emphasizing more traditional patriarchal values in China.

One of the things I didn't mention before is that Xi Jinping has been very focused on this idea of trying to do away with difference within the PRC. He's been pushing against feminists and any kinds of feminist movements.

So, going back to Confucius.

#466

Yeah. In some ways, there are people who will argue for a less patriarchal Confucius, but it fits with that mode.

So now that gets us close to Mao consolidating power.

#466

Then the story after 1949 with Mao is that there were divisions within the Communist Party. Mao was impatient. He wanted to transform the country quickly, and he had a utopian streak.

You didn't have to stick to the traditional pattern of moving slowly to socialism and then to communism. He tried to do this with the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous policy that imagined China outdoing the West through a kind of quick industrialization, and it just didn't work. All kinds of things were wrong with it, and that would require a whole other session to discuss the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

#466

One of the simple ways to think about it is that Mao made these disastrous moves, was partially sidelined, and then wanted to get back to power. There was a struggle between people who were more gradualist—more “let’s try to work more rationally”—and the more utopian side with Mao. Both the Great Leap Forward and, later, the Cultural Revolution were Mao’s efforts to do things dramatically, even at the risk of chaos, even at the risk of undoing a lot of the slow state-building that was going on.

There were other figures who were more concerned with incremental moves. After Mao’s death, one of those figures, Deng Xiaoping, ended up being the next long-term paramount leader. His economic reforms led to decades of economic progress and record-breaking growth for China, and so on.

But I’ve got to linger on the Great Leap Forward a bit—enough to understand modern-day China. As people know, and as I’m sure I’ll talk about in other episodes, the Great Leap Forward—this agricultural collectivization and rapid attempt to industrialize—killed 30 to 45 million people. It’s one of the greatest atrocities in human history. How could Mao be so catastrophically wrong on the policy of collectivization and be so unwilling to see the atrocity and the suffering he was causing, to the point of changing course?

With the Great Leap Forward, which caused this incredible famine and incredible devastation, one of the things that happened was that Mao received very bad information. There was a sense that officials were afraid that if they gave bad news—if they admitted that they were failing to meet the giant targets being set—that would be seen as a political mistake. It became a survival mechanism to pass on unrealistic reports about what was going on.

Some of it was a culture of fear around a great leader that led to not getting accurate information. Ego was a big part of it. There were all kinds of unresolved issues. Early in the history and rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party, there was a connection to the Soviet Union, and Mao had a connection with Stalin.

After Stalin’s death, Mao was haunted by the move toward de-Stalinization and the moves by Khrushchev, and thus laid the groundwork for the Sino-Soviet split. But there was also this obsession with doing things differently that Mao had in that case as well. You have factional struggles. You have all kinds of things happening simultaneously.

There’s something I learned about called Gray’s law, which states, “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” I would say that when 30 to 45 million people die, it doesn’t really matter what the explanation is. That’s a longer discussion, but the interesting discussion that connects to everything we’ve been talking about is: How is Mao seen in modern-day China? What has Xi Jinping said about Mao?

Before Xi Jinping, there was this assessment of Mao in the early ’80s as being 70% right and 30% wrong. I guess Mao’s own analysis of Stalin was that Stalin was 70% right and 30% wrong, and so they applied the same kind of logic there.

Yeah. Mathematical analysis of Mao.

#466

But Xi Jinping has had a different way of talking about this. He’s talked about the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China and the second 30 years, and says that we should not use the successes of one to criticize the other. We need to see where we are today as benefiting from both those first 30 years and those second 30 years.

That implicitly—or sometimes, when he talks about a “new era,” explicitly—suggests that, in many ways, he sees China as now being in a post-reform era. We can think about a third stage, and there are people who write about it in that way.

There’s always been a way of trying to separate out a kind of Mao from the periods when things were not going horribly. I think Xi Jinping would see Mao as having managed to fight the Korean War to a standstill, which is how the history of that period is described in the PRC. He would say, “Look, you had so many different forces from the more developed world fighting on one side, and that war did not end in a defeat for North Korea or for the Chinese side.”

Xi Jinping wants to be seen as an inheritor of Mao, a continuer of one side of the Mao legacy. But clearly, circling back to where we began, not the Mao who liked to stir things up, not the Mao who believed in mobilizing youth onto the streets, and not the Mao who let things get out of control—but the Mao who was responsible for strengthening the nation.

Can I ask you about the 1953 speech? Let me just watch it real quick. This particular speech is from 1953, at the end of the Korean War, saying China will not surrender. Let’s actually just listen to it.

The speech reads:

“As to how long this war will last, we’re not the ones who can decide. It used to depend on President Truman. It will depend on President Eisenhower or whoever will become the next U.S. president. It’s up to them. But no matter how long this war is going to last, we will never yield. [Applause] We’ll fight until we completely triumph.”

Yeah. So this is the version of Mao that you’re speaking of, that is still celebrated today. From the Chinese perspective, I guess they could tell the story about that particular proxy war as one in which they triumphed. What do you think about that speech, about this performance? I don’t know how much you’ve listened to Mao’s speeches.

#466

Well, he had a really difficult accent to make sense of, and native speakers of Chinese could have trouble with his speech. That one was less hard to follow than some of them.

What explains the accent?

#466

He’s just from Hunan, and he had a heavy accent. This is another complicated side of Mao: He was both anti-intellectual and very intellectual. He liked to write poetry and to fashion himself as an intellectual, but he also liked to be seen as incredibly earthy and critical of intellectuals. He had an animus toward intellectuals, even though he was intellectual; he had that anti-intellectualism.

