Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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
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,
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.
And both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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