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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 241–260 of 385 · page 13 of 20
← Previous
Next →