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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Now, one of the things that's happening now is the Chinese Communist Party, the economy isn't booming the way it was before. The sort of sense of clearly we're living better materially than the generation before, it's not as easy an argument to make when you have slower growth rates and things like that.
But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now about the rest of the world is in chaos and we're more stable. But the thing that I now am going to think about differently is the argument was we'll give you more choices and you'll have more of a private life, more of this. But now in the period we are globally...
Now there's a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choices. I mean, there was an idea that the post-Tiananmen generation was promised to have a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state. Mm-hmm. And now, globally, we worry about the prying eyes of whether it's the state or whether it's tech companies. It's a different moment.
What does it mean to say you have more choices?
That's a really great question. I was actually just writing a review of two books. One is called The Xi Jinping Effect, which was just a bunch of scholars, an academic volume, sort of looking at, take this topic and that topic, how much has Xi Jinping as a person really affected it? And they come up with all kinds of answers. But there's a book I really like.
Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called Let Only Red Flowers Bloom. And what she talks about the changes in China as she was covering it from the mid-2010s on was, and I think this really is Xi Jinping's, one of his imprimatures on the country, is there's a narrowing of spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country.
And this goes against the grain of a pattern in the sort of post Tiananmen period of allowing more space for sort of civil society, but also allowing sort of way Muslims felt that they didn't have to choose between being, you know, their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity.
But there's more and more of a kind of, we see this in Xi Jinping becoming impatient with Hong Kong, where there was a way of which, okay, this is a city that's part of the PRC, but it really operates very differently. He seems to be
uncomfortable with difference, I guess, and he's not alone in Strongman this way, of sort of wanting to impose a kind of singular vision of what Chinese identity means, what loyalty to the status quo means. And so there's been a kind of tightening of controls over all the borders. And One thing Xi reported on was Inner Mongolia.
It's been seen as an unproblematic kind of frontier area, and who cares if there was some revival of Mongolian language? But under Xi, there's been a less patience with those kinds of difference. There's been more of a resurgence of patriarchy. All kinds of things have happened under him. But How much is it just him or how much is it also a kind of mood or group within the party?
Some of these trends, I think, began before he took power in late 2012. I think really my own feeling going to China fairly often from the mid-1990s till about 2018 is, was that until 2008, the year of the Olympics, each trip it would feel like, oh, there's just more space.
There's more breathing room for, you know, it's not becoming a liberal democracy, but I would notice things that felt like, I'm surprised that that happens, that people felt less worried about what they were saying and what they were doing. That kind of trend line up until about 2008 happened.
But from the Olympics and then the financial crisis after that, the Chinese Communist Party felt, I guess, more... It's still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. And you had, like, okay... maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that's been stronger under Xi Jinping's time in power. And he was already the designated successor by 2008.
He was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment possibly of more opening up because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right-wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. And some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way. And it went quite the opposite.
So James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about just we should really be straight about what a black box the Chinese elite politics are and really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did...
used to have more of a sense of these kind of ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy and things like that. And they were also basically partly based on personalities and personal ties. But we did have a sense. You could sort of map out these kinds of rival power bases and things.
And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It's very hard to know, other than the sort of small group around him, how it works. We don't have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how Xi Jinping... We have Xi Jinping's self-presentation and a lot of things that are then...
There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, oh, he's going to be a reformer because his father was a liberalizing figure. That doesn't work that way. He does seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China's deep past.
We know he's a strong nationalist and a kind of cultural nationalist as well as political nationalist. But beyond that, we don't have that much of a sense of what makes him tick. We get little hints. There was a secret speech where he talked about that leaked out that he... talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed because the leadership didn't pay enough attention to ideology.
And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So I imagine if he and Putin ever have a kind of heart-to-heart conversation, one thing they'd find to agree on is this sort of distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was... That was the wrong way to do things.
Showing 161–180 of 385 · page 9 of 20
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