Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They were involved in these protests against warlords and against imperialists. And while Sun Yat-sen was alive, Sun Yat-sen got the two parties to work together because Sun Yat-sen wasn't a Marxist. He didn't believe in class struggle, but he admired Lenin and Leninism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And so he said that actually the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party may have had different views of the path forward for China, but they agreed on who the enemies were. And the enemies were the warlords who were keeping China weak and too willing to compromise with Japan and foreign imperialism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother, and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So China needed to get rid of the warlords and become a stronger country, and then they could sort it out of what road to take. Sun Yat-sen dies in 1925, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, initially keeps the alliance going with the Communist Party. But in 1927, he turns against the communists and tries to carry out a purge against the Communist Party members. He's the head of the nationalists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He's the head of the nationalists. And he has some very different... He's a kind of culturally more conservative figure. But what's important in part about this is... There are some members of the Chinese Communist Party who accept the basic ideas of Marxism, of revolution comes from the cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But Mao has this idea that actually he loves this idea of peasant rebellions in China's past as driving history forward. And he starts writing about how, well, maybe in China's case, actually the peasantry, farmers can be a radical force. And so the Communist Party is on the run. It's being pushed around, but the nationalists are trying to exterminate them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But eventually, the nationalists and the communists ally again after Japan invades China in the 1930s. They form what's called the Second United Front. But during this period, Mao is emerging as taking leadership in the Chinese Communist Party and and his idea of a different kind of vision of communist revolution that has the revolutionary vanguard somehow being the peasantry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
After World War II, after the two parties have brokered a truce and sort of worked together against japan there's a civil war between the nationalists and the communists and against all odds the communist party wins the communist party gets support from the soviet union the nationalists get support from the united states um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah. And there was even a sense that it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven, this kind of non-personified deity, like the emperor was to the minister. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And for Confucius, he said, so we should study the texts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
even though neither of them are quite doing things the way that their backer would like them to. But there also is a way in which the, and this is something I think the Communist Party leaders remember, there's a feeling that the Nationalist Party doesn't really believe its own rhetoric, that in fact all it cares about is having power and that it's internally corrupt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Chiang Kai-shek himself isn't viewed as sort of personally corrupt, but family members. And there's an idea that there's just a small band of people that are benefiting. And there's a kind of disgust with the leader, with the nationalists. The nationalists end up in retreat in Taiwan. That's why Taiwan then becomes the Republic of China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's an uprising there that Chiang Kai-shek's people, the nationalists repress. And it starts being from the late 1940s on, this long period of martial law on Taiwan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And there becomes then this period where the mainland's under the control of a Leninist party, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Taiwan's controlled by a Leninist party that believes in one-party rule, limits on participation, believes that it was a bad time when China was being bullied by imperialists. What distinguishes Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Kai-shek has a personality cult, Mao has a personality cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They have a lot in common, but one clear thing that makes them different is Chiang Kai-shek says that what's wrong with the Communist Party is they've abandoned Chinese traditional values of Confucianism. And Mao says that the Nationalists What's really bad is they are still wedded to these traditional Chinese values of Confucianism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So cycling back to where we began with Mao and Xi, you could actually say Xi Jinping in some ways is like living out the dream that Chiang Kai-shek had of one party rule. And also kind of celebrating Confucianism. Yeah, there's elements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yes. And both of them, right, they had high profile wives who were sort of celebrity figures and made a good impression globally and were more like kind of first ladies. But both Chiang Kai-shek and Xi Jinping oversaw a period of emphasizing more traditional patriarchal values in China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And one of the things I didn't mention before, Xi Jinping has been very, in this idea of trying to do away with difference within PRC, he's been pushing against feminists of any kinds of feminist movements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah. Yeah. In some ways. I mean, there are people who will argue for a less patriarchal Confucius, but it fits with that mode.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Then the story after 1949 with Mao is there were divisions within Mao Within the Communist Party over sort of Mao was impatient. He wanted to transform the country quickly. He had a utopian streak. He thought just as the peasantry could sort of you didn't have to stick to the traditional pattern of moving slowly to socialism and then to communism. He tried to the great leap forward was this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
We should study how the sages of old behaved, that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backward-looking thing. It wasn't arguing for progress. It was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
disastrous policy of his that imagined China outdoing the West in a kind of quick industrialization and move like this. And it just didn't work and all kinds of things were wrong. And we'd need a whole other session to do the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But one of the simple ways to think about it is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Mao made these kind of disastrous moves and then was partially sidelined and then wanted to get back to power. And there was this struggle between people who were more gradualists, more let's try to work more kind of rationally, and the more utopian side with Mao. And both the Great Leap Forward and then later the Cultural Revolution were Mao's efforts to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
to do things dramatically, even at the risk of chaos, even at the risk of undoing a lot of the kind of slow building of state building going on. And then there were other figures who were more concerned with kind of incremental moves. And then after Mao's death, one of those figures, Deng Xiaoping, ends up being the next long-term figure
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So with the Great Leap Forward, it's caused this incredible famine, just incredible devastation. One of the One of the things that happened was getting very bad information. There was a sense that there was people, officials were afraid that if they gave bad news, if they admitted that they were failing to meet these giant targets that were being set, that would be seen as a political mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So it got to be a survival mechanism to pass on unrealistic reports on what was going. So some of it was A culture of fear around a great leader that led to not getting accurate information. So that was one part of the dynamic. Ego was a big part of it. There were all kinds of things that were unmoored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
When early in the Chinese Communist Party history and power, there was the connection to the Soviet Union and Mao, and Stalin had a connection. 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 kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
obsession with doing things differently that Mao had in that case as well. And you have factional struggles. You have all kinds of things that are happening simultaneously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So before Xi Jinping, there was this kind of... assessment of Mao as having been early in the early 80s of being 70% right, 30% wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So in all kinds of ways, it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism, which is all about struggle and all about actually a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah. But Xi Jinping has had a different way of talking about this. And 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, that we need to see where we are today as...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
benefiting from both those first 30 years and those second 30 years, which implicitly, or he sometimes talks about a new era, suggests that in many ways, he sees China as now in a post-reform era. We can think about a third stage, and there are people who write about it in that way. And so he clearly, there's always been a way of trying to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
separate out a kind of Mao of the periods when things were not going horribly. And I think Xi Jinping would think that Mao, having managed to fight the Korean War to a standstill, which is how... how the history of that period is described in the PRC.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He said, look, you had so many different forces of the more developed world fighting on one side, and that war did not end in a defeat for North Korea and for the Chinese side. So yeah, Xi Jinping, I think, wants to be seen as an inheritor
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 on the streets, not the Mao who let things get out of control, but the Mao who was responsible for strengthening the nation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Well, he had a really difficult accent to make sense of, and native speakers of Chinese can have trouble with his speech. That one was less hard to follow than some of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Well, 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 that, but he also liked to be seen as incredibly earthy and, um, critical of the, uh, of, of intellectuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And if he had an animus toward, you know, wanting to, even though he came, even though he was intellectually had that anti-intellectualism. But no, I think what's interesting about that speech in part is how, um, in even the depiction of the Korean War as being the war against America and resist America and support Korea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I think it fit with his idea that it wasn't just about China, it wasn't about China working in self-interest, but siding with other, siding with the underdog countries against Korea. hegemonic ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And that was another part of Mao's desire to see China as representing a third world and the countries that had felt the brunt of Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism, and trying to find one or another 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 now. Mao could alternate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
At certain points, he thought there should be an alliance where he said that China should be able to work with Japan. At one point, he said, well, without Japanese imperialism, the Communist Party wouldn't have risen. because we wouldn't have had this ability to unite the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah, you could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition, which was what Mao connected to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
We have seen in the post-Mao period some leaders playing on sort of anti-Japanese sentiment because of the history of Japanese aggression, or there can be anti-American sentiment because of the history of American roles in imperialism. Or it can be played in a different way. The United States certainly tried. The United States didn't have formal colonies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
in Asia the way that Britain and France did and tried to present itself differently. But these things are also kind of in flux, and now we're in this very unusual influx period. At the beginning of the imposition of tariffs, there were leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea all together
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
