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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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.
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.
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,
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,
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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