What’s interesting about that speech, in part, is how the Korean War is depicted as the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. I think it fit with his idea that it wasn’t just about China, and it wasn’t about China working in its own self-interest, but about siding with other countries—siding with the underdog countries against the hegemonic ones.

That was another part of Mao’s desire to see China as representing the Third World and the countries that had felt the brunt of imperialism—Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism—and trying to find one or another country’s imperialism to focus on. At that point, he was focusing on America, which is something that can have particular resonances.

Mao could alternate positions. At certain points, he thought there should be an alliance with Japan, or he said that China should be able to work with Japan. At one point he said, “Without Japanese imperialism, the Communist Party wouldn’t have risen, because we wouldn’t have had this ability to unite the people.”

We have seen, in the post-Mao period, some leaders playing on anti-Japanese sentiment because of the history of Japanese aggression. There can be anti-American sentiment because of the history of the American role in imperialism, or it can be played in a different way. The United States certainly tried that. The United States didn’t have formal colonies in Asia the way that Britain and France did, and tried to present itself differently.

These things are also in flux, and now we’re in a very unusual inflection point. At the beginning of the imposition of tariffs, the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea were all together in photo ops. That was not something I would have expected—I mean, they were being seen as on the same side. I think this is also a broader lesson: Don’t assume that configurations will always stay the same if you look out into the 21st century.

What are some of the best possible things that could happen in the region and globally, with China at the center of the world stage? What are the possible trajectories you could see culturally, economically, and politically, in terms of partnerships and all this kind of stuff?

#466

It’s such a hard moment to be imagining these things. I’ve long wanted to see a return of China to a path toward greater tolerance of diversity within China, variations within China, and more space for civil society. I wasn’t one of the people who imagined that China’s emergence would evolve into a liberal capitalist kind of country, but I’d love to see a return to that kind of tolerance.

It’s a hard time to even imagine that, because Hong Kong represented a place that was somehow within China and yet was different. Looking backward, rather than forward, I think it’s really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong Kong for a period there. No Communist Party-run country had ever had a city within it that had as free a press as Hong Kong had then, or as much tolerance for protests.

I think it was an amazing thing. I hope it can be seen by some, at least within Beijing, as a miscalculation, too. The people of China wanted soft power, and Hong Kong films were admired around the world. This industry was there; there was a way in which creativity was flourishing.

#466

So I guess it would be just the hope for more spaces where that kind of creativity and openness can flourish. I’d love to think that there actually are a variety of things in Taiwan that, if they could become broader norms— not that Taiwan’s perfect. It has its own internal problems, but there are many really attractive things about it right now, different kinds of things that flourish. So maybe a setting in which Taiwan, in its post-martial-law, post-Leninist incarnation, would be something that we could think of more.

Yeah, and you’re right. Taiwan, and especially Hong Kong, are truly special places, a case study. It doesn’t make sense that that would happen, but it happened. History is full of wonderful things like this.

And I guess, can you clarify? You think the protests of 2019 were mostly a failure? Is there still a possibility that Hong Kong rises, and its way of life, its way of being, its democratic ideals—not necessarily full-on democracy or this kind of thing—but actually, in a sense, permeate China, not the other way around?

#466

That was a hope early on, and there were ways in which some parts of Hong Kong style even permeated across the border. I think it’s hard to see it now with how Hong Kong has changed, but I hesitate to say that, because there’s an awareness of the unpredictability of things. There’s no way to know what kind of thing there would be for Hong Kong later.

I do think there are things about Hong Kong that, even in the failure of the movement, have had repercussions that are not all negative. I think the Hong Kong spirit, which is being kept alive in diaspora communities around the world, is really interesting. There are things that are spreading.

I think Hong Kong represented a vision of a different way of being Chinese, a different notion of Chineseness. I think that is something that exists. There have been protesters in a lot of other parts of the world. I used to say, “From Minneapolis to Minsk,” because in 2020 there were protests in the United States and in Belarus, where there were activists talking about the Hong Kong idea of trying to focus on being water—more flexible protest tactics, or something.

Clearly, in Thailand, there were people who looked at things to learn from Hong Kong, even in defeat. There’s a New Zealand-based China specialist, Geremie Barmé, who talks about the other China, which can exist within China, in physical China, or elsewhere. This other China is equally attached to Chinese traditions, but thinks of those traditions as including not just Confucianism but Daoism, not just hierarchy but also openness to cosmopolitanism, and not just nationalism but cosmopolitanism.

I think there are some elements of that that, even in failure, the Hong Kong movements—the Hong Kong protests of the 2020s—were a last flourishing of. We can think of elements of Taiwan as another China as well. I think recovering this means not allowing the particular version of Chineseness that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping wants to make people think of as the essence of being Chinese. China has multiple cultural strands and multiple traditions that people can tap into. It’s something richer and more admirable, I think, than this narrowed-down version.

And I hope for a future where both Hong Kong and Beijing have bookstores that carry 1984, Brave New World, and all of your books. I can’t wait to visit them and enjoy the intellectual flourishing of incredible people. What a beautiful world we live in.

The Chinese people—all the people I’ve met—are just so great to interact with, a totally different culture. You can feel the roots run deep through ancient history, and they’re very different. It’s amazing. It’s amazing that Earth produced Chinese people, Indian people, and the Slavic people.

There are just all kinds of variants, and we all have our own weirdnesses and quirks and so on. Everybody has brilliant people. We all start shit with each other every once in a while, but I hope now that we have nuclear weapons and technology that connects us, we’ll actually collaborate more than we fight each other.

Thank you for being one of the people that shows off the beauty of this particular people, of the entire region, really, of Southeast Asia. It’s an honor to talk to you.

#466

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.