in photo ops which was not something that i mean being on the same side so i think this is also just a kind of broader lesson to not not assume that configurations will always stay if you look out into the 21st century what are some of the best possible things that could happen in the region
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's such a hard moment to be imagining these things. I mean, I've long wanted to see return of China to this path toward a more kind of... Yeah, I wasn't one of the people who imagined that there would be this convergence where China's emergence into evolution into a liberal capitalist kind of country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But I'd love to see a return to that more kind of tolerance of diversity within China, variations within China, more space for civil society. And it's a hard time to even imagine that because Hong Kong kind of represented that place that was somehow within... It was an amazing thing, I think, looking backward, sorry, rather than forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I think it's really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong Kong for a period there. That was really special. No communist party-run country had ever had a city within it that had as free a press as Hong Kong had then, as much tolerance for for protests. I hope it can be seen by some, at least within Beijing, as a miscalculation too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
The People's Republic of China wanted soft power, and Hong Kong films were admired around the world, this industry. There was a way in which creativity was flourishing. So I guess it would be just the hope for more more spaces where that kind of creativity and openness debate where things can flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I'd love to think that there actually are a variety of things in Taiwan that if those 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Xi Jinping, and before him, to some extent, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit at the Olympics, there was more of this kind of mix-it-all-together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So 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. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So maybe a setting in which Taiwan, in its post-martial law, post-Leninist incarnation, would be something that we could think of more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So that was a hope early on. And there were ways in which some parts of Hong Kong's style even sort of permeated across the border. I think it's hard to see it now with how Hong Kong has changed. But I hesitate to... I mean, 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Hong Kong that even in the failure of the movement have been 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And I think that is something that exists. And there have been protesters in a lot of other parts of the world, Belarus to, I used to say from Minneapolis to Minsk, because in 2020, there were protests in the US and in Belarus, where there were activists who were talking about the Hong Kong idea of sort of trying to focus on be water, more flexible protest tactics, something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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, Jeremy Bar-May, who talks about the other China, which can exist within China, physical China, or elsewhere, which is this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
equally attached to Chinese traditions, but thinking of those traditions as including not just Confucianism but Taoism, not just hierarchy but also openness to cosmopolitanism, not just nationalism but cosmopolitanism. And I think there are some 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 that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And we can see some elements of that in, we can think of Taiwan, elements of that as another China as well. And I think recovering, 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 Chinese. China has multiple cultural strands, multiple traditions that people can tap into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And it's something richer and more admirable, I think, than this narrowed down version.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's really, they had so little in common, but they both in his mind and the minds of others suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Thanks for having me on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah, and it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China, jumping forward a bit in 221 BC, he is anti-scholars. He burns books and he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for. And Mao, in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He said, well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. You know, scholars can be a pain. So he said, like, if you have to choose between Confucianism and that. But Xi Jinping, I think, continually is kind of not choosing. And if he wants to say, well, look at the Great Wall, look at this wonderful—in fact, that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
who, by the way, 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. But still, this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that has, in many ways, a nationalist above all else. Xi Jinping is a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
supporter of the party and single party rule that's something he clearly believes in and he's um 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 is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Sure. So there's an optimism to this. There's an optimism in the sense of an ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it's a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts. were exemplary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And it did have this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education. And 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 be remolded,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And China was one of the few places where they didn't kill the last emperor. The last emperor, the idea was that he could become, anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good member of this polity. through the kind of education. Often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, but I think that's a carryover from, from the Confucian times. And, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy should be run not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
A bit like at some points in the American past, 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 of scholarly pursuits...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil serving 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 families would...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
would pool together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there also was a kind of... There was always a tension of that. So what if you don't succeed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. And you had this issue. And then it became something, well... the system was out of whack and it needed a new leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea which can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
if he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that If the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it's an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral... dimension to it, but it also, it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's been a lot of emphasis on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at some subjects and having... There isn't the civil service exam, but there is the Gaokao, an exam that really can determine where you get, what kind of institution you get into. And I think
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of tradition, what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness in who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism and which really seems to subvert this whole idea of kind of meritocracy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the 1989 protests at Tiananmen, even though kind of in the Western press in particular was discussed as a movement for democracy, but a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the Communist Party and nepotism, and the sense that people
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Despite all the talk, I mean, despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams to get good positions in universities, that some of them were being handed out via the kind of backdoor. And that led to a kind of outrage. I mean, that's true in many places, but I think it gives a special...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So in 1989, this massive movement took place. The story of it's 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And so I think 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 try to support the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing trend. liberalizing and opening up form that had taken shape after Mao's death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And in a sense, the student generation of 89, and I was there in 86 when there were some sort of warm-up protests. there was a kind of frustration with what they felt was a half-assed version of what they were talking about. The government was saying, the party was saying, we believe in reforming and opening up. We need to liberalize. We need to give people more control of their fate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm, and that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that suggested the party needed to be pressed to really, really move in that direction. And it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in 86 when I was there in Shanghai in late 86, And students protested.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the Cultural Revolution, or at least since 76. And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this physicist, Fang Lijue, who was a kind of, often thought, a Chinese Sakharov. He was a liberalizing intellectual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But 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, that Jan and Dean... the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. And they were touring China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert, and the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward, was letting them be more part of the world. And for them, that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And at the concert, some students got up to dance because that's what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert. And the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this sort of symbolized what was, you know, a feint toward openness that really didn't have follow through. We're going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So the protests went on for a little while in 86, and posters went up. The officials at universities said, no, this is out of hand. 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. So there were posters I saw that said, this is new Red Guardism. And the students didn't want to be associated with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So it wound down pretty quickly. And they thought, you know, 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 sort of scared them. And also it meant that the government was really serious about Mao. dealing with them. So then in 1989, the protests restart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And there are a variety of reasons why they can restart. The space for them, students are thinking about doing something. In 1989, it's a very resonant year, 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. People are thinking about that. But more importantly, it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history, the May 4th movement of 1919.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the May 4th movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member leading founders of it had been student activists then. It was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also a movement against bad government. And so the students thought, you know, the anniversary of that movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Movement was always marked, commemorated in China, and people took the history seriously. People were reminded of what students did in the past. And so there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then a leader... Hu Yaobang, who was associated with the more kind of reformist, more liberalizing group within the Chinese Communist Party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking, partly taking a fairly light stance toward the 86, 87 protests. And so 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 sort of Deng Xiaoping's potential successor. And he dies unexpectedly. And there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the students take advantage of the opening of their having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Hu Yaobang was younger than some of the more conservative members, they said. So some people are dying too young. Some people are... don't seem like they're ever going to die. And so they begin these sorts of protests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
