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
But at the same time, when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore refugee, a political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondence Club saying kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore.
And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the Foreign Correspondence Club, and then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about what the culture in this Foreign Correspondence Club.
And there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia, saying things very directly, and then said, and there are things going on in Thailand that we're not going to talk about. And there was this kind of, yeah, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing.
So I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao wandering this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and what books were for sale. And I thought about how he'd... He'd be like, what's going on? Is the Communist Party not in control? I mean, he talked about how art and politics needed to, in some ways, go together.
And you've got all these kind of things. He also would have been shocked by all these books about how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. It's like all of these things just wouldn't compute from his time. Although I said it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s.
He was a participant in the May 4th movement, which was a time of reading all over the world, looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this. So some of the coolest bookstores... Things that I was just as amazed could exist in the early 2000s. So you can still buy copies in 1984, and you can still get some of these other things.
But that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I'm not sure you get permission to translate some of those things now. There's more of a sense of caution. And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about
kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability to the situation in China, some of those bookstores have closed or have had to become kind of really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones, not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, a Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station.
And it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s. But then it just got less and less space to operate under Xi Jinping when things started narrowing. And it then had to close in Shanghai. And it's just been reopened in D.C. as JF Books. And it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub. And I'm really delighted.
It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book when it comes out in June, this book on the Milk Tea Alliance, about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including China. places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai.
So places like that, they stopped being able to exist on the mainland. Then they could still exist in Hong Kong. But now in Hong Kong, One of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn't feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there. And it's reopened in upstate New York. So you have this phenomenon of bookstores.
There's also a few bookstores called the Nowhere Bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei. And The Hague, and I heard one maybe is going to open in or is open in Japan, too. My sometime collaborator, Amy Hawkins, who covers China for The Guardian, wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon, sort of carrying on the conversations that people face.
thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't and imagine someday being able to hold in China, but maybe can't.
So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I do think about. And sometimes people will think because of censorship and that, there's an idea of sort of brainwashing within China population control. And I periodically will get students from the mainland. And I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes.
I teach Chinese history and I feel like, okay, now I'm contradicting the version of the past that's been drumbeat into them. But I'll still get students who are incredible free thinkers who have come through that system and it just doesn't hold or there are limits to it. And Some of them are people who just got curious by something. And it is a porous system.
It's more porous than in North Korea, things like that. So even if there's that fear, friction, and flooding, which... Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government, there's still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued or they see an image of sent by a friend of theirs on social media.
We'll share them something on WeChat that it doesn't get picked up by the censors, but they look at it carefully and they say, oh, well, wait a minute. That contradicts what the government's official line is. So there's still ways in which that creativity and freedom of thinking persists.
Yeah, it is. And I think it's the whole kind of the world of short attention spans and social media and how this all works. And Chinese Communist Party leaders, I brought up Singapore and Deng Xiaoping and some of the other leaders were like looking at that. And they're looking at, you know, there are all kinds of things that
Going to Singapore can sometimes make you feel like you're in this futuristic setting in terms of a lot of things that eventually came to other parts of the world would be tried out there. And I think the seductiveness is that some of these things are... They both add to convenience at the same time they strip away.
They're collecting information about you, which can be also something that can make your life easier at the same time it's stripping you away. I mean, we talk about that. siloing of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news. And so two things come to mind to mention.
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