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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But in the case of Tiananmen and the case of Hong Kong, 2019, if people feel that the sort of protesters have the moral high ground in one way or another. And what tipped it that way in Hong Kong, I think, was really that the police were using really strong-arm methods, and the government was never apologizing or never saying, we need to investigate that.
And I think what really kept the protests going was they became a referendum on the right to protest itself. And what I think the government hoped and what Beijing certainly hoped was that some of the protesters would start doing militant actions, violent actions that would alienate the populace from the protests.
And the protesters did do some of those things, but they tended to attack, violence was often against property. And when there were occasionally violence against people, people within the movement would apologize or try to distance themselves from that. Meanwhile, the government was never apologizing or distancing itself from the police.
That created a dynamic where you had these enormous numbers of people who were previously on the fence about things turning up for these protests and leading to them being giant. This was a city that sometimes had the reputation, misunderstood reputation, as being one where people didn't care that much about politics. They just focused on living a good life.
But there was a sense that they wouldn't have that possibility if you had a police... And the police used to be really highly respected in Hong Kong, but it lost that.
So protests were one of the things that... Some of the most impressive books I've been reading about other places have been emphasizing is that protests are often preceded by other protests that may seem like dead ends, but actually provide support. people with the kind of skills and scripts and repertoires to then carry out things on a larger scale after that.
So you often get, we get captivated by a moment that seems to come out of nowhere, but it often doesn't. The ground has been laid by, it can be by an earlier generation that passes on the stories about it, or it can be just a few years before. And sometimes a new generation will say, Look at what they did. That was exciting, but we want to put our mark on things by a generation.
So there were these 1986 protests that sort of fizzled out that helped lay the groundwork for the 1989 ones. In Hong Kong, there were the 2012 and 2014 ones that laid the groundwork for 2019. Some of the times it was the same activists out on the streets again, but sometimes it was a younger generation said, yeah, okay, but that failed. So what can we do differently?
And we see this in cases in the US and we see it around the world of this kind of the percolating of things that happen, sometimes in conversations that continue that happen. And sometimes failures can seem like dead ends, but over a long period of time, we see them as succeeding. And It can seem irrational to try to do something after the last three times people have tried to do it have failed.
But then occasionally, history shows that the third time or the fifth time or the 20th time actually does succeed. There's enough countervailing, you know. In Eastern Europe, you would say like in 1956, there was a rising, it was crushed. In 68, there were risings, crushed. Poland, 1981, it's martial law imposed.
In 1989, what were East German protesters thinking when they poured out onto the streets? And then it happened. But this time it wasn't. So I think there's a way in which social movements are fundamentally unpredictable. And there are just times when against all seeming odds, something that seemed like it would be there forever just no longer is.
You know, it doesn't mean that it will work. It doesn't mean that it will work, but I think history has enough examples of things that you thought. I mean, this is, you know, it explains why certain figures are so inspirational for generations of activists that, you know, people read. There's a reason why people talk about Vaclav Havel.
Whereas if Vaclav Havel had died in 1988, people would have said, oh, maybe he was a great writer. But his political project, he didn't live to see. But then he lives to 89 and becomes, you know, against all expectations. So Rebecca Solnit, she's got a new book, No Straight Road Takes You There, Essays for Uneven Terrain.
And she's talking about taking a longer view of some struggles that achieve things after the point when people might have imagined that they had run into dead ends. And she's talking about keeping your eye on the gains that happen, even incrementally, and the ways in which the need to take a longer-term perspective on some of these things.
And I think it's a strange thing because there's also often an impatience in movements of people wanting kind of immediate results. But as a historian looking at situations, I've mentioned sort of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but Taiwan was a right-wing dictatorship under sort of a version of martial law for decades.
And at each stage, it would seem that people struggling to change it were on a quixotic, impossible kind of mission, or South Korea was in a similar situation. And then in the late 1980s, you start to have those things unravel. And it's partly because of a kind of steady resistance is partly because something in the world changes, but there's often a combination of those things.
So I'm interested in that whole, you know, we know that what happened in Hong Kong in the short run didn't work. And I don't see a way in which the national security law is reversed or anything like that.
a completely impossible effort, even though we know the result in that case was to have this failure.
So maybe this is another case where the Chinese Communist Party, people, leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, they do know about history and they care about history. And one history they know is the Chinese Communist Party was almost destroyed in 1927.
I mean, it was, if you were taking odds on what are the chances that this ragtag sort of group that's being pursued by Chiang Kai-shek to try to determine, and yet over time, they somehow manage to ride it out and eventually come to power. There's an awareness of the ways in which the seemingly impossible can happen. It doesn't mean it will.
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