This is in April of 89. And the government tries to sort of get the protests to stop quickly, and they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People's Daily that says this is creating chaos, which is a code term for taking us back to the Cultural Revolution. And this time, the students say, no, you know, we're just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's too much corruption and nepotism. There's not enough support for the more liberalizing wing within the party. And so they keep up the protests. And there's a lot of frustration at this point. There are also economic frustrations at this point. The economy is improving because of the reforms, but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich too easily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And so there's sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro managing of their private lives on campuses. So The protests at Tiananmen Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It's an anti-corruption movement. It's a call for more democracy movement. It's a call for more freedom of speech movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But it's also a kind of has some counterculture elements that are like there are rock concerts on the square. The most popular rock musician, Sui Jian, comes to the square and is celebrated when he's there. There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. And I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in the Eastern Bloc 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the Communist Bloc, which was about... moving toward socialism with a human face, more like trying to get the parties in power to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them. So there was a kind of disjuncture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Happened at the same time as moves to end communism. But of course, I would say there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square, it seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement to just have a kind of course correction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But then there's also an internal struggle within the Communist Party leadership and clearly the people who are more political conservatives, even if they believe in economic reform, are clearly getting the upper hand and this is not gonna be tolerated. And the students stay on the square when signals are given to try to get them out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Students from around the country are pouring into Beijing to join this movement. They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived. So it's actually one thing that keeps it going is new participants are coming from the provinces. And even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And then workers start joining in the movement as well and form an independent labor union. And that really, the Chinese Communist Party, to a certain extent, they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
potential intellectual leaders of the country and admiration for scholars is part of this that people turn out when students protest, something very different from the American case where there's a kind of often suspicious of student activists being necessarily on the same side as everybody else. But in China, there had been from the history of the 20th century, a sense of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are labor activists joining the movement, then troops are called in and there's a massacre near Tiananmen Square on the middle of the night of June 3rd and early June 4th.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation, which is something the People's Liberation Army is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression. And they're acting like an invading force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
The tanks roll in, and I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank that's a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it's considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's an amazing symbol. You know, he's on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks. And it's unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there's some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end, he climbs up on the tank and the tank swerves, you know, it doesn't run him over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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. And they tried this whole story with Tiananmen initially of saying, look, The students were out of control. Everybody should remember what happened during the Cultural Revolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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 they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of footage, the Communist Party could say, look, actually, look at this. The heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And they try for the first months after it to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tiananmen a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the tank man. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that, in fact, there had first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And there had been many, many people some students, but a lot of ordinary Beijing residents and workers who were just mowing down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work. And then I think
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
The claim had to be made to try to suppress discussion of the event, and particularly to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of a line of tanks, whatever the tanks did to him or not. The main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city that the image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And they really didn't want to have that image out there in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah. And it's probably not a student. It's often described as a student, but he probably was a worker. And it is a powerful, powerful image of bravery. And I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph. of a man bearing his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during what we think of as Prague Spring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968, in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And that's what the Chinese Communist Party, in a sense, can't 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And you could say, well, look, and 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 blocs. Maybe we actually, maybe this was the right way to go. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's so interesting to just speculate and we just don't know because, you know, he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important because one of the students' main demands was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
then 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 a patriotic, that 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And you mentioned about the power of the image. And I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something, has taken to heart the power of the image after that, because we saw this in... But when there were protests in Hong Kong, the government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of, you know, crowds out of control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And initially there were in 2014, and again, initially in 2019, there were very orderly crowds. And it... 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They also worked very hard when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s. to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police. And they tried very hard and managed to success because the Western press was often saying, will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre? Will there be soldiers on the streets? The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
the use of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to wound. There was beanbag shot. There were rubber bullets. There was 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
the Tiananmen tank man image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, young woman that became another of the iconic images during the Vietnam War, those images really can have an extraordinary power. And I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are no really gripping, there are very few photographs allowed of the Xinjiang image extra legal detention camps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There are very little, very little photo. There is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I assume he was killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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, Leo Chabot 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 are there's been relatively few of like for political crimes recently sentencing to death and things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's much more just remove them, imprison them. But the tank man, there was never a trial. There was never even a trial that was a, was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared. And there's been somebody who's like another figure like this who's disappeared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 denunciation of COVID policies, but also a dictatorial rule. And the banner, somehow he managed to have it up and get it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he's disappeared. And there hasn't been a show trial or even a secret trial. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They don't want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So, you know, there's a lot of censorship. 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. And she says there's fear, which is this kind of direct censorship thing, like banning things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But there's also friction, which she says, she has three 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. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you'll get through a search. So a lot of tech savvy or globally minded people tapped-in Chinese people will use VPN to jump over the firewall. But it's work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So you just create friction so that, okay, 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 the people to believe. So all those kind of exist in operation. And I think The fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So 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 book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you're not supposed to be able to read that in a... somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state, if anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But it's not specifically about China. And so censorship is most restrictive when it's things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there's intense kind of censorship of that and certain events in that way. But a sort of like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
something through allegory, something through imagining a place that looks a lot like a communist party ruled state so that people are going to read it. There were things that were banned throughout, up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule, bad things banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
You've been able to since 1985. You can buy, again, it's not about China. And actually for some people within China in the mid 1980s, where they focused on the part of 1984, that's like the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people. For some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And then by the 90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren't having fun. And people said, like, you could read, some people would 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... you know, he wasn't talking about a country like ours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Look, we've got supermarkets, we've got McDonald's. I mean, this is not, you know, we've got fast trains. We got things are, we're living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did. And this isn't like that bleak world he was imagining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
