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 you could say, well, look, and after 1989, the Chinese economy boomed Life got better for people in China. Life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocs. Maybe we actually, maybe this was the right way to go. And you can make that kind of argument, but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks, you just have a different kind of image of heroism.
It's so interesting to just speculate and we just don't know because, you know, he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important because one of the students' main demands was
then I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square would have been to say, we want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic, that our goals are patriotic. We're not here to take China back into the Cultural Revolution. We're here to express our love for the country if it goes in the right way. So will you admit that?
And you mentioned about the power of the image. And I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something, has taken to heart the power of the image after that, because we saw this in... But when there were protests in Hong Kong, the government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of, you know, crowds out of control.
And initially there were in 2014, and again, initially in 2019, there were very orderly crowds. And it... It had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents, as there almost always are, of violence by crowds. And then they would show those images over and over again.
They also worked very hard when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s. to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police. And they tried very hard and managed to success because the Western press was often saying, will this be another Tiananmen? Will there be a massacre? Will there be soldiers on the streets? The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without
the use of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to wound. There was beanbag shot. There were rubber bullets. There was enormous amounts of tear gas. There was even tear gas let fly inside subway stations in 2019. And all these things are really brutalizing, but they don't make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like
the Tiananmen tank man image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by napalm, young woman that became another of the iconic images during the Vietnam War, those images really can have an extraordinary power. And I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are no really gripping, there are very few photographs allowed of the Xinjiang image extra legal detention camps.
There are very little, very little photo. There is an awareness of how much power a photograph of a certain type can have.
I assume he was killed.
I assume. He was just disappeared. It's interesting because very often figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean, Leo Chabot was imprisoned and not allowed to get enough medical care, so you can talk about him having died earlier than he should have. But there are there's been relatively few of like for political crimes recently sentencing to death and things like that.
It's much more just remove them, imprison them. But the tank man, there was never a trial. There was never even a trial that was a, was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Liu Xiaobo and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply disappeared. And there's been somebody who's like another figure like this who's disappeared.
A couple of years ago in Beijing, there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge, Sitong Bridge in Beijing. And it was extraordinary. It had denunciations of the direction Xi Jinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of COVID policies, but also a dictatorial rule. And the banner, somehow he managed to have it up and get it.
long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images. And he's disappeared. And there hasn't been a show trial or even a secret trial. And again, we don't know if he's still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn't want a competing story out there.
They don't want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking.
So, you know, there's a lot of censorship. My favorite book about, one of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there's fear, which is this kind of direct censorship thing, like banning things.
But there's also friction, which she says, she has three Fs, fear, friction, and flooding. And she says they're all important. And I think this is true, not just of China, but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get.
Even though you know that some people will get it, you just make it that the easiest way, the first answer you'll get through a search. So a lot of tech savvy or globally minded people tapped-in Chinese people will use VPN to jump over the firewall. But it's work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN.
So you just create friction so that, okay, some people will find this out. And then flooding. You just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist in operation. And I think The fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked.
So I'm always interested in things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. You can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarianism. You can read Hannah Arendt's book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you're not supposed to be able to read that in a... somewhat totalitarian state or a dictatorial state, if anything.
Showing 81–100 of 385 · page 5 of 20
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