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
He said, look, you had so many different forces of the more developed world fighting on one side, and that war did not end in a defeat for North Korea and for the Chinese side. So yeah, Xi Jinping, I think, wants to be seen as an inheritor
inheritor of Mao, a continuer of one side of the Mao legacy, but clearly circling back to where we began, not the Mao who liked to stir things up, not the Mao who believed in mobilizing youth on the streets, not the Mao who let things get out of control, but the Mao who was responsible for strengthening the nation.
Well, he had a really difficult accent to make sense of, and native speakers of Chinese can have trouble with his speech. That one was less hard to follow than some of them.
Well, he's just from Hunan, and he had a heavy accent. This is another complicated side of Mao. He was... both anti-intellectual and very intellectual. He liked to write poetry and to fashion himself as that, but he also liked to be seen as incredibly earthy and, um, critical of the, uh, of, of intellectuals.
And if he had an animus toward, you know, wanting to, even though he came, even though he was intellectually had that anti-intellectualism. But no, I think what's interesting about that speech in part is how, um, in even the depiction of the Korean War as being the war against America and resist America and support Korea.
I think it fit with his idea that it wasn't just about China, it wasn't about China working in self-interest, but siding with other, siding with the underdog countries against Korea. hegemonic ones.
And that was another part of Mao's desire to see China as representing a third world and the countries that had felt the brunt of Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism, and trying to find one or another one or another country's imperialism to focus on. At that point, he was focusing on America, which is something that can have particular resonances now. Mao could alternate.
At certain points, he thought there should be an alliance where he said that China should be able to work with Japan. At one point, he said, well, without Japanese imperialism, the Communist Party wouldn't have risen. because we wouldn't have had this ability to unite the people.
We have seen in the post-Mao period some leaders playing on sort of anti-Japanese sentiment because of the history of Japanese aggression, or there can be anti-American sentiment because of the history of American roles in imperialism. Or it can be played in a different way. The United States certainly tried. The United States didn't have formal colonies.
in Asia the way that Britain and France did and tried to present itself differently. But these things are also kind of in flux, and now we're in this very unusual influx period. At the beginning of the imposition of tariffs, there were leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea all together
in photo ops which was not something that i mean being on the same side so i think this is also just a kind of broader lesson to not not assume that configurations will always stay if you look out into the 21st century what are some of the best possible things that could happen in the region
It's such a hard moment to be imagining these things. I mean, I've long wanted to see return of China to this path toward a more kind of... Yeah, I wasn't one of the people who imagined that there would be this convergence where China's emergence into evolution into a liberal capitalist kind of country.
But I'd love to see a return to that more kind of tolerance of diversity within China, variations within China, more space for civil society. And it's a hard time to even imagine that because Hong Kong kind of represented that place that was somehow within... It was an amazing thing, I think, looking backward, sorry, rather than forward.
I think it's really extraordinary how much leeway was given to Hong Kong for a period there. That was really special. No communist party-run country had ever had a city within it that had as free a press as Hong Kong had then, as much tolerance for for protests. I hope it can be seen by some, at least within Beijing, as a miscalculation too.
The People's Republic of China wanted soft power, and Hong Kong films were admired around the world, this industry. There was a way in which creativity was flourishing. So I guess it would be just the hope for more more spaces where that kind of creativity and openness debate where things can flourish.
I'd love to think that there actually are a variety of things in Taiwan that if those could become broader norms, not that Taiwan's perfect, it has its own internal problems, but there are many really attractive things about it right now, different kinds of things that flourish
So maybe a setting in which Taiwan, in its post-martial law, post-Leninist incarnation, would be something that we could think of more.
So that was a hope early on. And there were ways in which some parts of Hong Kong's style even sort of permeated across the border. I think it's hard to see it now with how Hong Kong has changed. But I hesitate to... I mean, an awareness of the unpredictability of things. There's no way to know what kind of thing there would be for Hong Kong later. I do think there are things about...
Hong Kong that even in the failure of the movement have been have had repercussions that are not all negative. I think the Hong Kong spirit which is being kept alive in diaspora communities around the world is really interesting. There are things that are spreading. I think Hong Kong represented a vision of a different way of being Chinese, a different notion of Chineseness.
And I think that is something that exists. And there have been protesters in a lot of other parts of the world, Belarus to, I used to say from Minneapolis to Minsk, because in 2020, there were protests in the US and in Belarus, where there were activists who were talking about the Hong Kong idea of sort of trying to focus on be water, more flexible protest tactics, something.
Showing 361–380 of 385 · page 19 of 20
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