playing to your sense of pleasure and 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 Eden and they were sort of rivals and in fact in 1949 Orwell sent his former teacher a copy of 1984 and said, you know, look, I've written this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Basically, it's kind of almost a little Oedipal, like, I've written this book that displaces yours. He didn't say that. He just said, I want you to have this. But he had criticized Brave New World and reviews as like... not having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before, realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China. And he just said, you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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, and 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 Handmaid's Tale, similarly, the construction of the elements. And she was a big fan of both. 1984 and Brave New World.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So there's a way they go forward. But, you know, there was a kind of, it's not exactly a sequel, but Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He says that in Mao's China, they're kind of combining the two things of this. And I'm really fascinated by that because they 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 Zemiaten's We, that inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That's one book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And then there's Animal Farm in 1984. It's the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in Complex Characters. You could buy it in Hong Kong. But I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland. And it's all the same, except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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, that gets taken out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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, except 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Even places like Shanghai, that it seemed much more the Brave New World kind of style, had their Orwellian moment. So you have it now, I think it's, you know, there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah. And I think it's one of these really good examples of how China's distinctive, but it's not unique. You have other settings where you have these no-go zones that you learn. And one example is in Singapore. So National University of Singapore has a world-class history department. But no Singapore historian in it. Nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Because, you know, it's incredibly wide-ranging what you can do, analyze. But when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore, then it gets... to be touchy. In Thailand, which I've been working on recently, you have these lese-majeste laws that make it very, very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And so in all of these settings, you have to figure out ways to work around it. There's there's a way in which you can say at the international, the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country won over that you can say basically anything you want, but when it gets to the things in the place where you are, it's touchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I should give credit for that insight. Shivani Matani, who's written, co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong, Among the Braves, She was talking about that, that in Singapore, at the Foreign Correspondence Club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore refugee, a political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club saying kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club, and then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about what the culture in this Foreign Correspondence Club.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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. And there was this kind of, yeah, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao wandering 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. And I thought about how he'd... 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And you've got all these kind of things. He also would have been shocked by all these books about how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, 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 nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He was a participant in the May 4th 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. So some of the coolest bookstores... Things that I was just as amazed could exist in the early 2000s. So you can still buy copies in 1984, and you can still get some of these other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But 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. And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become kind of really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones, not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 then had to close in Shanghai. And it's just been reopened in D.C. as JF Books. And it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub. And I'm really delighted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including China. places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So places like that, they 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 and tightening control there. And it's reopened in upstate New York. So you have this phenomenon of bookstores.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei. And The Hague, and I heard one maybe is 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 face.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't and imagine someday being able to hold in China, but maybe can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about. And sometimes people will think because of censorship and that, there's an idea of sort of brainwashing within China population control. And I periodically will get students from the mainland. And I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I teach Chinese history and I feel like, okay, now I'm contradicting the version of the past that's been drumbeat into them. But I'll still get students who are incredible free thinkers who have come through that system and it just doesn't hold or there are limits to it. And Some of them are people who just got curious by something. And it is a porous system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's more porous than in North Korea, things like that. So even if there's that fear, friction, and flooding, which... Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there's still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued or they see an image of sent by a friend of theirs on social media.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
We'll share them something on WeChat that it doesn't get picked up by the censors, but they look at it carefully and they say, oh, well, wait a minute. That contradicts what the government's official line is. So there's still ways in which that creativity and freedom of thinking persists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah, it is. And I think it's the whole kind of the world of short attention spans and social media and how this all works. And Chinese Communist Party leaders, I brought up Singapore and Deng Xiaoping and some of the other leaders were like looking at that. And they're looking at, you know, there are all kinds of things that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 would be tried out there. And I think the seductiveness is that some of these things are... They both add to convenience at the same time they strip away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They're collecting information about you, which can be also something that can make your life easier at the same time it's stripping you away. I mean, we talk about that. siloing of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news. And so two things come to mind to mention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
One is Christina Larson, a very bright journalist, a friend of mine who's now working on other things, but was working on China. And she 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And, you know, you think about it with, you think of the worst as easy, you know, the Great Firewall, you try to search for what happened. You search for the tank man, you won't get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Search for things about Xinjiang and it makes it seem like it's a place where people are happy rather than massive extra legal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by crime. by things you have no control over. But she said like on other ways, when it comes to like consumer playing to your pleasures and things, it was really advanced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember after I, around the time that I had read that, I was in Shanghai and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about like going out to eat. Like I said, oh, we've got such and such. And I said, oh, that's like Yelp.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I 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 that's in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this. Or, you know, what the best dish there is in the last week. Forget about these sort of slow things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And you had a lot of things, you know, that were like, okay, you've... smart city and controlled you can learn things about ease of movement and singapore had some of these things tested too you had way before you move you go into an underground um parking lot now in the u.s and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on um on a floor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
That was something that was 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. And it was something that can be very seductive. So the other line besides best of worst internet I always like is William Gibson, who wrote
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
one of the other important dystopian novels of the present, Neuromancer, he wrote a rare, for him, nonfiction piece about Singapore where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. And, you know, there are times when... I shouldn't laugh. But it is. It's a powerful... Yeah. He's not welcomed in Singapore, let's just say. But he talked about how when he wanted to try to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you sort of got a sense of what the future might hold. So the dark side of this, the surveillance state at its worst, which we see in Xinjiang and places. And there, again, it may seem like I'm just obsessed with science fiction. And there, it really is minority report. It's this kind of like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
you do certain kinds of behaviors. And we're seeing this other places too. We're seeing versions of it in the US as well, where it's like, oh, we can tell from a pattern that you're the kind of person who might do X. And so in Xinjiang, when they were starting to round people up, there's this great book by a Uyghur poet. He talks about how
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
People were just starting to disappear off the streets, and they were being accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. And 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 violent. Um, more devoted to Islam and more devoted to something, a particular version of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So he talked about how a group of the poets, when they would get a writers, would they get together? They would, 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, of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Xinjiang is this example, and Tibet also 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's asked about governments, but it's also asked about big tech and what you have as a trade-off. But I hadn't thought about it until this conversation, which... I can tell is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations because you have set lines, but then the conversation goes and you think in a different way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power. And they realized that the Soviet Union, Soviet bloc was falling apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They knew that one reason why people, and this is like the simple way of, one way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe was partly about ideals and thirst for freedom and that, but also people knew that people, East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. And it was true. And I think this is a human, as human as the desire for more freedom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don't have things like Tiananmen again? Well, what if we tried to make a deal with people? We'll give them more choices. in their daily life. We'll give them better stuff. We'll give them more choices at the store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
We'll give them more choices about what to read, too, because, you know, we'll give them more choices in consumer goods and intellectuals. The consumer goods they want are 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
We won't open the floodgates completely, but we'll give them more choices, but not give them more choices at the ballot box or in politics. And this was the new kind of new 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 in terms of material goods.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Now, one of the things that's happening now is the Chinese Communist Party, the economy isn't booming the way it was before. The sort of sense of clearly we're 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now about the rest of the world is in chaos and we're more stable. But the thing that I now am going to think about differently is the argument was we'll give you more choices and you'll have more of a private life, more of this. But now in the period we are globally...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Now there's a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choices. I mean, there was an idea that the post-Tiananmen generation was promised to have a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state. Mm-hmm. And now, globally, we worry about the prying eyes of whether it's the state or whether it's tech companies. It's a different moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
What does it mean to say you have more choices?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
