Jeffrey Wasserstrom — A historian of modern China who has written extensively on Chinese protest movements, Tiananmen, and Hong Kong. His forthcoming book covers the Milk Tea Alliance and struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia.
The gist
Wasserstrom compares Xi Jinping and Mao, noting both built personality cults but differ in that Mao reveled in chaos while Xi prizes order, stability, and Confucian hierarchy. The conversation traces Chinese history from Confucius and the civil service exams through the 1989 Tiananmen protests, the iconic Tank Man, and the multi-layered censorship system of fear, friction, and flooding. He frames modern China through the lenses of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, and examines the post-Tiananmen social compact trading material choices for political control. The discussion covers Hong Kong's one country, two systems decline, the implications for Taiwan, the US-China trade war and tariffs, and Mao's rise to power including the catastrophic Great Leap Forward.
Big reveals
- Xi Jinping is the first Chinese leader since Mao to sustain an intense personality cult, reversing the post-Mao norm of not publishing a leader's speeches until they left power.
- On the night of June 3rd into June 4th, 1989, the army moved in near Tiananmen Square and behaved like an army of occupation, firing on unarmed civilians.
- The Chinese Communist Party initially showed Tank Man footage themselves to claim restraint, but the narrative failed because too many Beijing residents had personally witnessed the killings.
- China's censorship operates through Margaret Roberts's three mechanisms: fear (direct banning), friction (making information hard to access), and flooding (drowning the media with preferred narratives).
- A Chinese edition of the dystopian trilogy box set is identical to the Hong Kong/Taiwan version except the passages in Brave New World Revisited that reference China are surgically removed.
- After 1989 the CCP struck an unspoken social compact: give people more material goods and consumer/cultural choices but no choices at the ballot box, in exchange for keeping power.
- The 1984 Hong Kong deal created one country, two systems with a 50-year guarantee (1997-2047), and Beijing explicitly told Taiwan to watch it as a model for eventual absorption.
- Mao's Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 30 to 45 million people, worsened by a culture of fear in which officials passed on falsely optimistic reports to avoid being seen as political failures.
Things worth remembering
- The Great Wall as seen today did not exist under the first emperor (221 BC); he built walls, but the familiar Great Wall came centuries later.
- In 1986 Shanghai students protested partly because security guards made them sit down when they tried to dance at a Jan and Dean surf-rock concert, symbolizing openness without follow-through.
- Aldous Huxley taught Eric Blair (George Orwell) at Eton; in October 1949 Huxley wrote Orwell a letter predicting future dictators would find less arduous ways to control populations.
- Singapore's top-ranked National University history department has no historian who specializes in Singapore's own history because the ruling family is a touchy subject.
- Journalist Christina Larson described China as having both the best and the worst internet experience in the world.
- William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, called Singapore Disneyland with the death penalty in a non-fiction piece, and is no longer welcome there.
- Victor Hugo has long held a positive reputation in China because he denounced the European destruction of the Old Summer Palace in 1860; Do You Hear the People Sing from Les Miserables became a Hong Kong protest song.
- In April 2025 the US raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%, and China responded by raising tariffs on US goods to 125% and suspending some rare earth and magnet exports.
- The 2019 Hong Kong protests were among the largest in history percentage-wise, drawing one to two million people in a city of about 7.5 million.
- Blogger/race-car-driver Han Han argued the US would never bomb China's Three Gorges Dam because downriver is where their iPhones are built, illustrating how interconnection deters conflict.
Recommended in this episode
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Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall
Margaret Roberts
“My favorite book about one of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories.” — Jeffrey Wasserstrom 00:40:31Find it on Amazon
Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China
Emily Feng
“there's a book I I really like um Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called um let only red flowers bloom” — Jeffrey Wasserstrom 01:12:22Find it on Amazon
The Milk Tea Alliance
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
“It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book um when it comes out in June. This book on the Milk Tea Alliance” — Jeffrey Wasserstrom 00:56:12Find it on Amazon