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
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.
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?
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.
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...
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
Showing 201–220 of 385 · page 11 of 20
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