That's a really great question. I was actually just writing a review of two books. One is called The Xi Jinping Effect, which was just a bunch of scholars, an academic volume, sort of looking at, take this topic and that topic, how much has Xi Jinping as a person really affected it? And they come up with all kinds of answers. But there's a book I really like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. And what she talks about the changes in China as she was covering it from the mid-2010s on was, and I think this really is Xi Jinping's, one of his imprimatures on the country, is there's a narrowing of spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And this goes against the grain of a pattern in the sort of post Tiananmen period of allowing more space for sort of civil society, but also allowing sort of way Muslims felt that they didn't have to choose between being, you know, their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But there's more and more of a kind of, we see this in Xi Jinping becoming impatient with Hong Kong, where there was a way of which, okay, this is a city that's part of the PRC, but it really operates very differently. He seems to be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
uncomfortable with difference, I guess, and he's not alone in Strongman this way, of sort of wanting to impose a kind of singular vision of what Chinese identity means, what loyalty to the status quo means. And so there's been a kind of tightening of controls over all the borders. And One thing Xi reported on was Inner Mongolia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's been seen as an unproblematic kind of frontier area, and who cares if there was some revival of Mongolian language? But under Xi, there's been a less patience with those kinds of difference. There's been more of a resurgence of patriarchy. All kinds of things have happened under him. But How much is it just him or how much is it also a kind of mood or group within the party?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Some of these trends, I think, began before he took power in late 2012. I think really my own feeling going to China fairly often from the mid-1990s till about 2018 is, was that until 2008, the year of the Olympics, each trip it would feel like, oh, there's just more space.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's more breathing room for, you know, it's not becoming a liberal democracy, but I would notice things that felt like, I'm surprised that that happens, that people felt less worried about what they were saying and what they were doing. That kind of trend line up until about 2008 happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But from the Olympics and then the financial crisis after that, the Chinese Communist Party felt, I guess, more... It's still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. And you had, like, okay... maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that's been stronger under Xi Jinping's time in power. And he was already the designated successor by 2008.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment possibly of more opening up because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right-wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. And some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way. And it went quite the opposite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So 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 just we should really be straight about what a black box the Chinese elite politics are and really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
used to have more of a sense of these kind of ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy and things like that. And they were also basically partly based on personalities and personal ties. But we did have a sense. You could sort of map out these kinds of rival power bases and things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It's very hard to know, other than the sort of small group around him, how it works. We don't have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how Xi Jinping... We have Xi Jinping's self-presentation and a lot of things that are then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, oh, he's going to be a reformer because his father was a liberalizing figure. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
We know he's a strong nationalist and a kind of cultural nationalist as well as 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 where he talked about that leaked out that he... talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed because the leadership didn't pay enough attention to ideology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So I imagine if he and Putin ever have a kind of heart-to-heart conversation, one thing they'd find to agree on is this sort of distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was... That was the wrong way to do things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah, to not strong enough about, you know, really keeping control. And, you know, for Putin, it would be that it led to the Soviet Union, to the loss of an empire. But for Xi Jinping, there is a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union. And I'm not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
landmass that was in a sense rebuilt over time for Mao and then Deng Xiaoping. You have a very powerful story about the Chinese past that the Chinese Communist Party makes a lot out of. But the Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Party who was Mao's great rival, also made a lot out of. And it has a partial basis in fact, was that from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
China, which had been the strong force in the world, got bullied and nibbled away at by foreign powers. And it's important to realize there are elements of that story that are very true. And the answer they had is that under my watch, that's not going to happen. And the reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China's place in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I think there are all kinds of different things about safety or not. I think until recently, at least, the people who were most vulnerable were people of Chinese descent, people originally from China who had gone abroad and coming back, or even people who were Chinese Americans who went there. There was... So you had early cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
My friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Al Jazeera and reporting on Xinjiang. So that's one kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Another kind of person who was vulnerable, or in this case, more likely to be blocked from China, the Communist Party is particularly concerned about people from outside of China who are amplifying the voices of people within China or exiles from China who the government would like to silence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So the Dalai Lama, you had scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to the Dalai Lama were early people to have trouble going to the PRC. Then scholars who worked on Xinjiang and were connected to Uyghurs. But there also were people who were sort of personally connected to dissidents or exiles who would...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
amplify their voices or translate their work would promote them, that then it wasn't about necessarily danger if you got in China, but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. So I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party I published them in some high-profile places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I've written a lot about Tiananmen, wrote about human rights issues, all that. And I kept getting visas to go to China. I testified to a congressional executive joint committee on China about the Tiananmen protests on the 25th anniversary of it. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Now I think it might be different. Now some of these expectations have been changed. There have been people who've been... very surprisingly got in trouble. These two Canadians who were clearly, it was a kind of tit for tat partly because of TechMaven's relative being held in Canada. So it was kind of there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It was also not picking a fight with Americans, but there were certain kinds of things that you could map out what was the riskiest thing to do. And so I went in the 2010s having ridden, you know, forcefully about Tiananmen. And I didn't feel dangerous. I mean, I felt there was an awareness in some cases of what, if I was giving a public talk, there was awareness of what it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There 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 you were connected to China in different ways. For me, it's been confusing these last few years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I wrote one piece about this, about 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. But with Hong Kong, with the mainland, I had kept a kind of distance from the dissidents that I was writing about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules kind of didn't apply, and I was more connected to them, more friends with some of them. And then with this crackdown that's come on Hong Kong and their exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And so now I feel that, you know, 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. And so I wouldn't want to meet with some of my friends there who aren't this high profile. So I don't want to go to a place where I would feel that I was toxic in some way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
If you do, I would be very pleased because I could watch that interview and get some insights about Xi, which have been very hard to get. I mean, they're really difficult. There have been very few... Very few discussions. He doesn't give press conferences. There's a variety of things. And this is different from some of his predecessors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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. You know, there are a variety of things. But he had relatively spontaneous conversations. I was going to say, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It matters because the party secretary is the more important role. But anyway, he just met with a group of people. foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in 88 for a conference on Shanghai history. And just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what's going on in Chinese politics, or I mean, predictability is just very hard in general in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But I think the consensus among us and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China, was this was somebody who really had probably topped out because he was meeting with us. He must not be heading anywhere up. And then after Tiananmen, he becomes... the top leader in China. But he had a kind of, you could pick things out from being in a room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He liked to kind of show off his kind of cosmopolitanism. Xi Jinping talks, gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read, but it's all very kind of scripted, at least in his own head too. It's very carefully done to present a certain image of himself. And we really don't get many of what he's like in unguarded moments or has them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And sometimes we get the illusion of them. Like there was an image of him and Obama in their shirt sleeves at the Sunnylands meeting. And the photo would show them walking and talking, but there's no translator in the image. And so you're like, how are they talking? What language are they using? How is this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Or is it just a kind of, I mean, there are, of course, there are exchanges with top leaders and Trump will say they're friends or these kinds of things, or there's a language of Xi Jinping can talk about somebody or some country being friend, but we don't have a sense of these kinds of the, what makes them tick as a person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway and see if he really gets excited about him. Because in the kind of generic things he talks about, all these, you can see him sort of ticking things off about, oh, yes, I'm glad to be in England, the country of Shakespeare, and this, and he goes off these set things. But Hemingway...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's some sense that he had some special feeling, which fits in with some of the macho side that would be. Interestingly, he doesn't mention Orwell as one 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 Miserables became one of the protest songs in Hong Kong. And how do you get in this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And actually, Victor Hugo is a rare Western author who's had a pretty steadily positive career. image in China, even under periods of criticism of, like all Western authors, problematic, because Victor Hugo famously wrote a statement denouncing the European destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, the end of the Second Opium War. He said, how can we claim to be civilized?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
