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
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.
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
Tighter connection to the PRC are often doing badly in elections there because of this of this mood.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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