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
And one of the really tragic or heart-rending things is you can have situations in which movements that seem to be pursuing an impossible end result, they achieve that result. And then after another period, the country goes into another really difficult period, or it seems that the successes are being rolled back.
And my new Milk Tea Alliance book that I've just written, dedicated to two people who've lived through a variety of these things. One is a Burmese activist who was involved in a failed uprising in 1988. He then was an exile who didn't know whether he could ever see his brothers who he loves back in Burma. And then something magical kind of changed.
And in the 2010s, it seemed that there was a kind of democratization that turned out to be a false dawn. He was able to go back. And now he's again, when there's been a coup and a crackdown, he's now again cut off. And at one point, I was asking him about his, you know, how he feels about this when he's still trying to sort of raise awareness globally about what's happening. And he already said...
I feel helpless but not hopeless. I think, how does somebody maintain hope in that? And the other person I dedicated to, Miklas Hrasti, is a Hungarian friend of mine who was an activist before 89 and saw this amazing thing happen with a Communist Party rule ending.
He was part of the process that came, and he was friends with Havel, and Havel's there, and Poland's changing, and all of this exhilarating. But ends up being a critic of Orban and following a tightening of control of rolling back of many of the things that were victorious then. But this kind of the no straight road, you know, that actually there's something about.
It can be disquieting when these unexpected things are blows to where you thought history was going. But history just shows you that history doesn't have a direction. There isn't a straight road.
And some of it is also, though, people, sometimes the people who I find really admirable, It's not about trying to create totalistic change, but they focus on trying to do what they can for the things they believe in within constrained circumstances. And in Thailand, they've sort of hit a roadblock now again over kind of trying to bring about electoral change.
A party that did really well was then disqualified. And some of the activists I know are focusing on local efforts to improve a neighborhood, to keep a neighborhood from suffering from a kind of unthinking gentrification. They're thinking small.
They're thinking sometimes about just what can we do to improve the life of people within certain... How can we build... How can we contribute to the kinds of social groups that... might make some kind of incremental improvement to being the kind of world that we want to live in. People do that in all kinds of ways.
Well, I think the way that things developed in Hong Kong have undermined the kind of trust in any kind of story coming out of Beijing that there's a place within Xi Jinping's version, at least the People's Republic of China, for a place where people live very different kinds of lives. And I think a lot of people in Taiwan think of them, feel they're living a very different kind of life.
on the mainland. So in that way, I think Hong Kong was an important example that way. And there were connections between there was a Taiwan protest in 2014 before the big protest in Hong Kong by people who were young people who felt the government then was moving too much toward working together with Beijing. So they've been interconnected stories.
And I think we sometimes miss how people within a region are looking at what other people in the region are doing and are taking clues from it about sort of how to agitate for the things they care about, what the risks are, what the dangers are. Autocrats within different parts of a region are looking at each other too, as well as globally.
It's one of these really worrisome issues that there isn't an easy... I think experts who tell you they know what X, Y, and Z about this are deluding themselves, probably. There are so many variables.
So with talking to people in Taiwan and from Taiwan, there are a couple things that are clear. One is that daily life in Taiwan is not people waking up each morning, living their life based on the fact that they're in such a perilous kind of predicament, that life goes on and a lot of people are... feel very, very fortunate to be in Taiwan.
There are many reasons why it seems like a great place to live in many ways. But at the same time, there is an awareness of things that increase precariousness. And there was a lot of concern with the invasion of Ukraine and watching how how the response to that was. And there was a sense of it being analogous.
There was a sense that Xi Jinping would be watching the response to Putin and seeing what he would do then. And so then there was a sense of relief, I think, when there was as unified a Western NATO, including the United States, response. And then there's a concern about the Trump presidency because of Ukraine. At the same time, they're mixed signals.
I'm sure there are people there who are both saying Trump is going to be tough toward the Chinese Communist Party and others are going to say, but if he's not as supportive of Ukraine, what does that say for So they're not the same situations, but all people have in a sense sometimes with unknowable situations is to look at things that have any degree of parallel connections in other places.
That loose idea was accepted. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao both thought that these two places were part of somehow destined to be the same. It was just under that period, Chiang Kai-shek thought, how long until I... take over the mainland and it all becomes the Republic of China. This is not now something that any leader in Taiwan is believing.
There is a degree to which that remains a kind of sense within the Chinese Communist Party leadership as an eventuality. I don't think there's a set plan, in part because I think it is also dependent on what the kind of costs in various realms would be of doing that. I think one scenario would be possibly a sense of becoming strong enough to not have to worry about consequences.
I think another, I still think to some extent more, would be a sense of weakness or precarity of maintaining power domestically and needing to do something to distract.
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