when we've destroyed one of the great creations of civilization. So that kind of made him a kind of long-term friend to the Chinese nation. Mark Twain has had a pretty good reputation because he was a critic of American imperialism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But anyway, I think 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's certainly gotten harder for journalists to operate in China. There was a way in which now Journalists will look back to the early 2000s, and it was really quite extraordinary what they could do. Well, you have a lot of listeners. I mean, I think there isn't that tight a watching of what an academic writes about the Chinese Communist Party.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But there are certain things that clearly are kind of tightly policed. And one is discussions of the private life of Chinese leaders and their families and issues of kind of really following money trails for corruption and things like that. there was the case of the Hong Kong booksellers who were kidnapped, and one of them is still in a Chinese prison.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He would be a good example, this Gui Minhai, the kind of person who was vulnerable. He was born in China. He was actually a Swedish, he is a Swedish citizen, and he was spirited out of Thailand into the mainland. And the reason why he was on the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
on the radar of the Communist Party was because 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 kind of vision of them as a certain kind of moral exemplars. And that's different from writing things about China has a bad human rights record or something like that in ways like I did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
These were books that were exposés or sort of 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. And I've thought sometimes that Xi Jinping seems to have lay's majesty envy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I don't think it's kind of general criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party as an authoritarian structure or place that doesn't deserve to rule in kind of very general terms. I don't think that's something that they then pick you up at the border and say, no, we can't let that person in because people are let in. And it's not rational. It's not a rational process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There are people who've been denied visas. It seems pretty inexplicable. There are things that now I think the rules are changing very quickly all over the world for kinds of what's safe to say and do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There's a degree to which I think there's some confusion about a couple things. I mean, one is when there's a sense that Trump is sort of uniquely tough on the Chinese Communist Party, he has periodically said things about praising Xi Jinping as a leader, even sort of praising Xi Jinping's strength and things. So I think for some ways for the personality cult of Xi Jinping,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Some of this is kind of useful because the... story that the Chinese Communist Party, they need to tell a story about why they deserve to keep ruling. And one of their stories is that because the world is a dangerous place and there's not enough respect for China. So when there's very tough talk about China coming out of the White House, that's useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And then the other part is about Xi Jinping being just the right person to have at the helm. And when there are discussions, when there's praise for him and his showing toughness, that also works well. So I think the argument among at least some China specialists is to say the Chinese Communist Party likes predictability, and Xi Jinping seems to like predictability in particular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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 the Chinese Communist Party wants, under Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping wants to gain more allies around the world, to be seen with more respect around the world, and at the moment is in a position where
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
he can present himself as an orderly, thoughtful, gradualist figure. In some ways, I think as much as there's tension between the two capitals, there's a way that things are going in a way that benefits Xi Jinping and can seem good. That doesn't explain what their personal relationship is and how they actually see each other when they're in the room together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So I think one persistent, there's a lot to unpack there for a historian too. I mean, I think that the reference to being bullied by a foreign power is something that comes up periodically and plays to this kind of notion of the 100 years of national humiliation that's been talked about by generations now of Chinese leaders to talk about that period from the 1840s to the 1940s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There were a group of foreign powers who were involved in bullying China in one way or another, and you can selectively pick one or another. So there is a way in which this can be. And if Xi Jinping gives that kind of speech in Southeast Asia, he's speaking to a place where there is knowledge of times of the past when the United States was an aggressive force there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has 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 speeches. And when Mao was alive, you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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-a-vis other parts of the world that is a crucial part of this. I'm circling around it, but there's a tendency in discussions of U.S.-China relations to think about it in terms of a bilateral discussion or dispute, even though time and again,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
we realized that places other than the United States are key variables in these things. So the US and China being at odds in the Mao era,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
What changed things dramatically for that wasn't so much even 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, that actually it was tensions between China and the Soviet Union that altered equations for the United States and China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I happened to be in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three Chinese citizens died. And there was tremendous discontent about that, anger about that within China. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And that happened. And then in 2001, there was a spy plane incident that happened. And so there was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see U.S.-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, which is these are two totally different things, the Sino-Soviet split and 9-11.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But in both cases, no matter how careful you were at parsing what was likely to be the next five years for US-China relations, get dramatically changed by something that happened that wasn't the US and China. And in the current situation, the trade war, I know that it will be very important that China can try to increase sales of consumer products to Europe. This is something that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 as being the two actors. And sometimes Beijing can't control what's happening outside, and sometimes Washington can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And so I guess this is simply saying that when you're watching and you're trying to keep the eye on the ball, it matters a lot what India's relationship to China and the United States is. So all of these are happening there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So I think that's it, that 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
The story that's been intensively told about the past. is something that provides the possibility for this to matter a lot. That it's something that's just so... It's so much a part of the legitimating story of the Chinese Communist Party. And then you have to look at, are there things that are happening that aid the Chinese Communist Party's story? So the rise of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
what can seem like or is anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States can feed that propaganda story. And so certainly, during COVID, there was a way that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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, then that helps you. So I think there is a setup here where certainly for Xi Jinping, I think the desire to not be seen weak is is crucial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's a hard time to figure out what you can, to sort of hopeful angles. I mean, I guess what's hard to even balance these things out. So one of the things that I've thought about when you talk about rising chances of war, that often Taiwan comes to mind with China. And one of the things that I've thought of is that for Xi Jinping, that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere, the newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him. And quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xi Jinping, you've had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. So that's a key commonality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 deserves to lead. So then there's a kind of way of playing to the national sentiments of some part of the population.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So then, in a sense, it's hopeful that I think in some ways right now, Xi Jinping is not looking desperate in the eyes of the world. If he can focus on potentially
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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, when 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. So Hong Kong...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that... He talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really, his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King about this legendary figure, this Monkey King who could turn the heavens upside down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Hong Kong Island became a British colony at the end of the First Opium War, the 1840s, and then Kowloon Peninsula near there became a British colony in 1860 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 became under British control in 1898. but was not a colony. It was a 99-year lease.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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, the Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, depend on for energy, water, and food. So it would have been very hard to just transfer those parts to the People's Republic of China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So a deal needed to be struck of what would happen in 1997. And the deal was about transferring sovereignty of all of Hong Kong, all these parts, to the People's Republic of China. And I carefully say transfer sovereignty, not give it back to the People's Republic of China, because it never belonged to the People's Republic of China. It was part of the Qing Empire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
which was a different country, a different state. But this needed to be transferred. And the deal that was struck was that the London side wanted to do something to protect what was going to happen to the people there. And 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And because of that, the Chinese representative of 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 go to independent. But so anyway, there was an understanding that something would have to happen in 1997 and London wanted some protection for the people in Hong Kong who they knew were
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 and 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
In this negotiation, something was come up with called one country, two systems. And 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 was the idea from 1997 until 2047.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There was a tension from the beginning over what that other system, what was going to be the part that was going to be separate. And clearly, everybody agreed it would need to have a different economic system. It had capitalism. So people agreed on that. But there was tension from the start of, well, what about legal? What about cultural and other things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And things were written into this deal, which would be over time, Hong Kong people would govern Hong Kong. But Beijing thought they would govern Hong Kong, but it would be a Hong Kong person who Beijing played a role in choosing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But the reason why Taiwan is relevant to all this is in 1984, as they were discussing this, the Chinese Communist Party said, and 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So the idea was Beijing said, 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, saying like, watch how smoothly it will go. Over time, people in Hong Kong started saying, well, wait, Beijing keeps sort of nibbling away at, chipping away at these things that make us separate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a way to improve things. Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up, liked to have people on the streets clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And especially after 2008, I mean, there were reasons why Beijing went especially light on Hong Kong early, after 1997. Beijing wanted to join 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 economics in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong economy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Also, just something, because I'm a university person, in 1997, when Hong Kong became part of the People's Republic of China, then Hong Kong universities were the only universities in the PRC that were considered totally world-class. Hong Kong University and Chinese University of Hong Kong were highly rated institutions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And at that point, Peking University, Beijing, Beida, and Tsinghua were not yet considered world-class institutions because they didn't have the kind of academic freedom and humanities that was at that point needed to be 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And Beijing universities surpassed Hong Kong ones. So by the 2010s, when you started to have these protests in Hong Kong, pushing back against what was called mainlandization and sort of clamping down, Hong Kong protesters in 2014 put up a banner. At the time when Beijing was holding the line against Hong Kong, people wanted to have real elections to choose the chief executive rather than a kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
one where there were elections, but only people who Beijing approved of basically could 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 spinning the one country, two systems argument and saying, yeah, Taiwan, you should watch what happens here. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
One way to think of Chinese leaders since Mao is that Mao and those after him wanted to make China bigger territorially than it had been, to try to reclaim land. Under Mao, Tibet, which became part of the People's Republic of China. Mao offered something a little bit like one country, two systems to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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. And then by 1959, the center got restless, tried to interfere more. Local people pushed back against it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And a workable, what seemed like it might work out somehow against all odds, explodes. The Dalai Lama goes into exile. The Dalai Lama, who before that had thought maybe he and Mao could work together, that didn't work. Hong Kong, a new version of the experiment happens, and it becomes clear in the 2010s that it's not really workable, that the center is less patient, needs Hong Kong less.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
The Hong Kong people feel it's more of a sort of 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 during 1997. But he had achieved that kind of deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Xi Jinping could argue, you could argue 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. And you could say that that then is a stepping stone toward Taiwan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in anything that can't be controlled. So there are a lot of ways that they're similar, a lot of ways they're different. They're also different, and this fits with this orderliness, that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Or you could say that that and the South China Sea islands build up 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. I mean, you know, he probably to the extent he would like Taiwan to become part of the People's Republic of China, which this has never been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But the hope was it could happen through a kind of more gradual absorption and people in Taiwan being willing to think of that. And yet, in part because of what's happened to places like Hong Kong, there's a fiercer, a stronger sense of Taiwan identity now than there was at an earlier point, and less parties that are more willing to try to negotiate some kind of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Tighter connection to the PRC are often doing badly in elections there because of this of this mood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Yeah. I mean, I'm particularly interested in youth movements. And one of the things about, I think, generation is such an important factor. And people know that generation is important, but somehow Sometimes people think that if you divide people up into economic groups, you divide people up into racial or ethnic class, that that somehow is more tangible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But I think with things like the Hong Kong protests, that there was a process of what was seen as mainlandization, of Beijing just moving to make the things that were really distinctive about Hong Kong less distinctive and minimizing the differences. And this process sped up dramatically after the 2019 protests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And there was just partly with the distraction of COVID and the distraction of the world, there was this imposition of this national security law that basically did away with the differences. And you had some people in... in the city of an older generation saying, like, why couldn't they have just been more patient? Why did these protests force the hand of the people in power?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But I think that age has a lot to do with it, that 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 this sort of freer, I mean, freer press or just freer associational life and things like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 like, why can't they be patient? And people in between had all kinds of other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior, whereas Mao liked things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a futile way of thought that it held China back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
This is one thing that leads to often kind of logically, there's a rationality toward younger people being more militant about certain kinds of things. I think we see the same thing with climate change, with climate activism. You're talking about whatever projection is of when things are going to get worse further down, the younger you are, the more of your life is going to live in that scenario.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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 sort of resolve issues. These are things with Hong Kong, with climate change, with Thailand, the place that I've been working on lately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 of Gradual solutions are fine, but we're carrying more of a burden of what we're going to live with there than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So in 2019, also the protests, I mean, some of the things that were being chipped away at by Beijing, in 2012, there was an effort to impose mainland-style patriotic education. It seemed like, well, who cares how civics is taught? But actually, that has a lot to do with the larger kind of political story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the protesters that year, young people, stood up and actually got the government to blink. The local authorities backed down on that, bringing in mainland-style education. 2014, the protest was to try 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But in the end, it hit a dead end. 2019, there are even bigger protests. And at first, it seems like surprising what the issue was. The issue was an extradition law that would have people potentially who committed crimes in Hong Kong being tried for them if the mainland wanted them on the mainland. Now, the difference, they're really different court systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 the other way than what the government wanted. And the mainland doesn't have that kind of court system, 98, 99% conviction rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So you can come up with things that they're similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites, but they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party. And that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them too as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
In Hong Kong, if you're arrested even before 2020, if you were arrested even 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So I think in 2019, even having lost the battle over voting, 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 a clearly obvious thing for slogans, but it is something that I think we've realized today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And, you know, 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, yeah, being charged. So yeah, there was a clear sense that if, if they didn't protest, then would they be able to protest later?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Percentage-wise, you know, because the reason why I kind of make that claim, because there were a million to two million people in the biggest protests, and this is a 7.5 million people. So if you think about what that means, it's It's just enormous. I mean, yeah, there were some very daring protests around that period, the Hong Kong ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the year after that, there were protests in other places, but protests in Belarus, where again, there was a very... You know, it's taking big risks and people, but if people have a feeling that it's a kind of last moment. So yeah, these were giant. And the protests kept growing. And I think they kept growing in part, and this happens, why protests grow, it's always hard to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But in the case of Tiananmen and the case of Hong Kong, 2019, if people feel that the sort of protesters have the moral high ground in one way or another. And what tipped it that way in Hong Kong, I think, was really that the police were using really strong-arm methods, and the government was never apologizing or never saying, we need to investigate that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And I think what really kept the protests going was they became a referendum on the right to protest itself. And what I think the government hoped and what Beijing certainly hoped was that some of the protesters would start doing militant actions, violent actions that would alienate the populace from the protests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the protesters did do some of those things, but they tended to attack, violence was often against property. And when there were occasionally violence against people, people within the movement would apologize or try to distance themselves from that. Meanwhile, the government was never apologizing or distancing itself from the police.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
That created a dynamic where you 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. This was a city that sometimes had the reputation, misunderstood reputation, as being one where people didn't care that much about politics. They just focused on living a good life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But there was a sense that they wouldn't have that possibility if you had a police... And the police used to be really highly respected in Hong Kong, but it lost that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So protests were one of the things that... Some of the most impressive books I've been reading about other places have been emphasizing is that protests are often preceded by other protests that may seem like dead ends, but actually provide support. people with the kind of skills and scripts and repertoires to then carry out things on a larger scale after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So you often get, we get captivated by a moment that seems to come out of nowhere, but it often doesn't. The ground has been laid by, it can be by an earlier generation that passes on the stories about it, or it can be just a few years before. And sometimes a new generation will say, Look at what they did. That was exciting, but we want to put our mark on things by a generation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So there were these 1986 protests that sort of fizzled out that helped lay the groundwork for the 1989 ones. In Hong Kong, there were the 2012 and 2014 ones that laid the groundwork for 2019. Some of the times it was the same activists out on the streets again, but sometimes it was a younger generation said, yeah, okay, but that failed. So what can we do differently?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And we see this in cases in the US and we see it around the world of this kind of the percolating of things that happen, sometimes in conversations that continue that happen. And sometimes failures can seem like dead ends, but over a long period of time, we see them as succeeding. And It can seem irrational to try to do something after the last three times people have tried to do it have failed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
First of all, we don't know that much about the historic Confucius. He's around the same time as figures like Socrates. And like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterwards. So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
But then occasionally, history shows that the third time or the fifth time or the 20th time actually does succeed. There's enough countervailing, you know. In Eastern Europe, you would say like in 1956, there was a rising, it was crushed. In 68, there were risings, crushed. Poland, 1981, it's martial law imposed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
In 1989, what were East German protesters thinking when they poured out onto the streets? And then it happened. But this time it wasn't. So 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
You know, it doesn't mean that it will work. It doesn't mean that it will work, but I think history has enough examples of things that you thought. I mean, this is, you know, it explains why certain figures are so inspirational for generations of activists that, you know, people read. There's a reason why people talk about Vaclav Havel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Whereas if Vaclav Havel had died in 1988, people would have said, oh, maybe he was a great writer. But his political project, he didn't live to see. But then he lives to 89 and becomes, you know, against all expectations. So Rebecca Solnit, she's got a new book, No Straight Road Takes You There, Essays for Uneven Terrain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And she's talking about taking a longer view of some struggles that achieve things after the point when people might have imagined that they had run into dead ends. And she's talking about keeping your eye on the gains that happen, even incrementally, and the ways in which the need to take a longer-term perspective on some of these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And I think it's a strange thing because there's also often an impatience in movements of people wanting kind of immediate results. But as a historian looking at situations, I've mentioned sort of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but Taiwan was a right-wing dictatorship under sort of a version of martial law for decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And at each stage, it would seem that people struggling to change it were on a quixotic, impossible kind of mission, or South Korea was in a similar situation. And then in the late 1980s, you start to have those things unravel. And it's partly because of a kind of steady resistance is partly because something in the world changes, but there's often a combination of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So I'm interested in that whole, you know, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
a completely impossible effort, even though we know the result in that case was to have this failure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
You can have a lot of fun with these sort of axial age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these axial age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation of the elite and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped decide how you should run a polity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So maybe this is another case where the Chinese Communist Party, people, leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, they do know about history and they care about history. And one history they know is the Chinese Communist Party was almost destroyed in 1927.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I mean, it was, if you were taking odds on what are the chances that this ragtag sort of group that's being pursued by Chiang Kai-shek to try to determine, and yet over time, they somehow manage to ride it out and eventually come to power. There's an awareness of the ways in which the seemingly impossible can happen. It doesn't mean it will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And one of the really tragic or heart-rending things is you can have situations in which movements that seem to be pursuing an impossible end result, they 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And my new Milk Tea Alliance book that I've just written, dedicated to two 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 who he loves back in Burma. And then something magical kind of changed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 he's again, when there's been a coup and a crackdown, he's now again cut off. And at one point, I was asking him about his, you know, how he feels about this when he's still trying to sort of raise awareness globally about what's happening. And he already said...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I feel helpless but not hopeless. I think, how does somebody maintain hope in that? And the other person I dedicated to, Miklas Hrasti, is a Hungarian friend of mine who was an activist before 89 and saw this amazing thing happen with a Communist Party rule ending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
He was part of the process that came, and he was friends with Havel, and Havel's there, and Poland's changing, and all of this exhilarating. But ends up being a critic of Orban and following a tightening of control of rolling back of many of the things that were victorious then. But this kind of the no straight road, you know, that actually there's something about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It can be disquieting when these unexpected things are blows to where you thought history was going. But history just shows you that history doesn't have a direction. There isn't a straight road.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Confucius lived in a time when there were these warring kingdoms in a territory that later became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past. that 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And some of it is also, though, people, sometimes the people who I find really admirable, It's not about trying to create totalistic change, but they focus on trying to do what they can for the things they believe in within constrained circumstances. And in Thailand, they've sort of hit a roadblock now again over kind of trying to bring about electoral change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
A party that did really well was then disqualified. And some of 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
They're thinking sometimes about just what can we do to improve the life of people within certain... How can we build... How can we contribute to the kinds of social groups that... might make some kind of incremental improvement to being the kind of world that we want to live in. People do that in all kinds of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Well, I think the way that things developed in Hong Kong have undermined the kind of trust in any kind of story coming out of Beijing that there's a place within Xi Jinping's version, at least the People's Republic of China, for a place where people live very different kinds of lives. And I think a lot of people in Taiwan think of them, feel they're living a very different kind of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
on the mainland. So in that way, I think Hong Kong was an important example that way. And there were connections between there was a Taiwan protest in 2014 before the big protest in Hong Kong by people who were young people who felt the government then was moving too much toward working together with Beijing. So they've been interconnected stories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And I think we sometimes miss how people within a region are looking at what other people in the region are doing and are taking clues from it about sort of how to agitate for the things they care about, what the risks are, what the dangers are. Autocrats within different parts of a region are looking at each other too, as well as globally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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. So the father and son relationship was a key one. The father... deserved respect from the son, but owed the son care and benevolence. And things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
It's one of these really worrisome issues that there isn't an easy... I think experts who tell you they know what X, Y, and Z about this are deluding themselves, probably. There are so many variables.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So with talking to people in Taiwan and from Taiwan, there are a couple things that are clear. One is that daily life in Taiwan is not people waking up each morning, living their life based on the fact that they're in such a perilous kind of predicament, that life goes on and a lot of people are... feel very, very fortunate to be in Taiwan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There are many reasons why it seems like a great place to live in many ways. But at the same time, there is an awareness of things that increase precariousness. And there was a lot of concern with the invasion of Ukraine and watching how how the response to that was. And there was a sense of it being analogous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
There was a sense that Xi Jinping would be watching the response to Putin and seeing what he would do then. And so then there was a sense of relief, I think, when there was as unified a Western NATO, including the United States, response. And then there's a concern about the Trump presidency because of Ukraine. At the same time, they're mixed signals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I'm sure there are people there who are both saying Trump is going to be tough toward the Chinese Communist Party and others are going to say, but if he's not as supportive of Ukraine, what does that say for So 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
That loose idea was accepted. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao both thought that these two places were part of somehow destined to be the same. It was just under 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 is believing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
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 kind of costs in various realms would be of doing that. I think one scenario would be possibly a sense of becoming strong enough to not have to worry about consequences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I think another, I still think to some extent more, would be a sense of weakness or precarity of maintaining power domestically and needing to do something to distract.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was, again, an unequal one of the husband being superior to the wife, but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers, these were all parallels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
If all that wasn't complicated enough, Taiwan isn't just one place or one island. There are also islands that are closer to mainland Jinmen and their degrees of integration. But your comment about integration of trade and sort of being a check. There's a Chinese writer, fascinating guy, Han Han, who was a race car driver and a filmmaker and a bad boy novelist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
Anyway, in his heyday, he was an interesting kind of blogger who was testing the edges of things. And he had this blog post where he was talking about, this was in the early 2000s, He was talking about how China was building the massive Three Gorges Dam project. And he said, some people are saying building these dams, it could be so easy for the Americans to just...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
You know, just bomb them and destroy our country because it would be a massive flood. And he said, but that's really silly. That's a really silly argument because Americans know that down river from there, what would be flooded out was the place where their iPhones are built. And they want their iPhones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So this kind of notion he's making through a humorous point, the way in which interconnectedness can be a check. And interconnectedness can be in all kinds of ways. The flows 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism, even something that in the West we often think of as a kind of quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, there was only older brother and younger brother. Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
The road to Mao coming to power, we need to first say that China was under rule by emperors until 1911, overthrown by an upheaval that was partly by people who wanted to change China into a republic, but also some people who wanted to get rid of the last dynasty was a group of Manchu ruling families. So they saw them as ethnic outsiders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
So it was a strange combination of kind of ethnic nationalists who wanted China back under the control of Han Chinese, other people who thought the time for rule by emperors was over and wanted to establish a republic. And Sun Yat-sen became a first provisional president of this newly formed Republic of China. But then he got nudged out of power by a military strongman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And then there was a period where the country was really divided. Republic of China didn't have a strong government, but there were Then two groups, one rallied around Sun Yat-sen, had founded something that became known as the Nationalist Party. And then there was a small group of people who formed a Communist Party. Mao was one of them. These were...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
intellectuals who were part of the May 4th movement of 1919. They were inspired by Marxist ideas, but they were also just inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia was nearby. It seemed good to think with. It had a largely rural population, and somehow it it seemed to be getting strong in the world. And there was this interest in sort of how China could do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And 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, in 1900, the Boxer uprising had taken place and then been crushed by a consortium of foreign powers who had gotten privileges and indemnities out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao
And the newly formed Soviet Union renounced those, said 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, a bigger nationalist party.